(REVIEW) It’s a shame that “Solo Planet” has such a ho-hum subtitle: “How Singles Help the Church Recover Our Calling.” It should be: “An Intrepid Reporter Surveys Christian Singles on Six Continents during a Whirlwind 17-month Tour.”

Which is what Anna Broadway did. Having already written one book on singles (“Sexless in the City: A Memoir of Reluctant Chastity”) in 2008, this 40-something single evangelical woman noticed that most literature on the topic came from an English-speaking, American perspective.

What if someone surveyed the non-English speakers and those who held different views on politics, race and culture than did the typical American?

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And so Broadway traveled across six continents and 41 countries interviewing 345 single Christians, pastors and some couples, providentially ending her journey just before the pandemic hit. (I did 189 interviews for one of my books and found that exhausting; the thought of interviewing nearly twice that amount is a head spinner). As a result, “Solo Planet” may be the most extensive, in fact, maybe the only study of Christian singleness across multiple cultures.

The author begins with a big picture of what she calls “the church’s significant demographics problem.” Worldwide, she tells us, 60 percent of all churchgoers are female. If they are supposed to follow the biblical dictate to marry within the faith, that leaves a sizeable number of women without husbands. Put another way, globally, there are 85 million more women over 30 than men in the global church. Here in the States, women in church outnumber men by 25 million.

Added to that, she adds, are the cruel attitudes held by many churches. The unmarried are often treated as though the lack of a spouse is their fault through a lack of faith or inability to pray hard enough. Marriage is treated as normal, singleness as abnormal; singles are always sexually suspect, whereas the married are assumed to be living sexually well-adjusted lives.

“What almost no one seems to consider is that singleness might actually show obedience,” she writes. “When women outnumber men in the church, that leaves three options: polygamy, marrying a non-Christian or staying single. Which would you like us to choose?” 

Her self-funded research project involving a large dataset of unmarried Christians was meant to produce ideas on ways singles can thrive even if they have not chosen this station in life. I can’t say I picked up all that many ideas, as most of the singles Broadway interviewed were just as confounded as were their American cousins. A few had found communities that supported them, but most were winging it on their own.

The book couldn’t make up its mind whether it was a Bible study guide, a blog, a newspaper article or a journal. Sometimes the author slipped into preaching mode; other times it was a jumble of quotes. For instance, the prose would jump from a prison convict to a paragraph from a Swedish novelist to a series of quotes from an Argentinian Catholic priest with no transitions.

I wanted to know more about these folks; what they looked like, where they lived and more details about them. Their quotes alone made many of these people seem disembodied. And the flow of each chapter was interrupted by unhelpful reflection questions at the end.

The book suffered from the lack of a strong editor. The author would drop a casual sentence such as: “When I got held up at knifepoint, it happened on a short walk, alone, along a beach,” then abruptly change the topic in the next paragraph, leaving the reader hanging.     

Vignettes sprinkled throughout the book helped lighten the presentation but what would have worked better would have been to trace the author’s journey through those 17 months instead of jumping back and forth between continents. A travelogue style would have given us a better idea of the breadth of her experiences and the richness of some of her destinations. Instead, the colorful international ports of call were mainly place holders for various points the author wished to make.

Some fascinating personalities shone through, such as the single Nigerian mother who came to the interview hungry because she couldn’t afford to eat that day (Broadway bought some snacks for her). Then there’s the Orthodox priest whose wife dumped him and whose church forbade him to remarry. Trapped in his 40s with a celibacy he never signed onto when he was priested, here was a man trying to figure out how to live without sex the rest of his life. If the idea of the book was to show us how singles were thriving, this poor man’s bleak existence portrayed the opposite.

The author brings to light many situations that singles find depressingly familiar – i.e. how one can never go swimming alone at a beach as there is no one to watch your things – but which may feel surprising to those who’ve had spouses or partners much of their lives. It’s this latter group that most needs to read “Solo Planet.” Single households are becoming more and more the norm in our society and the U.S. marriage rate dropped around 60 percent between 1970 and 2011. The only places in society where people are still ostracized for being single are in houses of worship.

Small wonder, then, why so many singles are unchurched. Considering the odds against them, it’s amazing that Broadway found so many Christians still willing to be part of their congregations.

What she has taught us through her encounters with singles in 41 countries is they face situations (poverty, religious persecution) far more difficult than we face here. Sadly, the churches these singles attend are ambivalent about their existence. After reading this book, I wouldn’t say single Christians are thriving worldwide at all. Instead, they’re barely hanging on.

Julia Duin is a Seattle writer and author of seven books. Her fourth book, “Quitting Church: Why the Faithful are Fleeing” (2008), lists singles as one of the top unchurched demographics in contemporary religion.