Looking For Love: Christian online dating sites surge in US

Looking for love in America? Perhaps what you need is a little faith.

Christians in the United States who are trying to find their soul mates are turning with increasing frequency to the Internet, so much so that – despite studies that find religious affiliation declining in America – Christian dating sites have become a booming and very competitive business.

“The benefit of coming to a site like ours is knowing you are coming to an online Christian community where you know people share your faith and your values,” said Ashley Reccord, spokeswoman for ChristianMingle.com, in an interview with RIA Novosti.
“We are the largest and fastest growing online dating site for Christians,” she added.

With just over eight million registered members, ChristianMingle.com is the largest of the dozen or more Christian dating sites that have sprung up online in recent years.

It is also the most popular of the 28 different, niche-dating sites owned by Spark Networks including JDate.com which is targeted toward Jewish singles and has 750,000 active members; LDSSingles.com for Mormons, which reports over a thousand couples that have found their matches; and BlackSingles.com, which reports tens of thousands of members that log onto its site each day.

The Pew Research Center, a Washington-based nonpartisan think tank that studies national and global trends, released a report in 2012 that found the number of Americans who have no religious affiliation had grown from 15.3 percent in 2007 to 19.6 percent in 2012, the vast majority of them under the age of 50.