Is It Blasphemous to Go to Church to Pick Up Women?

No, not in the strict sense of the word. Blasphemy means speaking or acting with contempt toward God or sacred things, and walking into a church hoping to meet someone is not that. But sitting through services you do not believe in, only to meet women, is a kind of pretending that most churchgoers would find disrespectful and many would call dishonest. If you share the faith, meeting women there is normal and welcome. If you do not, meet women somewhere else.

In most Christian traditions, blasphemy means words or acts that show contempt for God or holy things. Think of mocking the sacraments, cursing God, or treating sacred objects as a joke. It is a serious word with a fairly narrow meaning.

Going to church with mixed motives does not fit that meaning. People attend for all kinds of reasons: loneliness, habit, family pressure, the hope of meeting someone. Congregations generally welcome them anyway.

So if the question is whether you would be committing blasphemy, the answer is no. Whether it is a good idea is a separate question, and the answer to that one depends on you.

The trouble starts when the faith is a costume. If you do not believe, but you sit through the services, sing the hymns and talk about prayer because it gets you closer to the women there, you are deceiving everyone in the room. Many believers would find that more troubling than a careless word, because it uses other people's worship as a tool.

a dating coach makes a practical point about this on a coaching call. If you meet women at church, they assume you are religious, and it would be strange for them to think anything else. That assumption is built into the setting. Letting it stand when it is false is a lie told by silence, and it tends to come out early. When she finds out, the dating ends, and so does your welcome in that congregation.

There is a cost to the community too. A congregation is supposed to be a place where people can lower their guard. A man working the pews for dates changes how the room feels for everyone in it.

If you belong to the faith, church is one of the most natural places to meet a woman who shares your values. Many congregations run young adult groups, singles events and volunteer days partly so members can get to know each other, and plenty of couples met exactly that way.

What matters is that the faith is real and that church means more to you than a place to find a date. Attend because you want to be there, take part in the life of the community, and if you meet someone along the way, that is a good thing.

coach also has advice for men who go stiff around religious women. In his words, "just because a girl goes to church doesn't mean that she's not a woman anymore." She still wants to be flirted with. You may go slower with her, and a little interest may go further because she is less used to it, but the basic skill does not change. Only the calibration does.

If you are unsure where you stand, ask yourself three questions.

• Would you keep going to this church if you never met anyone there?
• Would you be comfortable telling the pastor why you started coming?
• If she asked on a first coffee what you believe, could you answer truthfully without changing the subject?

If the answer to all three is yes, you are a member who happens to be single, and there is nothing wrong with that. If any answer is no, you are pretending, and the pretense is the problem, whatever word you use for it.

Then church is the wrong place, and you lose nothing by skipping it. Women are everywhere else: cafes, bookstores, markets, parks, the street on a sunny afternoon. You can meet a woman with strong faith in any of those places too. If her faith matters to her, you will find out honestly, over a drink, rather than through a performance on Sunday.

There is no reason to fake values to meet women who hold them. A man who is honest about what he believes, and curious about what she believes, will do better with religious women than a man pretending to be one of them. They tend to spot the act.

Many men consider church because saying hello to a stranger in public feels impossible, and a congregation looks like a way around that. Without the faith, it is the wrong way around it.

The better fix is getting comfortable meeting women in everyday settings. A Cold Approach Bootcamp is in person and fully in the field, in Miami and New York, with daygame in streets and cafes and night game in bars and lounges. You get live coaching on every approach and feedback after every set. Group is three consecutive days at three students per coach, and Private is 1-on-1 for one, two or three days. There is no skill floor, approach anxiety is the program's specialty, and you leave with a short written practice plan.