Below is an essay I wrote to be published later, I share it here, you can download it here.
This essay proceeds from the claim that marriage and family have historically provided more than emotional support or moral guidance; they have functioned as world-forming practices that rendered Christian faith phenomenologically intelligible. When these practices collapse or become marginal, the Church does not merely lose members—it loses the shared horizon within which its language, disciplines, and promises can be readily understood.
As such, many contemporary failures of religious engagement are not failures of belief, will, or devotion, but failures of intelligibility rooted in the erosion of shared forms of life.
When Christianity Loses Its World
Marriage, Meaning, and the Collapse of Religious Intelligibility
Jonathan McCormack
Christianity as a Way of Being, Not a Theory
Christianity has historically functioned less as a system of ideas to be mastered than as a way of inhabiting the world. Its language, symbols, and moral expectations presuppose immersion in shared practices that quietly form perception, expectation, and self-understanding. For most of Christian history, these practices were not confined to explicitly ecclesial settings but were sustained through durable forms of life—most centrally, marriage and family—that structured daily time, responsibility, sacrifice, and generativity. Within such contexts, Christian claims were not primarily encountered as abstractions to be evaluated but as realities already half-known through lived participation.
When these formative practices are widely inhabited, religious meaning remains largely implicit. The language of fidelity, fruitfulness, inheritance, authority, forgiveness, and self-gift does not need to be decoded, because it resonates with experiences already shaping the moral imagination. Faith in such circumstances is not “anti-intellectual,” but it is pre-theoretical: reflection arises from within a shared world rather than attempting to construct one from concepts alone.
The problem this essay addresses emerges when that shared world is no longer in place. Under conditions where marriage and family cease to function as common, stable forms of life, Christianity increasingly appears as something that must be approached indirectly—through explanation, instruction, or intellectual reconstruction. Religious language that once oriented practice now requires interpretation; symbols that once disclosed meaning now appear opaque. Faith shifts from being a way of being-with others in a meaningful world to a set of propositions or moral ideals that must be grasped from the outside.1
This shift does not occur because individuals suddenly become less spiritual or less sincere. Rather, it reflects a more basic transformation in the conditions under which meaning becomes available at all. Human beings do not first possess a neutral world and then choose how to interpret it; they come to understand themselves and reality through participation in shared practices that disclose what matters and why. When such practices are absent or fragile, meaning itself becomes thematic and burdensome. One must ask what previously went without saying.
In such circumstances, it is unsurprising that Christianity is often encountered either as an intellectual project or not encountered at all. Those capable of sustained abstraction may attempt to relate to the faith through theological systems, ethical reasoning, or metaphysical coherence. Those without such capacities may simply find the Church unintelligible. What emerges is not merely a pastoral challenge but a structural one: the erosion of the world in which Christian faith once appeared as a lived possibility rather than a conceptual demand.
This essay proceeds from the claim that marriage and family have historically provided more than emotional support or moral guidance; they have functioned as world-forming practices that rendered Christian faith phenomenologically intelligible. When these practices collapse or become marginal, the Church does not merely lose members—it loses the shared horizon within which its language, disciplines, and promises can be readily understood. The sections that follow will explore how this loss reshapes religious experience, why it drives faith toward abstraction, and why exhortation or instruction alone cannot repair what is, at root, a disruption in the conditions of meaning itself.
Marriage and Family as World-Forming Practices
Marriage and family have never functioned in Christian life merely as optional supports for individual flourishing. They have operated as formative structures that organize time, responsibility, expectation, and moral perception long before such dimensions are thematized or reflected upon. Through their ordinary demands—shared schedules, interdependence, vulnerability, generativity, and endurance over time—these forms of life quietly generate a shared world in which meaning appears as something already given rather than something that must be constructed.
This world-forming character is not incidental to Christianity but integral to its intelligibility. Much of Christian language is irreducibly analogical, drawing upon experiences of spousal fidelity, parenthood, inheritance, discipline, forgiveness, and fruitfulness. These are not metaphors chosen for rhetorical convenience; they are disclosures drawn from practices that once saturated daily life. When such practices are widely inhabited, religious language remains close to experience. It does not require translation because it resonates with patterns already shaping how persons understand obligation, love, sacrifice, and hope.2
Crucially, these meanings are not first grasped intellectually. They are learned through participation in forms of life that precede reflection. One does not deduce the meaning of fidelity from propositions, nor infer the significance of generativity from moral exhortation. These realities are encountered as constraints and invitations embedded in shared practice. Over time, they disclose a moral landscape within which persons come to recognize themselves, others, and God. In this sense, marriage and family do not merely illustrate Christian claims; they help make those claims perceptually available at all.
When these practices recede, the loss is not only relational but hermeneutical. The Church may retain its doctrines, rituals, and moral teachings, yet the experiential ground that once rendered them immediately intelligible is weakened or absent. Religious language that once named lived realities increasingly appears opaque or idealized. Symbols remain, but the practices that once sustained their meaning are no longer commonly shared. What was once tacit must now be explained.
This shift has significant consequences for how faith is approached. In the absence of world-forming practices, Christianity is increasingly encountered as an abstract system rather than an inhabited reality. Belief becomes something to be evaluated rather than lived; moral claims become ideals to be weighed rather than norms already shaping action. Faith risks becoming detached from the rhythms of daily life and relocated to the realm of ideas, where it must compete with other intellectual frameworks for coherence and plausibility.
Importantly, this transformation does not imply that unmarried persons are deficient, nor that marriage is the only site of meaning. Rather, it names a structural reality: certain forms of life generate shared worlds more readily than others, and marriage and family have historically played a central role in doing so. When they are no longer broadly present, the Church faces not merely a pastoral gap but a loss of the conditions under which its language and practices naturally disclose their significance.
The argument here is not that the Church should idealize marriage or marginalize those who do not inhabit it. It is that marriage and family have functioned as primary sites of formation through which Christian meaning became embedded in ordinary life. When these sites are weakened or absent, the Church cannot assume that its symbols will remain self-evident, nor that its practices will be readily intelligible. The remainder of this essay will explore how this loss reshapes religious experience, drawing on phenomenological accounts of meaning, worldhood, and disembedding to explain why faith under such conditions is increasingly forced into abstraction.
When Meaning Becomes Explicit: Disordered Worldhood and Religious Unintelligibility
Phenomenological accounts of human understanding help clarify why the loss of world-forming practices produces not merely confusion but a deeper disruption in meaning itself. Human beings ordinarily do not encounter the world as a set of neutral objects requiring interpretation. Rather, they inhabit a meaningful environment in which norms, expectations, and possibilities are disclosed implicitly through participation in shared practices. What matters is not first grasped reflectively but lived pre-theoretically, as part of the background against which action makes sense.3
This implicit structure of understanding becomes visible precisely when it breaks down. Phenomenological descriptions of mental illness have long noted that when ordinary patterns of engagement are disrupted, the world no longer “holds together” in the same way. Activities that once flowed without thought become effortful; meanings that once guided action must be consciously reconstructed. The individual is forced into an explicit, reflective stance toward what previously functioned tacitly. The problem is not simply psychological distress, but a disturbance in worldhood itself—the shared horizon within which things appear as relevant, valuable, or possible.4
The relevance of this insight extends beyond clinical contexts. The key claim is structural rather than diagnostic: when the practices that sustain a shared world are weakened or absent, meaning becomes thematic and burdensome. One must ask what once went without saying. Norms must be justified; symbols require explanation; purposes must be defended. What had been lived as obvious now appears questionable or opaque.
Applied to religious life, this dynamic helps explain why Christianity increasingly presents itself as a problem to be solved rather than a way of being inhabited. Where marriage and family no longer function as common formative practices, the analogical language of faith loses its experiential grounding. Concepts such as fidelity, sacrifice, inheritance, authority, and fruitfulness no longer arise naturally from lived contexts but must be approached reflectively. Faith is no longer encountered from within a shared world but from outside it.
In such conditions, religious meaning tends to shift toward explicit theorization. Belief becomes something to be justified; doctrine becomes something to be mastered; moral norms become ideals to be evaluated rather than habits already shaping life. This movement toward abstraction is not a failure of sincerity or devotion. It is a predictable response to the loss of the practical background that once rendered religious life intelligible without explanation.
Phenomenological accounts of disordered worldhood emphasize another crucial point: individuals cannot simply will themselves back into a shared world through reflection alone. When the background practices that sustain meaning are absent, increased effort often intensifies disorientation rather than resolving it. Instruction, exhortation, or counter-argument may clarify concepts, but they cannot restore the tacit structures through which meaning is ordinarily disclosed. What is required is not better explanation, but re-immersion in practices capable of re-opening a shared horizon of sense.5
This insight is decisive for understanding contemporary religious experience. When Christianity becomes unintelligible at the level of lived meaning, the response cannot be reduced to improved teaching or more persuasive argument. The difficulty lies not in the content of belief, but in the erosion of the world in which belief once appeared as a lived possibility. The following sections will examine how this condition shapes the experience of singleness within the Church, why faith under such circumstances is driven toward abstraction, and why pastoral exhortation often misfires by addressing the wrong level of the problem.
Singleness, Abstraction, and Christianity as a “Luxury Good”
When the world-forming practices of marriage and family are no longer widely shared, singleness is not merely a different relational state; it becomes an existentially distinct way of inhabiting the world. The daily structures that organize time, responsibility, and futurity for married persons—shared households, mutual obligation, generational continuity—do not simply add meaning to life but quietly supply the background against which meaning appears at all. In their absence, individuals are required to engage in a far greater degree of explicit self-interpretation in order to situate themselves within a coherent narrative of purpose and belonging.6
This burden of explicit self-interpretation has significant consequences for how faith is encountered. Where Christian language presupposes analogical familiarity with marital and familial forms of life, unmarried persons often find themselves relating to the faith indirectly. Rather than recognizing themselves within its symbols, they must translate those symbols conceptually. Faith becomes something to be understood, evaluated, or systematized before it can be inhabited. The religious life thus shifts from participation to interpretation.
For some, this shift leads to a highly intellectualized engagement with Christianity. Theological systems, ethical frameworks, and metaphysical coherence become primary points of entry, not because abstraction is inherently preferred, but because it is the only available mode of access. In the absence of shared formative practices, intellectual mastery offers a way to stabilize meaning and secure belonging. Faith becomes a cognitive achievement rather than a lived orientation.
For others, particularly those without the capacity, education, or inclination for sustained abstraction, the result is disengagement rather than over-intellectualization. When faith appears primarily as a conceptual demand rather than a lived possibility, it becomes inaccessible. Christianity under such conditions risks functioning as a cultural good available chiefly to those with sufficient intellectual and social capital to navigate it. What emerges is not deliberate exclusion, but a form of structural unintelligibility.
This dynamic helps explain why contemporary churches in many contexts increasingly reflect middle-class and upper-class populations, while those lacking stable relational structures or educational resources quietly drift away. Christianity begins to resemble a “luxury good”—not because it is intentionally elitist, but because participation now presupposes capacities that are unevenly distributed.7 The faith has not changed its claims, but the conditions under which those claims can be meaningfully received have narrowed.
Importantly, this is not a critique of singleness as such. Nor is it an argument that unmarried persons are incapable of faith. Rather, it names a structural asymmetry: marriage and family once provided a shared horizon that relieved individuals of the need to construct meaning reflectively. When that horizon collapses, the burden shifts onto individuals, who must now supply through abstraction what was once given through practice. The result is a religious landscape divided not by belief or sincerity, but by access to the conditions of intelligibility.
Understanding this dynamic is essential for pastoral realism. Without acknowledging how singleness under these conditions reshapes religious experience, the Church risks misinterpreting abstraction as spiritual preference and disengagement as moral failure. The following section will argue that attempts to address this situation through interior resolve or exhortation alone misunderstand the nature of the problem, mistaking a disruption in worldhood for a deficit of will or devotion.
The Category Error of “Inner Marriage” and “Inner Monkhood”
In response to the disembedding described above, pastoral counsel often shifts toward interiorization. Unmarried persons are encouraged to cultivate an “inner” version of goods that are no longer available externally: an interior sense of spousal meaning, an inwardly sustained vocation, or a form of solitary spiritual heroism capable of compensating for the absence of durable relational structures. While well intentioned, such counsel rests on a profound category error.
Marriage is not primarily an interior state that can be approximated through reflection or desire. It is a form of life constituted by external structures: exclusivity, permanence, shared economic and temporal rhythms, mutual obligation, and embodied accountability over time.8 These features are not secondary expressions of an inner disposition; they are the conditions through which the goods of marriage are generated at all. One cannot acquire the formative effects of marriage—its reshaping of desire, patience, responsibility, and hope—by willing them inwardly in the absence of the practices that sustain them.9
The same logic applies to monastic life. Historically, the Church has never understood monastic renunciation as a purely interior achievement. Monks are formed through prolonged training, enclosure, rule, and communal discipline precisely because the goods of renunciation cannot be sustained by intention alone. Even solitary forms of monasticism presuppose years of formation within a community that has already met and structured the monk’s relational needs.10 To suggest that lay persons might become “inner monks” without such formation or support misunderstands the nature of ascetic life and the role of external structure in shaping interior capacity.11
These examples illuminate a more general principle: human goods that depend on stable practices cannot be reproduced through interior resolve once those practices are absent. When the Church implicitly treats marriage, family, or monastic discipline as interchangeable with inward dispositions, it reverses the actual order of formation. Interior capacities are not the source of these forms of life; they are their fruit.
This reversal has serious pastoral consequences. It encourages individuals to interpret structural deprivation as personal failure and to respond with increased effort precisely where effort is least effective. It also mislocates responsibility, implying that meaning can be restored through prayer, reframing, or determination alone. Such counsel may intensify shame or exhaustion while leaving the underlying disruption untouched.12
The issue, then, is not insufficient commitment but misplaced expectation. To ask individuals to generate inwardly what historically required external form is to ask them to perform a task for which human beings are not constituted. The problem is not unwillingness, but impossibility. Recognizing this does not diminish the value of prayer or spiritual discipline; it situates them correctly within a broader ecology of formation.
If the Church is to respond truthfully to the conditions of contemporary life, it must resist the temptation to spiritualize the loss of formative structures. The final section will argue that pastoral care must begin by naming these limits honestly, relinquishing exhortation where it misfires, and recovering forms of accompaniment that acknowledge the dependence of faith upon shared practices capable of sustaining a meaningful world.
Pastoral Honesty and the Limits of Exhortation
The analysis developed in this essay leads to a difficult but necessary conclusion: many contemporary failures of religious engagement are not failures of belief, will, or devotion, but failures of intelligibility rooted in the erosion of shared forms of life. When marriage and family no longer function as common world-forming practices, the Church increasingly addresses individuals who stand outside the conditions that once rendered its language and disciplines self-evident. Under such conditions, pastoral exhortation risks addressing the wrong level of the problem.
Appeals to prayer, trust, or renewed commitment often presume that individuals already inhabit a meaningful world within which such practices can take root. When that world has fractured, exhortation becomes unintentionally coercive. It treats what is structurally unavailable as if it were personally withheld, and it frames impossibility as reluctance. This not only fails to restore meaning; it can deepen alienation by placing responsibility for intelligibility on those least able to supply it.
Pastoral honesty begins by naming these limits. It requires acknowledging that faith cannot be sustained indefinitely in abstraction, nor can interior resolve compensate for the absence of formative structures. Such honesty is not a concession to secularism or a weakening of doctrine. It is an act of truthfulness about the conditions under which human beings are capable of inhabiting meaning at all. To deny these conditions is not to affirm transcendence, but to confuse it with disembodiment.
This recognition also clarifies what the Church can and cannot provide. Parish life remains indispensable, but it cannot by itself recreate the dense, enduring practices through which meaning is ordinarily formed. Nor can clergy function as substitutes for the relational worlds that marriage and family once supplied. To pretend otherwise burdens both pastors and parishioners with expectations they cannot fulfill, and it obscures the real sources of strain within contemporary Christian life.
What is required instead is a posture of accompaniment that refuses to moralize deprivation or spiritualize loss. Such accompaniment does not rush to solution or exhortation, but remains attentive to the ways in which meaning has become inaccessible. It recognizes that some wounds cannot be healed by instruction and that some absences cannot be filled by inward resolve. In these cases, pastoral care must make room for lament, patience, and the naming of limits without shame.
This essay does not propose a program for restoring the conditions it describes, nor does it suggest that the Church can simply will them back into existence. Its claim is more modest and more urgent: that the Church must tell the truth about what has been lost and about what it cannot replace. Only by relinquishing false expectations can pastoral care become truthful again. Only by acknowledging the dependence of faith upon shared practices can the Church resist turning Christianity into an abstract demand addressed to isolated individuals.
To name these limits is not to abandon hope. It is to recover a form of hope that does not require denial—hope that can coexist with loss, wait without pretense, and remain faithful without asking human beings to do what they cannot. Such hope does not arise from exhortation alone, but from truthfulness about the world we actually inhabit and the conditions under which faith can still, however precariously, be lived.
Endnotes
1) Mary Eberstadt has argued extensively that the erosion of marriage and family undermines not only social stability but the intelligibility of Christian belief itself, insofar as Christian language and moral imagination are deeply dependent upon familial and relational forms of life. See Mary Eberstadt, How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2013), esp. chs. 1–3.
2) On the analogical saturation of Christian language in familial and marital experience, see David L. Schindler, “Love and the Postmodern Predicament,” Communio 27, no. 1 (2000): 117–148; cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Christian State of Life (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1983).
3) For a phenomenological account of how meaning ordinarily remains implicit within shared practices and becomes explicit only when those practices break down, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), §§15–18.
4) On “disordered existentiality” and the collapse of worldhood in conditions of disruption, see Matthew Ratcliffe, Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), chs. 1–3.
5) Thomas Fuchs develops a closely related account of how disturbances in embodied temporality and intersubjective attunement alter the structure of meaning itself; see Thomas Fuchs, “The Temporal Structure of Intentionality and Its Disturbance in Depression,” Psychopathology 46, no. 4 (2013): 242–252.
6) On the limits of interior resolve in restoring meaning once shared practices have collapsed, see James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), esp. ch. 1.
7) For sociological evidence that contemporary Christianity increasingly functions as a middle-class or elite cultural form, see Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), ch. 10.
8) For a theological account of love as that which discloses value and futurity beyond the self’s own powers of interpretation, see James E. Faulconer, “Love and the Self,” Faith and Philosophy 15, no. 4 (1998): 481–504.
9) Vladimir Solovyov’s reflections on love as decentering the self continue to inform phenomenological and theological accounts of relational meaning; see Vladimir Solovyov, The Meaning of Love, trans. Thomas R. Beyer Jr. (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1985).
10) On the historical understanding of monastic formation as dependent upon external rule, enclosure, and communal discipline, see Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982).
11) C. S. Lewis offers a vivid critique of attempts to practice extreme vocations inwardly without the structures that sustain them; see C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: HarperOne, 2001), Letter 12.
12) On the impossibility of altering one’s fundamental interpretive horizon through sheer volitional effort, especially under conditions of existential dislocation, see Jonathan Beere, “Reasons, Meaning, and Mental Disorder,”Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 17, no. 4 (2010): 293–307.
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