Stupid things religious people say

[Fake Messiah]

"Going to Church used to make men manly, but not anymore. People are leaving church (and this Christianity) because fathers don't go to church, and fathers don't go to church because there are no fathers; only single women and lesbians are raising children today."

Geez, these people will blame anything for people leaving Christianity, no matter how absurd, instead of confronting the obvious, which is that Christianity is a scam enveloped in fairy tales.

The central demographic fact of many modern American congregations is this: Men in church on an ordinary Sunday are outnumbered and aging. The American church has been stripped of much of its male presence.

The culture has noticed men’s absence and rushed to profit from it: the podcast strongmen, the testosterone clinics, the influencers peddling discipline and dominance—all selling at a markup the claim that they can restore a place for masculinity. That’s something the church offered and then abandoned. Men never stopped craving greatness. They stopped expecting it at the altar.

The expectation of finding manliness in faith died for a reason. The contemporary Christianity has muffled the martial half that built it. For centuries the sacrament of confirmation told boys that they were enrolled as soldiers of Christ, and the faithful called themselves the Church Militant. Men met God as a captain who demanded much of them.

That tradition channeled male impulses into service of God and the weak, but the modern demasculinizing of the faith demanded therapeutic reassurance instead. The Church Militant devolved into something closer to the Church Impotent (to borrow from the Catholic historian Leon Podles). Parishes became a circuit of women’s clubs that invited a man to picture himself a bride rather than a soldier.

A much-cited Swiss study from the 1990s asked how faith passes between generations, and the answer upset every assumption about gentle piety: The father decides. When a father practices, most of his children keep the faith; when he stays home, a devout mother rescues almost no one, about 1 child in 50.

Remove the father, and the structure gives way. About 1 in 4 American children, some 18 million, live without their biological father, the Census Bureau reports, and they grow up poor at four times the rate of their peers. The sociologists Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur showed that having two parents in the home produces better social outcomes in every race and income bracket.

About 40% of American babies were born outside marriage in 2025, nearly four times the rate in 1970. This wasn’t a private failure of fathers but the result of a public project. Law and politics, having declared themselves neutral toward family, stopped encouraging stable families. Politics is upstream of culture, and a regime that won’t prefer married-couple households will cease to produce them.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/fatherhood-a...h-8e5b36ed