CNN has asked the provocative question “Does the black church keep black women single?”
It’s not a new issue, as single black women have filled many a black church pew for years.
Before Valentine’s Day 1999, Religion News Service did its own take on a related topic with a story headlined “The perfect Valentine? A godly man.” It’s long enough ago that a link isn’t available, but here are some excerpts, starting with the lede:
Ask Yvette Irby what the top quality of her “Mr. Right” has to be and her answer is simple: a godly man.
Sitting over breakfast with friends, who, like her, are single, Christian and African-American, there’s immediate agreement.” If a man comes up to me and he’s talking about everything under the sun but the Lord and I say `Jesus’ and he’s looking at me like I got two heads… the mismatch has occurred,” said Irby. The 35-year-old computer consultant said she’d give the guy her perspective on the weather. But her phone number?
No way.
Her girlfriend Denise Williams concurs. “If I have a man over my household that wants to honor God and the things of God, then he’ll honor me,” said Williams, 41, an HMO representative for an insurance company.
These women bear out a finding detailed in the recent book, “All the Man I Need: Black Women’s Loving Expressions on the Men They Desire”(Gateway Publishers). The authors found that spirituality and religious convictions ranked at the top of qualities African-American women value in men.
The latter part of the story addressed some of the same issues as the CNN story – whether church is the place for single African-American women to find single black men:
Sarah Thomas, a health industry paralegal who used “All the Man I Need” in a marriage enrichment session at her church, said black women – and their parents – often think the black church is the place to go to find Mr. Right. “That has always been the source of finding refuge and finding a husband,” said Thomas, a member and deacon of Elmwood United Presbyterian Church, a predominantly black congregation in East Orange, N.J.
But there’s a challenge to viewing the church as a meeting place: In many black congregations, women far outnumber the men. Thomas and others cite instances where churchgoing women have been greatly disappointed when an eligible bachelor in the church announces his engagement. “Whenever a man walks in a church and they find out that he does not have a wife, because the ratio is probably 10-to-1, everyone kind of looks at that person as a prospective candidate for their list of significant others,” said Thomas.
(William) Allen, the Minneapolis therapist, said some black men stay away from the church because they think it is “dishonest spiritually” to go there solely to find a wife. But, he said, the lack of men in the pews does not mean they aren’t spiritual. “It’s not necessarily because men don’t believe,” he said. “It’s because they carry out their pursuit of faith and spirituality differently.” Although some women have succeeded in finding an earthly spiritual mate, others say they aren’t pining away, but rather, they treasure their relationship with God while they wait.
Williams, the St. Louis HMO representative, leads a singles ministry at her nondenominational church where she teaches that “you can be complete in Christ.” “That satisfies me totally and wholly until he decides to manifest a man in my life,” she said. “But the man definitely has to be spirit-filled.”
