Giff Lasta

@gifflasta · Twitter · 2026-09-07 22:16 UTC

Devon's post about the Church failing young men and women in the face of modernity is largely right. I'm a Christian and Devon isn't, so naturally I'll tell the story through a more sympathetic lens. During the fall of Rome, as the Empire's civic institutions weakened in the West, the Church found itself doing things it had never been designed to do. Bishops weren't ordained because somebody needed to administer food supplies, adjudicate property disputes, ransom captives, negotiate with barbarian rulers, and keep cities functioning. But somebody had to do those things. And increasingly, the Church was one of the only institutions left with the organization, resources, authority, and educated personnel to do them. So the Church stepped up. I think something similar may have to happen today around masculinity, femininity, courtship, and marriage. For most of Christian history, the Church didn't need a sophisticated program for teaching an awkward seventeen-year-old how to become attractive to women, how young men and women should actually pair off, or how a husband develops masculine frame. An enormous network of functioning institutions did much of that work: intact families, extended kin, neighborhood life, dances, schools, courtship customs, male associations, female friendship networks, and a culture with reasonably clear expectations about becoming a man or woman. The Church supplied the guardrails for a highway already built. Now the highway itself is disappearing, and we're standing among the ruins saying, "Well, technically, teaching a twenty-two-year-old man how to talk to a woman isn't the Church's job." Maybe not. Neither was negotiating with the Lombards. Take my wife's hometown in East Tennessee. Forty years ago, a couple could be only marginally connected to church and still be carried along by a culture heavily shaped by Christian assumptions about marriage, family, work, responsibility, and respectability. Today the economic bottom has fallen out of many communities. Meth is everywhere. Extended families and social support networks are fraying. The surrounding culture isn't quietly reinforcing the Church's vision of human flourishing anymore. In many places it's actively dissolving the habits and institutions that made that vision practicable. Back then, you could afford to be outside the Church because you were still living off a lot of its cultural capital. I'm not sure you can anymore. And that gives the Church a much bigger job than telling singles not to fornicate and married people not to divorce. The Church is increasingly being challenged to preserve the memory of—and in some cases rediscover—how to be human in a machine age. Devon is also right that the problem is bigger than teaching men male/female dynamics. Courtship rests on an entire social ecology: economics, status, community, useful work, family formation, and the ability of young men to become men whom women actually want and communities actually need. The Church cannot fix all of that tomorrow. But step one is just making men aware of the nature of the game. The church hasn't done that. It needs to now.