Singles: The New Majority

Singles Ministry: The Coming Revolution 

By Dave Sloan

Perhaps the most dramatic shift ever to take place in Western society has been the very recent shift from family life to single life.

 In 1950, singles comprised 20% of the households in America . But soon perhaps this year, singles will comprise a majority of all households.

Between 1970 and 2000 the number of Americans between 25 and 34 who were unmarried tripled. (All statistics from the US Census Bureau).

The future of our society and of our Church depends upon reaching this exploding demographic for two simple reasons.

1) Singles are the only source of families—all marriages, and all consecrated vocations as well, can only come from single people. The current crisis in both married and consecrated vocations cannot be remedied without providing formation to single people who are the sole source of all of those vocations.

2) The interests of our society are racing at a breakneck pace away from the values and issues of family life and toward the values and issues of single life. In recognizing how to reach and respond to singles, we are recognizing how to reach our entire society.

From the beginning of history until very recently the norm was to live from family to family--to live most of one’s life in a nuclear family and practically all of one’s life in an extended family. Scripture calls for a man to “leave his mother and father and cleave to his wife” (Gen 2:24 ), without mention of any protracted period of singleness. Life, throughout our history, has always been family life. There have certainly been exceptions, but they were understood to be exceptions.

Until very recently, the ascendant value in our culture had always been the notion of the “common good,” a natural extension of the concepts of family and extended family. In the turbulence of social change in the last half century, most of us failed to notice that this notion of common good has largely been replaced by the notion of individual rights, or personal freedom.

Perhaps the person who pointed this out most prophetically, and in the clearest terms, was Justice Blackmun, in the majority opinion he authored for Roe V. Wade. Justice Blackmun observed that the ideal of privacy has become the one upon which we as a society make our most crucial, life and death decisions. Justice Blackmun was wrong in the conclusions he derived from this, but profoundly and powerfully accurate in his assessment of what we as a society have come to treasure most highly: absolute autonomy—radical privacy.

Roe V. Wade was authored in 1973. Between 1970 and 2000:

The percentage of Americans living alone increased 2.5 times.

The percentage of people living alone compared to couples living with children increased over 5.5 times.

This astounding shift toward aloneness and isolation is rapid and ongoing and gives no sign of abating.

The ascendant value of radical privacy is given expression in our culture in so many ways today that we hardly even notice it. We have reality TV programs premised not upon shared experience but upon systematically excluding others until the winner achieves the modern ideal, the coveted status of isolation as the sole survivor. We have conservative thinkers espousing rugged individualism, self-reliance, and personal responsibility for one’s self as the supreme values. At the same time we have liberal thinkers rejecting any notion of absolute truth in favor of the individual’s right to choose his own truth, even his own reality.

It is certainly true that everyone in society is affected by the trend away from the concept of family and common good and toward the concept of personal rights and freedoms. But no group in our society exhibits the traits and suffers the consequences of modernity’s radical privacy so much as do single adults.

One of Pope John Paul IIs favorite quotes is that, “man can fully discover his true self only in a sincere giving of himself" (Gaudium et spes, n. 24) . Giving is God’s nature. Givi ng is the essence of love, and giving is exactly what singles typically have not learned how to do. Even more, giving is precisely what single life in our culture has taught us all not to do.

Giving is most naturally learned within the context of family. In family life we learn to put others before ourselves, and in the joy of this giving we discover who we are as God’s children. In our modern culture, and particularly in living the modern single life, we learn to put ourselves and our own desires first, and second and third and fourth and so on, as we isolate ourselves more and more fully from those around us.

Who can doubt that this isolation reaches its fullest expression in the modern sexual lifestyle, especially as lived by singles? An effective, descriptive term for the preferred and certainly most common sexual lifestyle of the modern single is “serial monogamy.” Serial monogamy is systematic reinforcement of abandonment, of abandoning and being abandoned by the person to whom we are bound the closest. Serial monogamies, more popularly and politely termed “committed relationships,” almost always involve some form of subtle, implicit deception as to what is actually being committed.

What is in fact being committed is almost never stated out loud. If it were, it would perhaps sound something like this. “I promise not to have sex with anyone other than you until I’m through or almost through having sex with you.” This is too crass, too depressing, to be admitted out loud. And it is certainly not consistent with the longings of our hearts. And so there is almost always a pretence of a promise or commitment to something vaguely more meaningful—but it is only a pretence. That is why serial monogamy, with its serial abandonment, is experienced by its participants as serial betrayal.

Serial monogamy, abandonment, and betrayal are the instructors in the school of isolation. This school decimates our capacity to give and to receive love, teaching us that we have nothing of value to give, and that all we can expect to receive in return for our nothing is a lie. We need look no further to discover why today we have few successful marriages and few consecrated vocations. This school of serial monogamies is the anti-marriage prep course, and the anti-seminary.

The good news is that everyone knows that serial monogamy is empty—and no one really wants it. Almost everyone is open and ready to be offered a better way, a way that speaks to the truth of who we really are and fulfills the desires which are found in the depths of our hearts.

In my travels across the country speaking on these topics I often take side trips to interview people about what they are looking for in relationships. I have done this on the campuses of secular and Catholic universities, and in the entertainment centers of major cities. The answers vary but little. Though their actions may appear to contradict it, everyone aspires to pretty much the same thing. Everyone says something like, “I’m looking for someone I really trust, someone who will care about me for who I am, someone I know I can count on.”

Our creator designed us from the beginning to long for something which is not serial at all. What we long for in our deepest being is absolute and irrevocable mutual self-giving, what Pope John Paul II describes as the mutual interpenetration of the gift. At the heart of our crisis as a society is a loss of understanding of what it means to be sexual creatures who image our creator by giving ourselves to each other in a life-giving union that binds us together as “one flesh.”

Here we begin to see the way out of this crisis; we begin to see how to lead singles to the fulfillment of our truest desires, and thence how to lead our culture away from isolation and back to an experience of shared love, family love, and common good.

We will now examine how this happens in practice, what must be done within the Church in order to bring about a new dawn of ministering to America ’s 100 million singles, and a new day of thriving marriages and vocations to consecrated life.

First, we must face the fact that the modern Catholic Church has offered almost nothing to her tens of millions of singles. We must understand why that is, and then we can see how to change it.

The simple fact is that society has recently begun and is now racing away at a breakneck pace from everything the Church knows and understands best, which is family life, and toward what the Church knows and understands least, which is single life and the values which lie at its core. Given both the newness and the nature of the changes underway, it is very understandable that the church would have been caught unawares. The Church certainly did not cause these problems, and they are in fact exactly the problems which we could expect the Catholic Church to be least prepared to face.

Heretofore, the word single has been whispered, if spoken at all, in many parts of the Catholic Church. Most parishes and dioceses have no personnel involved in “singles” ministry at all. Pastors and Bishops tend to think of singles ministries as meat markets or hook-up joints, or just try not to think of them at all. I travel the country widely as a speaker on these topics and (though there may perhaps be some) I’m not aware of a single person in America drawing a full-time salary for ministering specifically to Catholic singles--this in spite of the fact that there will soon be 100 million singles in America.

In the Catholic Church we often attempt to avoid speaking of singles by using the euphemism of “young adults” or YAs. Young Adult Ministry (YAM) is a grand thing. Some of my favorite ministries are Young Adult Ministries. I owe more than words can describe to the Young Adult Ministry in Atlanta , and to its founder, Janice Murphy. Atlanta ’s YAM may be the best de facto singles ministry in America today.

But YAM, by definition, in its name and in its charter, explicitly intends not to minister to singles as singles with needs specific to that state in life. YAM was created as YAM in part because the single life being lived around us is so weird, so antithetical to Catholic family values, that singles ministry itself has been stigmatized in the Church. The terms “singles” and “singles ministry” are simply not spoken in polite circles in the American Catholic Church.

Young Adult Ministry focuses, by definition, on those of a given age, typically 20-35. One unintended effect of the popular usage of the “young adult” euphemism, however, has been to keep leaders in the Church from realizing that many, almost half, of the single adults in America are older than the target age of these ministries. For these tens of millions of singles the attempted euphemism of Young Adult Ministry serves only to explicitly exclude them from all of the programs offered in their area which could meet their needs.

While YAMs are doing FANTASTIC, often heroic work, and 95%-99% of the attendees at most YAM programs are single, YAM simply can’t work as a euphemism for singles ministry. It leaves out nearly half of the people, and it very purposefully intends not to identify the specific charisms and needs of those in the single life. I LOVE YAM. YAM is wonderful. But YAM has been asked to do what it simply cannot do in attempting to substitute for singles ministry. YAM must not substitute for, but work together with singles ministries.

The charisms and needs of singles are not based upon age, but upon state in life. What singles experience and need at age 25 is almost indistinguishable from what singles experience and need at age 55.

What singles need can be best expressed in these two key concepts:

1) To be drawn out of isolation and into the family life of the Church--so to fully experience all of the grace, power and beauty of Christian life each and every day, beginning right now, rather than listlessly pining for some future state of marriage or consecration.

2) To be formed to the greatest appreciation of and preparedness for the vocations of both marriage and consecrated life.

The central charism of one who is married or who has become permanently consecrated in priestly or religious life (or similar consecration) is the charism of the vow, or promise. To differentiate from the single state, this can be termed the “avowed state.”

The central charism of the single person is very different. It most naturally is and ought to be the charism of freedom. Freedom is what makes it possible to give and to love. As Pope John Paul II has expressed it, “freedom exists for the sake of love. Freedom is the means, and love is the end” (Love and Responsibility p.135).

Those in the avowed state have used their freedom in order to make a permanent gift of themselves in love to another person or directly to God. For singles (we’re speaking now not of modern American single life, but of how single life should be taught and lived by Christians), this freedom of giving and loving is experienced very differently, according to our two key concepts above.

First, freedom is experienced by learning to discern anew and creatively each day how we are to make gifts of our selves. This takes place fully only by living within the family of the Church—it cannot take place in isolation. Living as part of the Church family is not a formal thing, but is a deep-rooted commitment to sharing the most significant aspects of our lives with other Christians—including living together as roommates, praying, attending Mass, attending holiday events, eating, working, frolicking--all of the things that families should share.

Second, we strive though vocation formation to become so free as to be ready to make absolute and authentic gifts of ourselves to either marriage or consecrated life whensoever God may call us to do so.

Singles ministry is and must be vocation formation.

For 1900 years the Church and Catholic parents formed teenagers toward their vocations, both married and consecrated. We stopped doing that in the 1960s, when it was accepted that teenagers were not going off to get married or become priests or nuns, but to go to college and then live as singles. It will be a challenge to return to forming teenagers, though we must strive to do so. In the meantime we must begin to form the 100 million singles who are now the only source for vocations.

(Many people debate whether single life is a vocation. I prefer to handle the topic with this discussion of single and avowed states. But for a direct answer to the question read Mary Beth Bonacci’s article on the subject at www.RealLove.net)

So, what does all of this require in practical terms? We must trust that God is good, and we can be confident that, as he has promised, his Church will prevail (Matt 16:18 ). In the midst of these crises we see fulfilled the scripture that “where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more” (Rom 5:20 ). For we live in the era of the prophet who will be known to history as Pope John Paul the Great. He has given us astounding resources to bring to bear in this battle.

The man I like to call “The Pope of Love” in his Love and Responsibility, and The Theology of the Body, has translated the Gospel into the language of our era, of our time and culture. He has expressed the deepest truths of our identities as sexual creatures in the most immediate possible language—the language of the body.

The job before us is simply to assimilate these teachings as they relate to the single life—and then to present those teachings to singles in the most relevant, real and compelling terms. Through the redemption and the untwisting of our desires for nuptial union, singles may find the way, and a culture consumed with the values of single life may find the way, into the heart of family life in the Church, and from thence to paradise.

All of this is beginning to happen right now in our midst. At the “National Conference on the Theology of the Body” last summer (2004) in Atlanta , Mary Beth Bonacci spoke on the meaning of the single life. To my knowledge, it was the first time that any major conference has ever included the topic of single life. There was a tremendous energy in the air as Mary Beth spoke of issues faced by Catholic singles every day of our lives, issues the vast majority of attendees had never before heard mentioned in any public forum.

The “First-Ever National Catholic Singles Conference” in February, 2005 in Denver . This two-day conference featured a crowd packed well beyond the auditorium’s 400 person capacity. The crowd, drawn from thirty states, enjoyed two days of talks and activities which addressing the most fundamental truths of living in this society as a single person.

Mary Beth Bonacci, on of its featured speakers, wrote of this conference th at “ it is the first step in a really positive, beautiful, healthy revolution.” One attendee expressed the sentiments of many when she stated, “this has been a life-changing experience. I had no idea how much I needed to be here.”

Conference organizer Anastasia Northrop is planning several more regional Catholic Singles Conferences. More information, and recordings of the Denver conference, are available at www.TheologyoftheBody.net.

I have been traveling the country presenting a seminar titled “GOD OF DESIRE: From Dating to Courtship to Paradise .” In the context of a very practical seminar on dating, we see our creator revealing himself, and revealing us to ourselves, through our attractions toward and desires for one another. This is nothing other than the Gospel expressed in the language of the body as given to us by the great Pope of Love. In addition to offering singles much-needed encouragement on the topic of courtship, the www.GodofDesire.com website includes curricula for singles ministry based upon an extensive compilation of excerpts from the writings of Pope John Paul II.

There is no turning back now. The dam has broken. The revolution is launched. Single life is becoming understood and singles are finding homes in the family life of the Church. From these singles and from this outreach the entire culture around us is being transformed into a culture of family, a culture of life.

And from these singles will spring ALL of the vocations of tomorrow. Our Church will thrive. She will prevail, and she will shepherd ALL of her sheep.

For more information visit: TheologyoftheBody.net, ReaLove.net, GodofDesire.com, ChristopherWest.com, yam.org.