News

What Algorithms Have Brought Together

Christian singles aren’t going to church to find life partners. They’re swiping on the apps.

A digital engagement ring
Illustration by Simone Noronha

The first time Alex Entz saw his future wife, she was behind a paywall.

The popular dating app Hinge had deemed Leanne Brady a “standout” match for Entz—an attractive, compatible, and compelling person. So it put her in a special, separate category. Entz had to decide whether to shell out $3.99 for the chance to talk to her.

He didn’t pay.

It worked out anyway. A few days later, Brady’s profile showed up in his regular feed. This time, Entz responded, and they matched. They started to chat and hit it off. Today, the couple is married.

The Entzes are devout Christians and believe God wrote their love story. But like 57 percent of people under 30, they also have an algorithm to thank for bringing them together.

They never found it easy to trust the algorithms.

Many Christians in America feel the same way. But for singles looking for love, opaque code that materializes potential partners without explanation increasingly seems like the only choice. Data shows that only about 15 percent of people find a romantic partner through their friends. About 10 percent meet at work or through coworkers. Almost nobody marries their high school sweetheart anymore, and vanishingly few marry someone they met in college. Church is one of the least common ways to connect. Only around 3 percent of Americans in a romantic relationship say they met at a religious event. 

That leaves the internet, according to Stanford University sociologist Michael Rosenfeld, whose research tracked how couples met from 1940 to 2021. 

That doesn’t mean singles are happy about their new matchmakers, though. And it doesn’t mean they believe the algorithms will find them love.

Christians who put a high priority on their faith may have a particularly tough time finding partners on the apps who feel similarly. Historically, evangelicals have been slower than others to venture online for romance, according to Barna Group research. When they do start swiping, many find the algorithms’ methods don’t quite work for them. They have to tinker with settings and try different strategies to find people they would even consider as a potential life partner.

Before Leanne Brady matched with Alex Entz, for example, she matched with lots and lots of people that she didn’t find compatible. 

She hadn’t completely filled out her profile when she first joined Hinge, skipping some biographical categories, including religion. When she went back and checked the box saying she was a Christian, her number of matches—and dates—fell dramatically.

“It was so discouraging,” she said. “People just weren’t swiping on me.”

She made more changes and, over time, developed a theory about what worked best on the apps based on her own experience. It’s hard to argue with her results.

Your first picture on a dating app profile should be a solo shot, she decided. Good lighting, big smile, aiming straight at the camera and potential matches. The second shot should be one with friends. But it should be obvious who you are, and ideally you should be doing an activity, like posing after a 5K mud run. For the third, choose a photo where you’re dressed up for a formal event, like a wedding. The last one can be goofy and show your personality.  

Brady’s last photo showed her doing a karate chop at Jackie Chan, the martial arts star, at a wax museum. 

That was the one that caught Entz’s attention, along with her megawatt smile and her intentionality about expressing the importance of her faith in her profile. He liked that a lot.

Entz was going through the same process of navigating the algorithms. If anything, for him it was more intense. Men have to wade through bots and fake profiles; when the women Entz saw were real women, they didn’t seem to want what he wanted. 

“Basically every stereotype about the apps is true. The bad ones,” he said. “If you are a person who considers himself average, not a six-foot-tall Adonis… you might just have to work a bit more at it.”

Entz is an economist, so he attacked the problem as systems of inputs and outputs. He tried tweaking each of them to see if they would give him different results. In some ways, the apps were all the same. But in others they varied widely. 

“Hinge was the most serious, Coffee Meets Bagel was probably the most religious, Tinder was the most frivolous and pointless,” he recalled. Another popular app, Bumble, he described as a “total misfire.”

Entz experimented with his profiles, making little adjustments to try to connect with serious Christians who shared his beliefs, put a high priority on their faith, and wanted to make it a big part of their lives. He rarely went more than a few weeks without changing everything around just to get the algorithm to give him some better matches.

The exact details of different algorithms and how they work are not publicly available, but most seem to use “collaborative filtering.” That means the apps consider what users say they prefer and also the way people interact with profiles, developing additional metrics of unstated preferences. How someone clicks, swipes, and even just pauses in the app all becomes data that the algorithms use to filter the feeds of options. 

That makes sense. If you are a conservative Republican who automatically rejects anyone who identifies as a Democrat or a moderate in their dating profile, the algorithm will show you more of what you want, even if you don’t mark yourself “Republican.” Soon your feed will populate with women or men sporting MAGA hats. The same is true in reverse: If you’re a liberal Democrat, the algorithm will sort you that way whether you state a preference or not. Soon you’ll never have to look at someone who supports Donald Trump. 

A growing political divide between men and women—a divide that is also showing up in the American church—is likely exacerbated by algorithm-created silos on both online dating and social media platforms.

“We’re seeing a segregation in online content that young men and young women are exposed to, and a lot of it portrays the opposite sex in a relatively negative light,” said Daniel Cox, survey director at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, DC–based think tank. “If that’s what you’re going to use to inform your views about dating and relationships, that will have fairly long-term impacts on whether you even want to have a partner, or if you want to get married, or if you want to have kids with someone.” 

The algorithms learn what attributes someone does or doesn’t want to be shown and takes that into consideration as they filter options. They also appear to learn what everyone else does and doesn’t want to be shown. If one person’s profile gets a lot of interaction—clicks, comments, views (or whatever metrics the apps use), their value goes up, and that profile is shown to more people. Or the other way around: If a profile doesn’t generate much response, the algorithms respond accordingly and show it in fewer and fewer users’ feeds.

This may sharply limit the opportunities someone has to connect with potential life partners. Saying you are a committed Christian will filter out a lot of people you want to filter out, but it might also make your profile so unpopular that basically no one sees it.

This is a common enough concern for people of faith that some apps promise to make things easier by putting religion front and center.

Upward, for example, allows users to not only say that they’re Christian but also specify their denomination, state their dating intentions, and even upload a faith statement. 

“Upward removes the mystery of ‘Is my potential date as serious about their faith as I am?’ ” said Rachel DeAlto, a dating expert at Upward. “Members are opting in on that very principle… to find someone that matches their faith values.”

According to Upward (which is owned by Match Group, the same company behind Hinge, Tinder, Match.com, OkCupid, and many other dating apps), Christians are most likely to search for people on Sundays between noon and 5 p.m.

Some marriage and relationship experts wonder, though, if Christians could find more ways to connect on Sunday mornings. They worry that churches and Christian leaders haven’t done enough to help people find suitable partners.

According to a Barna survey, only 7 percent of churches have any kind of ministry for single people. Many churches aren’t large enough to do something like that successfully. Others don’t see the need. The rapid rise of dating apps may have given churches the impression that “someone else is solving the problem” of connecting single Christians, said J. P. De Gance, coauthor of Endgame, a book about the need to strengthen families.

“Churches leave that entire playing field unoccupied. Nobody’s on that field for our churches,” De Gance said.

His nonprofit, Communio, is trying to help. The group has organized events at 180 Protestant and Catholic churches, including swing dancing, pickleball, softball, and axe throwing.

“We have such loneliness and nihilism around us,” he said. “This is the great felt need of our moment.”

Some young Christians feel in-person meetings are better not because there’s an increased likelihood of finding someone compatible but rather because they worry about the side effects of being on dating apps.

John Shelton, policy director for Advancing American Freedom, tried a number of apps before he met his wife, Katelyn. He found they encouraged a “shopping” mentality that he didn’t like. Instead of interacting with a person as a person—a sister in Christ, a beloved child of God—he was asked to start with a list of things he wanted.

Katelyn Shelton had similar concerns, so she never joined the apps. But her friends’ stories of searching for romantic partners online always reminded her of being in middle school, when she and other girls would write endless lists of what they wanted in a future husband. As adults, they could do the same thing, just with the help of an algorithm. 

“The high curation… all these different parameters—the height, their interests,” John said. “It makes it more fraught.”

The couple met and connected offline, outside the Supreme Court, at the most romantic of events: a Southern Baptist Convention Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) briefing. 

John describes their love story as “hybrid,” since the internet did play a role. John, who interned for the ERLC, noticed Katelyn, one of the next crop of interns, in a photo on X. He found out they both had divinity degrees. That, plus another guy’s obvious interest in Katelyn, gave him a push to ask for her number. Fast-forward, and the pair now has four children.

Jessica Greensmith would like to see more of those kinds of in-person connections. The Christian mother of four has hosted matchmaking events since a women’s conference in 2023. One of the sessions asked people to think about “who in our church community is actually overlooked?”

She thought of the single Christian women she knew who were discouraged and exhausted from the dating scene. After a brainstorming session, she decided to host speed dating events with her cousin. 

“I just became really annoying, where I would ask everyone I know, ‘Do you know any really solid single believers that you think should be at this event that we’re doing?’ ” she said. 

Over the course of ten months, they organized eight events to help single Christians meet and connect. The speed-dating-style events had some competition mixed in. Singles carved pumpkins for a contest or tried to identify types of wine. There was a website, but no algorithms. The women used it to track referrals and potential matches. 

Greensmith’s fourth pregnancy caused her to push pause on official matchmaking, but she still has a heart for singles around her. She said married Christians can sometimes hesitate to step into a matchmaking role because they worry about causing offense. But she’s found that single Christians often respond with gratitude to being set up in a low-pressure environment. She can take credit for at least one engagement so far.

But there aren’t matchmakers in every congregation, and most churches are not organizing pickle-ball tournaments or speed-dating-pumpkin-carving events for interested Christian singles. 

Most are left to navigate the apps, tweaking their profiles again and again in hopes that the algorithms will finally work for them. 

That’s what happened to Alex and Leanne Entz back in 2021. He changed his profile, she changed hers. Leanne’s profile moved into Alex’s main feed, where he could appreciate the picture of her karate-chopping a wax Jackie Chan and see that she wanted “a guy who will bring me chocolate and go to church with me on Sunday.”

He messaged her, she replied, and less than a dozen messages later, he asked her out on a date. 

After all his trial and error with the algorithms, this is Alex Entz’s strongest bit of advice: Move from online to in-person as soon as you can. 

“Waiting is for suckers,” he said. “Write that.”

Their first date was on Halloween. They didn’t dress up, but their rooftop restaurant reservation featured a DJ wearing a terrifying Joker costume and blasting music so loud that Leanne struggled to hear Alex. None of that seemed to matter. 

The two got married in August 2023. They are expecting their first child this fall.

The Entzes see beauty in the way God brought them together—even if they are still surprised that God used an algorithm. 

“I could not have anticipated the way that God has mapped out my life,” Leanne said. 

But she also thinks it couldn’t have been planned any better.

Harvest Prude is a political correspondent for CT.

Also in this issue

As developments in artificial intelligence change daily, we’re increasingly asking what makes humanity different from the machines we use. In this issue, Emily Belz introduces us to tech workers on the frontlines of AI development, Harvest Prude explains how algorithms affect Christian courtship, and Miroslav Volf writes on the transhumanist question. Several writers call our attention to the gifts of being human: Haejin and Makoto Fujimura point us to beauty and justice, Kelly Kapic reminds us God’s highest purpose isn’t efficiency, and Jen Pollock Michel writes on the effects of Alzheimer’s. We bring together futurists, theologians, artists, practitioners, and professors to consider how technology shapes us even as we use it.

Seek the Kingdom Wherever It Is Found

The Transhumanist Question

Unlearning the Gospel of Efficiency

Review

Racial Reconciliation Is on the Move

Still Life with the Fruit of the Spirit

Analysis

Rise of the Thinking Machines

News

Evangelical Report Says AI Needs Ethics

God Remembers in Our Dementia

Review

When Pseudoscience Swallowed Scripture

Readers Say Yes to Church Kitchens

Qualms & Proverbs

Should Christians Avoid Writing with AI?

Review

We Want What the World Can’t Give

When We Make Intelligence in Our Image

Nicholas Carr on AI Doctors and Internet Edgelords

Public Theology Project

An Image of God for an Era of AI

Testimony

Explosive Secrets Damaged Me. Surrendering to Jesus Saved Me.

News

Meet the Christian Engineers Helping to Shape AI

We’re Committed to Humans

In Those Days, There Was No King Over AI

What Is (Artificial) Intelligence?

Don’t Conflate Intelligence with Value

Why We’re Desperate to Measure Intelligence

AI Offers Information. God Offers Wisdom.

AI Is Making Humans Dumber

View issue

Our Latest

News

Good News About Christian Hospitals in Africa

Study author praises staff members who “stay where their presence matters most.”

Evangelism Isn’t Allowed in Oman. Sharing Is.

A Christian-led interfaith group helps both Muslims and Christians explain the value of their faith.

The Bulletin

Hostages Come Home

Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners released as part of a peace deal brokered by President Trump.

Fighting Fire with Plants

Vegetative buffers taught me how to better respond to issues that so often divide us.

News

Ukrainian Refugees Brought Revival to a Polish Church

The arrivals that transformed one congregation overnight stand to have long-lasting effects on mission in Europe.

Teaching Sunday School on Philippines’ Witchcraft Island

Doris Lantoria grew up on Siquijor island. Now she’s back to tell its youth about Jesus.

Children Are Born Believers

Research shows that kids are naturally attuned for belief in God. We adults could learn from that.

Apple PodcastsDown ArrowDown ArrowDown Arrowarrow_left_altLeft ArrowLeft ArrowRight ArrowRight ArrowRight Arrowarrow_up_altUp ArrowUp ArrowAvailable at Amazoncaret-downCloseCloseEmailEmailExpandExpandExternalExternalFacebookfacebook-squareGiftGiftGooglegoogleGoogle KeephamburgerInstagraminstagram-squareLinkLinklinkedin-squareListenListenListenChristianity TodayCT Creative Studio Logologo_orgMegaphoneMenuMenupausePinterestPlayPlayPocketPodcastRSSRSSSaveSaveSaveSearchSearchsearchSpotifyStitcherTelegramTable of ContentsTable of Contentstwitter-squareWhatsAppXYouTubeYouTube