Sunday Best

Dominique Hoffman has been single for about a year. She is a conservative Christian in North Florida, she grew up in the True Love Waits culture, and she did what she was told. In the first episode of Sunday Best she asks the question she and many of her friends keep asking: so where are the men?

Her answer starts with a paradox. Dating should be the easiest it has ever been, with phones and dating apps in every pocket, and yet the excess of options has led to no options at all. The apps reward avoidant men and rosters. She cites 70 percent of men saying casual sex can be acceptable, and only 22 percent of men looking for a committed relationship.

Then she turns to the church. Half of Christians say casual sex can be acceptable, 75 percent of Christian men report some level of pornography use, and the godly man at church can turn out to be a caricature with a roster of his own. "Just date in the church" is advice she has heard from her mom many times. It is harder than it sounds.

The second half follows the pipeline on the right: the Whatever podcast and Brian Atlas, the pornification of men and the Instagrammification of women, hypergamy, the college gap, and how the grievance politics of Nick Fuentes draws in young Christian men looking for someone to blame for their shame. Then there is a trad feminism that measures a woman by her virginity or by the man in her life, and the dating pool for a woman like Dominique gets very small.

Her closing claim: this is the hardest time to date in Western history, and hardest of all for conservative Christian women. Her answer is not doom. It is personal agency, repentance and the parable of the talents. Hard times make strong men, and she argues we are not in the hard times yet.

Chapters

Watch the episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CaoNkykeSY

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