On this episode of news World, I was fascinated by the results of a new nationwide study on faith in relationships by Communio, a national nonprofit organization that works with churches to strengthen families and develop stronger faith lives. The study reveals a strong correlation between people who grew up in homes with married parents and their continuation their practice of faith in adulthood. It also shows that loneliness is a crisis that is negatively affecting relationships and religious life. The conclusions of the study are drawn from a nationwide survey of nineteen thousand Sunday church attendees conducted during worship in one hundred and twelve Evangelical, Protestant and Catholic congregations. That's an amazing amount of work. Here to discuss the new study, I'm really pleased to welcome my guest, JP Degance. He is the founder and president of Communio and the co author of the book Endngate, the church's strategic move to say faith and Family in America. JP, welcome and thank you for joining me on newts World.

On this episode of news World, I was fascinated by the results of a new nationwide study on faith in relationships by Communio, a national nonprofit organization that works with churches to strengthen families and develop stronger faith lives. The study reveals a strong correlation between people who grew up in homes with married parents and their continuation their practice of faith in adulthood. It also shows that loneliness is a crisis that is negatively affecting relationships and religious life. The conclusions of the study are drawn from a nationwide survey of nineteen thousand Sunday church attendees conducted during worship in one hundred and twelve Evangelical, Protestant and Catholic congregations. That's an amazing amount of work. Here to discuss the new study, I'm really pleased to welcome my guest, JP Degance. He is the founder and president of Communio and the co author of the book Endngate, the church's strategic move to say faith and Family in America. JP, welcome and thank you for joining me on newts World.

It's exciting to be here. Thanks so much for having men.

It's exciting to be here. Thanks so much for having men.

How did you go from working in politics to looking into the relationship between marriage and faith.

How did you go from working in politics to looking into the relationship between marriage and faith.

You know, it became like a lot of people who come to DC, you do this to try to save the country, and you start to recognize that a lot of what's going on in our politics is downstream of what's happening culturally in our homes. Actually, and God redirected my life About fifteen years ago, my sister's family failed. She was an abusive marriage and she ended up becoming temporarily homeless. And my wife and I, she asked us to tea in her four kids, and we experienced what happens when families fail in a real powerful way. And God used that to redirect my life in some pretty significant ways. And I started asking the question, what would it look like to use the types of tools and technologies that exist in the political and business world and bring it, baptize it, sanctify it, bring it into the service of the church to renew marriage and our culture which is so badly broken right now.

You know, it became like a lot of people who come to DC, you do this to try to save the country, and you start to recognize that a lot of what's going on in our politics is downstream of what's happening culturally in our homes. Actually, and God redirected my life About fifteen years ago, my sister's family failed. She was an abusive marriage and she ended up becoming temporarily homeless. And my wife and I, she asked us to tea in her four kids, and we experienced what happens when families fail in a real powerful way. And God used that to redirect my life in some pretty significant ways. And I started asking the question, what would it look like to use the types of tools and technologies that exist in the political and business world and bring it, baptize it, sanctify it, bring it into the service of the church to renew marriage and our culture which is so badly broken right now.

Before you got into looking at faith, you had quite a background in politics. Walk us through sort of your education, if you will. On the political side.

Before you got into looking at faith, you had quite a background in politics. Walk us through sort of your education, if you will. On the political side.

I'm a disciple of Morton Blackwell. I went to a youth leadership schools, and he actually showed up to that particular one in the state of Florida that year and ended up being the executive director of his pack for a cycle and working at the Leadership Institute separately that he ran, and then later on got connected with Charles Cooke and worked on his special projects team the Coke Industries in the free market side of the movement and becoming a vice president leader at Americans for Prosperity, and in that work ended up being exposed to all sorts of neat and amazing different types of strategies on polling, messaging, gotv micro targeting, and started to ask the question of so much of this stuff that exists in the policy world can be used and is used in business, it can also be used in ministry effectively in morally illicit way, right, And I ended up getting a phone call from Adam Myerson, who was the president of the Filanpy Roundtable, and Adam was looking for a chief operating officer. I told him he didn't know what it would look like yet, but it was very interested in working with philanthropists around building strategies that could produce movement, not on public policy, but in terms of increasing the stability of families, increasing the number of people getting to church. Fundamentally, what's going on in our country. There's a crisis in the American soul, okay, and it spills out and politics. An old friend, Texas oil guy, shared with me. I thought it was a useful analogy that if you want to try to change the country by focusing on politics alone, then that's a little bit like trying to change the weather by playing with a thermometer. Obviously, there's bilateral causality. Politics changes culture. Culture changes politics. It became clear to me that we need to be deeply serious about the health of our culture, and the health of the culture is formed fundamentally by our families and our houses of worshiper churches, and when those are ill, we're in a really bad way. And that's what we're seeing and play out in so many ways.

I'm a disciple of Morton Blackwell. I went to a youth leadership schools, and he actually showed up to that particular one in the state of Florida that year and ended up being the executive director of his pack for a cycle and working at the Leadership Institute separately that he ran, and then later on got connected with Charles Cooke and worked on his special projects team the Coke Industries in the free market side of the movement and becoming a vice president leader at Americans for Prosperity, and in that work ended up being exposed to all sorts of neat and amazing different types of strategies on polling, messaging, gotv micro targeting, and started to ask the question of so much of this stuff that exists in the policy world can be used and is used in business, it can also be used in ministry effectively in morally illicit way, right, And I ended up getting a phone call from Adam Myerson, who was the president of the Filanpy Roundtable, and Adam was looking for a chief operating officer. I told him he didn't know what it would look like yet, but it was very interested in working with philanthropists around building strategies that could produce movement, not on public policy, but in terms of increasing the stability of families, increasing the number of people getting to church. Fundamentally, what's going on in our country. There's a crisis in the American soul, okay, and it spills out and politics. An old friend, Texas oil guy, shared with me. I thought it was a useful analogy that if you want to try to change the country by focusing on politics alone, then that's a little bit like trying to change the weather by playing with a thermometer. Obviously, there's bilateral causality. Politics changes culture. Culture changes politics. It became clear to me that we need to be deeply serious about the health of our culture, and the health of the culture is formed fundamentally by our families and our houses of worshiper churches, and when those are ill, we're in a really bad way. And that's what we're seeing and play out in so many ways.

So you move from that political awareness thinking about it in the culture, and then in twenty fifteen you create the Culture of Freedom initiative, which is really a breakthrough and sort of doing with Martin described, you're now using the knowledge and the techniques and the practical things, but applying it to faith and culture. A little bit about the culture of freedom in Issiue was a fascinating breakthrough moment.

So you move from that political awareness thinking about it in the culture, and then in twenty fifteen you create the Culture of Freedom initiative, which is really a breakthrough and sort of doing with Martin described, you're now using the knowledge and the techniques and the practical things, but applying it to faith and culture. A little bit about the culture of freedom in Issiue was a fascinating breakthrough moment.

It was a big idea, the idea of taking a lot of the tools that exist in the areas of business and politics, right so effective message testing, micro targeting. Okay, we're at the cutting edge of bringing micro targeting into ministry. In a campaign, you have a zero sum game, as you well know, November is always coming, and then you have to husband your resources, move back and someone at the end of the day is going to know whether you want or lost. In ministry, we created a goal, a deadline, a number that we wanted to reach in terms of reducing the number of people getting divorced, increasing the number of people getting to church. Okay, And then we looked out over several years and worked back from that like you might in a political campaign, and then thought to husband resources and we called each of our pilot areas a cultural enterprise zone. And we raised about twenty million dollars and spent it over three and a half years and found a lot of things that didn't work. We tried things. It was an R and D project. Thanks be to Guy, we found some things that worked well and in Jacksonville, Florida. Duval County was one of our big pilot areas an NFL market. We were able churches there that we worked with. We moved fifty twelve people through four hours or more relationships skills ministry in the county. We saturated the county with digital messaging, really trying to target folks who were at risk for divorce. And then the net over that three year span was the divorce rate tumbled twenty four percent. And we had some business guys, you know, are not just going to take your word for it. So we had some folks pay for an outside evaluation of our work, which of course is always a little scary. And Brad Wilcox, who is a scholar at University of Virginia, and then some scholars at Florida State and a separate evaluation, and then some guys from BYU ended up doing evaluations, said there's there's no explanation for this decline in the county other than this intervention that you did, right. And so this was really the largest privately funded citywide effort to affect change on family stability. It succeeded, and afterwards my board and donors pushed us to think about how we scale, and we distilled from our work that really we didn't start this way automatically we included the church, but we recognize that the church was the most scalable unit of social change in the country. There's a lot of gospel reasons that are clear and obvious. Right the church is the body of Christ, and the Church in her members or Christ's hands and feet in the world. But in thinking and appealing that you've got churches in every town, in every community, on every street corner, and there's hundreds of billions of dollars of brick and mortar assets and human resource capital sitting on the sidelines right now, not leveraged in this great cultural struggle around renewal of marriage. And then we recognize that this is a great way to share the gospel, to grow, to draw people to faith in Jesus Christ. The Church is always advanced the gospel through felt need, okay, throughout her history and does so today. And we don't have felt needs of poverty and malnutrition. What we have is worse. Mother Teresa said that lonliness is the leprosy of the West, and we've got that in spades. And folks want healthy relationships, they want healthy marriages, and so we come alongside the local church where basically we operate largely like a campaign manager in terms of supporting the local church helping them design a strategy to do targeted outreach. We call it a data informed full circle relationship ministry, and the idea is informed by my old life and Morton's influence and helping a church basically design a campaign plan to reach out to the community, draw people in and affect change on relationship and merital health.

It was a big idea, the idea of taking a lot of the tools that exist in the areas of business and politics, right so effective message testing, micro targeting. Okay, we're at the cutting edge of bringing micro targeting into ministry. In a campaign, you have a zero sum game, as you well know, November is always coming, and then you have to husband your resources, move back and someone at the end of the day is going to know whether you want or lost. In ministry, we created a goal, a deadline, a number that we wanted to reach in terms of reducing the number of people getting divorced, increasing the number of people getting to church. Okay, And then we looked out over several years and worked back from that like you might in a political campaign, and then thought to husband resources and we called each of our pilot areas a cultural enterprise zone. And we raised about twenty million dollars and spent it over three and a half years and found a lot of things that didn't work. We tried things. It was an R and D project. Thanks be to Guy, we found some things that worked well and in Jacksonville, Florida. Duval County was one of our big pilot areas an NFL market. We were able churches there that we worked with. We moved fifty twelve people through four hours or more relationships skills ministry in the county. We saturated the county with digital messaging, really trying to target folks who were at risk for divorce. And then the net over that three year span was the divorce rate tumbled twenty four percent. And we had some business guys, you know, are not just going to take your word for it. So we had some folks pay for an outside evaluation of our work, which of course is always a little scary. And Brad Wilcox, who is a scholar at University of Virginia, and then some scholars at Florida State and a separate evaluation, and then some guys from BYU ended up doing evaluations, said there's there's no explanation for this decline in the county other than this intervention that you did, right. And so this was really the largest privately funded citywide effort to affect change on family stability. It succeeded, and afterwards my board and donors pushed us to think about how we scale, and we distilled from our work that really we didn't start this way automatically we included the church, but we recognize that the church was the most scalable unit of social change in the country. There's a lot of gospel reasons that are clear and obvious. Right the church is the body of Christ, and the Church in her members or Christ's hands and feet in the world. But in thinking and appealing that you've got churches in every town, in every community, on every street corner, and there's hundreds of billions of dollars of brick and mortar assets and human resource capital sitting on the sidelines right now, not leveraged in this great cultural struggle around renewal of marriage. And then we recognize that this is a great way to share the gospel, to grow, to draw people to faith in Jesus Christ. The Church is always advanced the gospel through felt need, okay, throughout her history and does so today. And we don't have felt needs of poverty and malnutrition. What we have is worse. Mother Teresa said that lonliness is the leprosy of the West, and we've got that in spades. And folks want healthy relationships, they want healthy marriages, and so we come alongside the local church where basically we operate largely like a campaign manager in terms of supporting the local church helping them design a strategy to do targeted outreach. We call it a data informed full circle relationship ministry, and the idea is informed by my old life and Morton's influence and helping a church basically design a campaign plan to reach out to the community, draw people in and affect change on relationship and merital health.

Now, in February of twenty nineteen, the Culture of Freedom Initiative gets rebranded as Communio. That obviously must have meant something big to you because that's a major project to do that, and you'd already had an invested communication around Culture of Freedom initiative. What led you to adopt Communio and what does Communio mean to you?

Now, in February of twenty nineteen, the Culture of Freedom Initiative gets rebranded as Communio. That obviously must have meant something big to you because that's a major project to do that, and you'd already had an invested communication around Culture of Freedom initiative. What led you to adopt Communio and what does Communio mean to you?

Yeah, So the Culture of Freedom was a project we started as a project in program within the phil Anthony Roundtable. The Flanty round tables constituents or philanthropists. They're members of the donor community, and so the name reflected that. And so the idea was to help philanthropus understand that if you care about a healthy and free American Republic, American society. Then you need to be deeply interested in the health of the culture. Right. That was the origin name. Right, And once we had our proof case, and it evolved in a way that we did not anticipate at the very beginning, which was we recognize that the go forward strategy was churches would be our customers. And so we spun off from the Philanthi Roundtable as a separate legal entity. We incorporated in twenty sixteen and completely spun off in twenty nineteen at the end of twenty eighteen. Really and then we said, okay, well, for churches are customers, what more effectively communicates to the church our mission. Our mission is to equip the church to share the Gospel through the renewal of healthy relationships and marriage. The word communio was selected because obviously it's Latin means community, and the two core pillars of strong community are strong marriages and strong faith communities. Right. The word communio also is obviously a very old word, but the dot io ending is used for tech startups, and we saw the io ending and communio as being a nod to technology companies. And we are one hundred percent of nonprofit and a ministry, but we have developed our own software that supports the local church. And so in a way, we want to come alongside the local church to help them do a very old thing right in marriage, but do it in a very new way, leveraging the best of technologies and strategies to win in the culture for marriage in the family.

Yeah, So the Culture of Freedom was a project we started as a project in program within the phil Anthony Roundtable. The Flanty round tables constituents or philanthropists. They're members of the donor community, and so the name reflected that. And so the idea was to help philanthropus understand that if you care about a healthy and free American Republic, American society. Then you need to be deeply interested in the health of the culture. Right. That was the origin name. Right, And once we had our proof case, and it evolved in a way that we did not anticipate at the very beginning, which was we recognize that the go forward strategy was churches would be our customers. And so we spun off from the Philanthi Roundtable as a separate legal entity. We incorporated in twenty sixteen and completely spun off in twenty nineteen at the end of twenty eighteen. Really and then we said, okay, well, for churches are customers, what more effectively communicates to the church our mission. Our mission is to equip the church to share the Gospel through the renewal of healthy relationships and marriage. The word communio was selected because obviously it's Latin means community, and the two core pillars of strong community are strong marriages and strong faith communities. Right. The word communio also is obviously a very old word, but the dot io ending is used for tech startups, and we saw the io ending and communio as being a nod to technology companies. And we are one hundred percent of nonprofit and a ministry, but we have developed our own software that supports the local church. And so in a way, we want to come alongside the local church to help them do a very old thing right in marriage, but do it in a very new way, leveraging the best of technologies and strategies to win in the culture for marriage in the family.

So, as part of that baseline, you undertook a nationwide study and faith in relationships, which is pretty impressive. I mean, you've got nationwide survey of nineteen thousand Sunday church attendees going to one hundred and twelve Evangelical, Protestant and Catholic congregations in thirteen different states. Did you find that difficulty at the church leadership to allow you to do this survey in the church?

So, as part of that baseline, you undertook a nationwide study and faith in relationships, which is pretty impressive. I mean, you've got nationwide survey of nineteen thousand Sunday church attendees going to one hundred and twelve Evangelical, Protestant and Catholic congregations in thirteen different states. Did you find that difficulty at the church leadership to allow you to do this survey in the church?

Yeah, it's a great question. So what's great newt is we serve right now more than one hundred and fifty churches around the country right now that are our client churches in nineteen different states. And so as part of our entire business model, the first thing we do with the church is we run an academically robut survey. It takes only about seventy seconds for a person to complete it. We've actually now collected over sixty five thousand surveys from Sunday Church goers since our inception. We grabbed the prior six months before we closed the survey, so we did a nineteen thousand segment of that did the analysis from that group. When we work with the church, the ideas we talk about helping the church analyze what's going on in their own people and in their community. And so those questions that we have are own family structure, loneliness, relationship health. All of those questions come from different academics. We don't invent any of the questions, and so there's a real data behind it that we can provide lead pastor at First Baptist or the pastor at Saint Mary's, Okay, we can provide some deep insights on their own people. Then we roll it up that nineteen thousand completed surveys. What we recognized is when you're sitting on two hundred and twelve completed surveys, you can get certain insights, but when you're sitting on nineteen thousand, you can start cutting the data in ways that you can't at the per congregation level. And it gave us some really useful insights that we're bringing to the church nationally to help influence the church to understand that the crisis of loneliness and the crisis of religious non affiliation is really entirely wrapped up in our flight from marriage. That's really fundamentally what's happening in our culture. And if our churches don't grasp that, I describe this to somebody, you'd appreciate it. Like if you're running an election and you're trying to become president, okay, and you come out of the convention okay for your party losing your base by fifty percent, okay, and your consultant comes to you and says, look, I've got this great plan to win over independence. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what you do with independence. If you're losing your base, your toast. And right now, my friends, churches are losing your base. And by that I mean too few Christians are getting married. Too many Christian marriages are struggling right now. One in five Sunday churchgoers report struggling in their marriage at a level that's at risk for divorce. Women are sixty two percent more likely to struggle than their husbands. And when you look out in the surrounding population. Amongst nuns, the church is better off than those who don't attend church on these measures, and so this actually gives a great opportunity to the local church to breathe into a felt need. We all want healthy relationships. There's a deep desire even amongst gen Z and millennials, who are the least likely to be married. They overwhelm. They say they want marriage still in the data, they just don't know how to do it. And if we in the church continues to operate like it's the nineteen fifties and people are just going to show up and present themselves for marriage, that world has gone. We need a metanoia, a transformation within the church to recognize strategically that the path to renewal of the church is through a renewal of marriage in the population.

Yeah, it's a great question. So what's great newt is we serve right now more than one hundred and fifty churches around the country right now that are our client churches in nineteen different states. And so as part of our entire business model, the first thing we do with the church is we run an academically robut survey. It takes only about seventy seconds for a person to complete it. We've actually now collected over sixty five thousand surveys from Sunday Church goers since our inception. We grabbed the prior six months before we closed the survey, so we did a nineteen thousand segment of that did the analysis from that group. When we work with the church, the ideas we talk about helping the church analyze what's going on in their own people and in their community. And so those questions that we have are own family structure, loneliness, relationship health. All of those questions come from different academics. We don't invent any of the questions, and so there's a real data behind it that we can provide lead pastor at First Baptist or the pastor at Saint Mary's, Okay, we can provide some deep insights on their own people. Then we roll it up that nineteen thousand completed surveys. What we recognized is when you're sitting on two hundred and twelve completed surveys, you can get certain insights, but when you're sitting on nineteen thousand, you can start cutting the data in ways that you can't at the per congregation level. And it gave us some really useful insights that we're bringing to the church nationally to help influence the church to understand that the crisis of loneliness and the crisis of religious non affiliation is really entirely wrapped up in our flight from marriage. That's really fundamentally what's happening in our culture. And if our churches don't grasp that, I describe this to somebody, you'd appreciate it. Like if you're running an election and you're trying to become president, okay, and you come out of the convention okay for your party losing your base by fifty percent, okay, and your consultant comes to you and says, look, I've got this great plan to win over independence. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what you do with independence. If you're losing your base, your toast. And right now, my friends, churches are losing your base. And by that I mean too few Christians are getting married. Too many Christian marriages are struggling right now. One in five Sunday churchgoers report struggling in their marriage at a level that's at risk for divorce. Women are sixty two percent more likely to struggle than their husbands. And when you look out in the surrounding population. Amongst nuns, the church is better off than those who don't attend church on these measures, and so this actually gives a great opportunity to the local church to breathe into a felt need. We all want healthy relationships. There's a deep desire even amongst gen Z and millennials, who are the least likely to be married. They overwhelm. They say they want marriage still in the data, they just don't know how to do it. And if we in the church continues to operate like it's the nineteen fifties and people are just going to show up and present themselves for marriage, that world has gone. We need a metanoia, a transformation within the church to recognize strategically that the path to renewal of the church is through a renewal of marriage in the population.

To what extent does the work you're doing require both better technology and better focus on the family and the community, but also require a reaffirmation that the central message is one of salvation and of not being lonely, in part because God is always with you, and therefore with God in your heart, it's a lot harder to.

To what extent does the work you're doing require both better technology and better focus on the family and the community, but also require a reaffirmation that the central message is one of salvation and of not being lonely, in part because God is always with you, and therefore with God in your heart, it's a lot harder to.

Be lonely fundamentally at the church. I use the term metanoia, right, It's the first word Jesus utters in the Gospel of Mark Okay, and it means conversion. And at the local church level, we have to recognize that the most common path, not everyone is called to marriage. We know that not everyone, but the most common path to grow in holiness as a Christian is through marriage, whether we like it or not, that's what the biblical evidence illustrates, right. And so at the pastor level and at the church level, helping our young people know how to form relationships that are godly and that can lead to marriage is a deep need because when the church does not teach. I'd heard a priest share this insight that we are sex saturated in our culture. Sex is everywhere around us except in our churches, and we don't know how to teach at the local church level about how to form these healthy relationships. So in first, there is a messaging at the individual local church level and preaching, teaching, and vision that needs to change. We work with churches on that. Then there is also the recognition that there's no gospel manda to be unsophisticated, and the church is supposed to be a light to the world, and this form of ministry, relationship and marriage ministry should be a front porch that welcomes and draws people in. So you first encounter that local church, perhaps through a date night, perhaps through a family block party, something that draws folks in, not first to worship because they're not necessarily ready for worship right, but first to an encounter with faithful Christians in the context of a church, and then through there helping those We use this term the ministry engagement ladder, moving people up that ladder so that you can actually help them, first, feed into their relationships, help them on a human level, and then the spiritual level so that they actually know how to relate to one another. Well, then what we're seeing from our churches is they're growing. Churches that have worked with us new for at least twelve months and not longer than twenty four months are growing or reporting that they're growing on average twenty two percent and their Sundaye attendants, and we're helping them everything that a statewide candidate can do to invite people to a rally or an event or to gootv we've brought to first Baptist We've brought to Saint Mary's. When we do that kind of outreach, we're helping them make marriage and relationship ministry not just for their people. We're actually helping the church to be a change agent in the culture for their surrounding community.

Be lonely fundamentally at the church. I use the term metanoia, right, It's the first word Jesus utters in the Gospel of Mark Okay, and it means conversion. And at the local church level, we have to recognize that the most common path, not everyone is called to marriage. We know that not everyone, but the most common path to grow in holiness as a Christian is through marriage, whether we like it or not, that's what the biblical evidence illustrates, right. And so at the pastor level and at the church level, helping our young people know how to form relationships that are godly and that can lead to marriage is a deep need because when the church does not teach. I'd heard a priest share this insight that we are sex saturated in our culture. Sex is everywhere around us except in our churches, and we don't know how to teach at the local church level about how to form these healthy relationships. So in first, there is a messaging at the individual local church level and preaching, teaching, and vision that needs to change. We work with churches on that. Then there is also the recognition that there's no gospel manda to be unsophisticated, and the church is supposed to be a light to the world, and this form of ministry, relationship and marriage ministry should be a front porch that welcomes and draws people in. So you first encounter that local church, perhaps through a date night, perhaps through a family block party, something that draws folks in, not first to worship because they're not necessarily ready for worship right, but first to an encounter with faithful Christians in the context of a church, and then through there helping those We use this term the ministry engagement ladder, moving people up that ladder so that you can actually help them, first, feed into their relationships, help them on a human level, and then the spiritual level so that they actually know how to relate to one another. Well, then what we're seeing from our churches is they're growing. Churches that have worked with us new for at least twelve months and not longer than twenty four months are growing or reporting that they're growing on average twenty two percent and their Sundaye attendants, and we're helping them everything that a statewide candidate can do to invite people to a rally or an event or to gootv we've brought to first Baptist We've brought to Saint Mary's. When we do that kind of outreach, we're helping them make marriage and relationship ministry not just for their people. We're actually helping the church to be a change agent in the culture for their surrounding community.

Your model ortormally is if you can get people to acquire a new set of habits, it dramatically lowers their resistance and increases the likelihood that they will, in the process become more spiritual and become more committed.

Your model ortormally is if you can get people to acquire a new set of habits, it dramatically lowers their resistance and increases the likelihood that they will, in the process become more spiritual and become more committed.

You're seeing couples who when you get right with your primary horizontal relationship your spouse or the person that you're pursuing as a spouse, or you begin to discern properly that horizontal relationship, it has profound impact on your vertical relationship that's your relationship with God. Okay, and that makes plenty of sense. It's the reason why the most common analogy used in scripture for salvation and God's pursuit of man is the espousal analogy. Right that God over and over is pursuing the Old Testament Church as his bride and the New Testament Church as his bride. The Bible begins in Genesis with a marriage and it ends with the eschatological wedding feast of the Lamb. And so when this gets so disordered, right, when man's ability to relate to woman and vice versa becomes so disordered, it's hard to grasp the divine love story. Okay, it's hard to accept that Christ so loved the church that he laid down his life for his bride. If I've not ever experienced that kind of complete gift of self, and seeing that in my parents, I've never seen that complete gift of self in my life. And we all do it as humans, we do it poorly. I always say that as a dad, I mean bad imitation of the real thing, the heavenly Father. Right, But to the extent that I reflect the bridegroom, to the extent that I reflect the love of the Father in the home, I am creating the narrative that God has woven into our hearts, that the Gospel can live on top that God intended to be grafted on top of all of our churches. When we work with them. It's both the spiritual formation and the human formation. And at first what people are willing to receive is the human formation because this helps me. Okay, and then along the journey, you start to help form the spiritual habits in the couples, right, being able to pray together, worship together, okay, and deepen in your faith together. And so our churches then start to see folks who don't attend their church starts showing up for ministry long before they're showing up for membership. And then there is a conversion and the reality is, well, I am very much a fan of the scholastics and the intellectual approach. The reality is is Jesus when he first performed Signs and wonders, and then he told Peter and Andrew to come follow him and go on a camping trip for several years with the guys, and it was entering into deep relationship with them that that form of personal encounter allowed the didactic and the catechisis to actually stick, the faith formation to stick.

You're seeing couples who when you get right with your primary horizontal relationship your spouse or the person that you're pursuing as a spouse, or you begin to discern properly that horizontal relationship, it has profound impact on your vertical relationship that's your relationship with God. Okay, and that makes plenty of sense. It's the reason why the most common analogy used in scripture for salvation and God's pursuit of man is the espousal analogy. Right that God over and over is pursuing the Old Testament Church as his bride and the New Testament Church as his bride. The Bible begins in Genesis with a marriage and it ends with the eschatological wedding feast of the Lamb. And so when this gets so disordered, right, when man's ability to relate to woman and vice versa becomes so disordered, it's hard to grasp the divine love story. Okay, it's hard to accept that Christ so loved the church that he laid down his life for his bride. If I've not ever experienced that kind of complete gift of self, and seeing that in my parents, I've never seen that complete gift of self in my life. And we all do it as humans, we do it poorly. I always say that as a dad, I mean bad imitation of the real thing, the heavenly Father. Right, But to the extent that I reflect the bridegroom, to the extent that I reflect the love of the Father in the home, I am creating the narrative that God has woven into our hearts, that the Gospel can live on top that God intended to be grafted on top of all of our churches. When we work with them. It's both the spiritual formation and the human formation. And at first what people are willing to receive is the human formation because this helps me. Okay, and then along the journey, you start to help form the spiritual habits in the couples, right, being able to pray together, worship together, okay, and deepen in your faith together. And so our churches then start to see folks who don't attend their church starts showing up for ministry long before they're showing up for membership. And then there is a conversion and the reality is, well, I am very much a fan of the scholastics and the intellectual approach. The reality is is Jesus when he first performed Signs and wonders, and then he told Peter and Andrew to come follow him and go on a camping trip for several years with the guys, and it was entering into deep relationship with them that that form of personal encounter allowed the didactic and the catechisis to actually stick, the faith formation to stick.

It seems to me that sometime around nineteen sixty the role of males began to change radically, and we went through both the process of demasculization and of total irresponsibility. And so you have a you number of males who are fathers without being fathers biologically. Fathers is not socially involved, and you have a profound breakdown because in families with no fathers, there's no one for young males to learn from. You've had this growing acceleration, which is also a part of our crime problem. What do you think happened and why did the society suddenly take this very dramatic detour from what had been a relatively healthy model.

It seems to me that sometime around nineteen sixty the role of males began to change radically, and we went through both the process of demasculization and of total irresponsibility. And so you have a you number of males who are fathers without being fathers biologically. Fathers is not socially involved, and you have a profound breakdown because in families with no fathers, there's no one for young males to learn from. You've had this growing acceleration, which is also a part of our crime problem. What do you think happened and why did the society suddenly take this very dramatic detour from what had been a relatively healthy model.

The sexual revolution hit its tipping point. Nineteen sixty is oftentimes identified as the beginning point of the sexual revolution. Fundamentally, in my book Endgame, the Church's strategic move on Saving Faith and Family in America, we go into this specific question. The reality is is the sexual revolution and really, with the proliferation of artificial contraception, you end up have a decoupling of marriage from sex, and then that springs about a variety of other couplings. Right, So then you decouple marriage from parenting, and you decouple now sex from even partnering. Okay, you start to have post nineteen sixty rapid growth. You have growth before it, but it hits an accelerator because now with this triumph of technology, you end up having no dissolving the cultural conventions around sexual chastity. Right, And what ends up happening is alienation. Right, It's what we're living through. We have been alienated. We're deeply wired for monogamy. Men and women were just hardwired for it. Okay. The sexual I like to just note, you know, when you look at the sexual revolutionist triumph, you know, the question to society is how's it working for you? Right? And the reality is is shorter lifespans, epidemic levels of loneliness. Women with multiple sexual partners. Okay, they were told, hey, behave like the worst stereotypes of a frat guy. You should be able to do that. That's great. Sex is nothing more than a bodily function. The reality is is that's not true. Okay, the science says that's not true. That was an ideological claim that was fact free and data free. We now have the data and it leads women disproportionately to high levels of depression, suicidal ideation. Okay. In our survey, we found the loneliest people knew were not the elderly, and they were not the widows. Although that's what you would think. The most lonely were actually the never married between the age of thirty and thirty nine. Okay. The reason for that is it's historically not natural. Okay. Men and women are not meant to be alone. We're social creatures. Okay. And this idea of prolonged adolescence into your thirties and then getting married at the average age of thirty, okay, that's been around for about thirty five seconds of human history. Okay. And the Surgeon General's advisory in May of this year, eighty two page dis cument okay, he buries the lead. The word marriage used twice first time on page fifteen. Okay. The reality is the loneliness epidemic would not exist today if we weren't fleeing marriage as a culture. It wouldn't be a thing, and you wouldn't have plummeting life expectancies at the levels that we are. Because single people guess what, they live less, They live shorter lives. My wife is more likely than not to say things like, hey, do you need that extra piece of cake? Or maybe you should go to the doctor for that, okay, And I'm likely to encourage her to go to the doctor if there's something going on. There's all sorts of reasons why that happens. But the reality is, as we should I think, And this is one of the points that we make to pastors and equip them to do, is the evidence is now piled up and it's in Okay. The sexual revolution leads in the triumph of It has led to untold amounts of human suffering, of fatherless children, of crime, of poverty. You don't have in America ever, multigenerational poverty until after the sexual revolution is trump and then you've decoupled parenting from marriage, and now you have multiple generations of folks who don't have any working memory that there was a marriage in their family. I was speaking with Alicia Lajas, who I think the world of She has done family strengthening work in tough neighborhoods in Chicago, and she told me the story or her and her husband were speaking to school children and she just introduced her husband and said, this is my husband, and then she goes on to keep talking. In a few minutes into the presentation, a little child raises her hand and says, what's a husband? And you have entire communities where there isn't this evidence of a marriage. And it's funny because to reverse Marxism on our friends, it's a very bourgeois virtue. To pretend that people don't need marriage when it's usually espoused by people who are married. On the left, free love is a cheap virtue when you don't suffer the economic carnage because of your already upper class existence. It's called comfort to those who are in middle class and lower existences. And the reality is, if you're born into the bottom quintile of way journers, if you're in the bottom twenty percent and you're born into that group and your mom never gets married, okay, seventy four percent of you will never never escape poverty. Okay. But if you're born in that same group of wayjourners, and I just know one another thing about you, mom stays continuously married, okay, You're more likely to die in the highest group of wag journers than in the bottom. You're the Horatio Alger story of our time that needs to be certainly trumpeted. There's all sorts of biblical reasons, and there's all sorts of good science reasons why this makes a ton of sense.

The sexual revolution hit its tipping point. Nineteen sixty is oftentimes identified as the beginning point of the sexual revolution. Fundamentally, in my book Endgame, the Church's strategic move on Saving Faith and Family in America, we go into this specific question. The reality is is the sexual revolution and really, with the proliferation of artificial contraception, you end up have a decoupling of marriage from sex, and then that springs about a variety of other couplings. Right, So then you decouple marriage from parenting, and you decouple now sex from even partnering. Okay, you start to have post nineteen sixty rapid growth. You have growth before it, but it hits an accelerator because now with this triumph of technology, you end up having no dissolving the cultural conventions around sexual chastity. Right, And what ends up happening is alienation. Right, It's what we're living through. We have been alienated. We're deeply wired for monogamy. Men and women were just hardwired for it. Okay. The sexual I like to just note, you know, when you look at the sexual revolutionist triumph, you know, the question to society is how's it working for you? Right? And the reality is is shorter lifespans, epidemic levels of loneliness. Women with multiple sexual partners. Okay, they were told, hey, behave like the worst stereotypes of a frat guy. You should be able to do that. That's great. Sex is nothing more than a bodily function. The reality is is that's not true. Okay, the science says that's not true. That was an ideological claim that was fact free and data free. We now have the data and it leads women disproportionately to high levels of depression, suicidal ideation. Okay. In our survey, we found the loneliest people knew were not the elderly, and they were not the widows. Although that's what you would think. The most lonely were actually the never married between the age of thirty and thirty nine. Okay. The reason for that is it's historically not natural. Okay. Men and women are not meant to be alone. We're social creatures. Okay. And this idea of prolonged adolescence into your thirties and then getting married at the average age of thirty, okay, that's been around for about thirty five seconds of human history. Okay. And the Surgeon General's advisory in May of this year, eighty two page dis cument okay, he buries the lead. The word marriage used twice first time on page fifteen. Okay. The reality is the loneliness epidemic would not exist today if we weren't fleeing marriage as a culture. It wouldn't be a thing, and you wouldn't have plummeting life expectancies at the levels that we are. Because single people guess what, they live less, They live shorter lives. My wife is more likely than not to say things like, hey, do you need that extra piece of cake? Or maybe you should go to the doctor for that, okay, And I'm likely to encourage her to go to the doctor if there's something going on. There's all sorts of reasons why that happens. But the reality is, as we should I think, And this is one of the points that we make to pastors and equip them to do, is the evidence is now piled up and it's in Okay. The sexual revolution leads in the triumph of It has led to untold amounts of human suffering, of fatherless children, of crime, of poverty. You don't have in America ever, multigenerational poverty until after the sexual revolution is trump and then you've decoupled parenting from marriage, and now you have multiple generations of folks who don't have any working memory that there was a marriage in their family. I was speaking with Alicia Lajas, who I think the world of She has done family strengthening work in tough neighborhoods in Chicago, and she told me the story or her and her husband were speaking to school children and she just introduced her husband and said, this is my husband, and then she goes on to keep talking. In a few minutes into the presentation, a little child raises her hand and says, what's a husband? And you have entire communities where there isn't this evidence of a marriage. And it's funny because to reverse Marxism on our friends, it's a very bourgeois virtue. To pretend that people don't need marriage when it's usually espoused by people who are married. On the left, free love is a cheap virtue when you don't suffer the economic carnage because of your already upper class existence. It's called comfort to those who are in middle class and lower existences. And the reality is, if you're born into the bottom quintile of way journers, if you're in the bottom twenty percent and you're born into that group and your mom never gets married, okay, seventy four percent of you will never never escape poverty. Okay. But if you're born in that same group of wayjourners, and I just know one another thing about you, mom stays continuously married, okay, You're more likely to die in the highest group of wag journers than in the bottom. You're the Horatio Alger story of our time that needs to be certainly trumpeted. There's all sorts of biblical reasons, and there's all sorts of good science reasons why this makes a ton of sense.

You're doing such amazing work and it's ongoing. Where can people go to visit your website?

You're doing such amazing work and it's ongoing. Where can people go to visit your website?

Yeah, I'd encourage anybody to download our study. It's for free. What newt has been talking and sharing about Communio dot org backslash study. Okay, you can get that. I'd encourage you to download the Studycommunio dot org backslash Study. You can download it, read it, discuss it with your small group, share it with your pastor. Okay, we need to help in producing this metanoia in the leadership of churches around the country.

Yeah, I'd encourage anybody to download our study. It's for free. What newt has been talking and sharing about Communio dot org backslash study. Okay, you can get that. I'd encourage you to download the Studycommunio dot org backslash Study. You can download it, read it, discuss it with your small group, share it with your pastor. Okay, we need to help in producing this metanoia in the leadership of churches around the country.

You're doing amazing work, groundbreaking work that may end up historically helping save America. Jp. I want to thank you for joining me today and I encourage our listeners to visit your website communio dot org slash study and check out the findings from your nationwide study on faith and relationships.

You're doing amazing work, groundbreaking work that may end up historically helping save America. Jp. I want to thank you for joining me today and I encourage our listeners to visit your website communio dot org slash study and check out the findings from your nationwide study on faith and relationships.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much.

New I want to thank my guest, JP Dugains. You can get a link to read the new Communio nationwide study on faith in Relationships on our show page at newsworld dot com. Produced by a Ginglishtree sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guernsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team at ginglishly sixty If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of news World can sign up for my three free weekly columns at ginglishree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich.

New I want to thank my guest, JP Dugains. You can get a link to read the new Communio nationwide study on faith in Relationships on our show page at newsworld dot com. Produced by a Ginglishtree sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guernsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team at ginglishly sixty If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of news World can sign up for my three free weekly columns at ginglishree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich.

This is newts World.

This is newts World.