Where did YOU meet your spouse? If you’re as old as I am, you likely met them through friends, or at work, or out and about. If you’re much younger, chances are increasing that you met online. A recent survey in The Economist has me wondering if the popularity and success of online dating has something to do with the slo-motion secularization of society.
Here’s what we know: Apps like Tinder have become the norm for dating. So while a significant proportion of married couples used to meet at church, that number has dwindled to nearly zero in recent years. I can’t help thinking that couples who met in church might be more likely to remain in that church and raise their kids in that church.
If fewer and fewer couples—both same-sex and hetero—are meeting in church, does that bode ill for religious affiliations? Are couples who meet on line less likely to have a strong affiliation with a church, or with organized religion as a whole?
I Love You but You're Going to Hell 
Agellius
/ August 21, 2018The thing about online dating apps is that they try to match you up based on common interests and values. I don’t see why, e.g., a conservative Catholic meeting another conservative Catholic online would increase the odds that they wouldn’t be or stay religious.
Part of your question, I guess, is whether conservative or traditionalist Christians would use online dating apps in the first place. I have actually suggested it to my son, for the reason that serious, conservative Catholics are a minority, so the odds of running into one that you like, even at church, are not that high. Unfortunately people don’t go around wearing buttons identifying themselves as conservative Catholics. But online that’s just what they do: label themselves according to just such criteria.