Analysis of: Spanish video game aims to boost church wedding rates
The Guardian | February 11, 2026
TL;DR
Spain's Catholic Church deploys a video game to reverse collapsing church wedding rates, down from 55% to 18% in 17 years. This desperate gamification reveals how religious institutions compete in the marketplace of meaning when material conditions undermine their traditional authority.
Analytical Focus:Material Conditions Historical Context Contradictions
The Spanish Catholic Church's video game campaign to boost church weddings reveals far more about the material transformation of Spanish society than about religious innovation. The dramatic collapse of church weddings—from over 55% in 2007 to under 18% in 2024—corresponds precisely with Spain's economic crisis, prolonged austerity, and the restructuring of family formation under late capitalism. Young Spaniards facing precarious employment, housing unaffordability, and delayed economic independence are not simply losing faith; they are responding rationally to material conditions that make traditional marriage patterns increasingly difficult to achieve. The Church's response—gamification, multi-year preparation courses, appeals to 'the beauty of Christian marriage'—operates entirely within the superstructural realm while ignoring the economic base driving these changes. The video game teaching 'patience, generosity, modesty' addresses marriage as a matter of individual virtue rather than examining why young couples cannot afford homes, why both partners must work precarious jobs, or why traditional gender arrangements have become economically unviable. This is ideology in its purest form: presenting structural problems as matters of personal choice and moral education. The turn to gaming aesthetics itself represents a telling accommodation. The Church must now compete in what it calls a 'gamified society'—that is, a society where attention is commodified and institutions must market themselves using techniques developed by the tech industry. The ecclesiastical institution that once commanded marriages through social necessity and economic incentive now finds itself one brand among many, forced to adopt the language and methods of consumer capitalism to remain relevant. This represents not adaptation but absorption into the very market logic the Church has historically claimed to transcend.
Class Dynamics
Actors: Catholic Church hierarchy (Spanish Bishops' Conference), Young Spanish couples (working class and petty bourgeoisie), Professional video game designers, University students (Pontifical University of Salamanca), Wedding industry stakeholders
Beneficiaries: Church as institution (seeking to maintain social relevance and membership), Wedding industry connected to church ceremonies, Cultural conservatives seeking to restore traditional family structures
Harmed Parties: Young workers facing material obstacles to family formation, Those pressured by ideological framing to view civil unions as inferior, Women implicitly pushed toward traditional gender roles through 'modesty' and 'generosity' messaging
The Church operates as a declining ideological state apparatus attempting to reassert influence over family formation. However, its power has shifted from compulsory (social and economic necessity) to persuasive (marketing campaigns). The bishops retain institutional resources—universities, media access, organizational capacity—but must now compete for voluntary participation from a precarious working class that increasingly sees religious marriage as either unattainable or irrelevant.
Material Conditions
Economic Factors: Spanish youth unemployment and precarious employment, Housing crisis and unaffordability, Delayed economic independence for young adults, Cost differentials between church and civil weddings, Decline of Church economic incentives (dowries, family property arrangements)
The transformation of marriage rates reflects deeper changes in production relations. When extended families controlled productive property (land, businesses), church weddings served to legitimize inheritance and family alliances. Under financialized capitalism with individualized wage labor, marriage becomes primarily an emotional and legal arrangement disconnected from production. The Church's loss of influence tracks the dissolution of the property relations that once made religious sanction materially necessary. Reproductive labor—the unpaid care work that marriage has historically organized—remains essential but is now in crisis as dual-income households become economically necessary while care infrastructure remains inadequate.
Resources at Stake: Church institutional legitimacy and social relevance, Influence over family formation and gender arrangements, Future membership and generational continuity, Cultural authority in defining 'proper' relationships
Historical Context
Precedents: Spanish transition from Franco-era National Catholicism (when church marriage was effectively mandatory), European secularization patterns following industrialization, Post-2008 austerity policies that devastated Spanish youth economic prospects, 1979 Spanish Constitution establishing civil marriage equality
This story reflects a longstanding pattern: religious institutions losing authority as capitalism transforms material conditions. The Church's dominance over marriage in pre-industrial society rested on its integration with property relations and community regulation. Industrial capitalism began separating these functions; neoliberal capitalism has accelerated the process by atomizing social life and subordinating all relationships to market logic. The 2007 benchmark is significant—it precedes both the financial crisis and the subsequent austerity that devastated Spanish youth prospects. The Church's decline thus tracks both long-term secularization and the specific conjuncture of post-crisis precarity. Spain's shift represents not merely cultural change but the material impossibility of traditional family formation for much of the working class.
Contradictions
Primary: The Church attempts to restore marriage through ideological persuasion (video games teaching virtues) while the material conditions making marriage difficult—precarious employment, housing crisis, economic insecurity—remain unaddressed and unacknowledged. This is the contradiction between superstructural intervention and base-level causation.
Secondary: The Church must adopt commodified, 'gamified' cultural forms to compete, thereby reinforcing the market logic it claims to offer an alternative to, Teaching 'modesty' and traditional gender virtues conflicts with the economic necessity of dual-income households and women's labor force participation, Multi-year marriage preparation courses assume a stability and predictability of life circumstances that precarious employment fundamentally denies, The game presents 'problems at work' as individual challenges requiring patience, not systemic issues requiring collective action
These contradictions will likely intensify. As material conditions for young workers remain difficult, ideological appeals will continue to fail. The Church may either double down on cultural conservatism (alienating more youth), adapt further to secular consumer culture (losing distinctiveness), or—unlikely under current leadership—engage with the material conditions themselves by advocating for housing, employment, and economic security. The most probable outcome is continued institutional decline masked by periodic innovation campaigns.
Global Interconnections
Spain's church wedding decline is not isolated but reflects a global pattern of religious institutional crisis under late capitalism. Similar trends appear across Western Europe and increasingly in Latin America and the Philippines—historically Catholic strongholds where neoliberal restructuring has transformed family economics. The Church's gamification strategy echoes broader institutional responses to declining engagement: political parties creating apps, unions using social media, universities offering online badges. All represent the subsumption of civil society under the logic of platform capitalism. More fundamentally, this story illuminates how ideological state apparatuses (in Althusser's terms) struggle to reproduce social relations when material conditions shift beneath them. The Church historically functioned to naturalize particular family arrangements, gender relations, and class structures. As these become increasingly misaligned with economic reality—as young workers cannot afford the families they're told to want—the ideological function breaks down. The video game is a symptom of this crisis: an attempt to maintain relevance through the very cultural forms (digital media, gamification, consumer choice) that represent the Church's displacement from the center of social reproduction.
Conclusion
The Spanish Church's video game campaign offers a clarifying example of ideology's limits. When material conditions change, superstructural institutions can delay but not prevent corresponding cultural transformations. For the left, this suggests that struggles over family, gender, and social reproduction cannot be won through counter-messaging alone—they require changing the material conditions that shape how people actually live. The millions of Spanish couples choosing civil unions or cohabitation are not suffering from inadequate catechesis; they are responding to an economic system that has made traditional family formation a luxury. Solidarity means fighting for housing, stable employment, and social infrastructure—not better propaganda for alternative visions of the good life.
Suggested Reading
- The German Ideology by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels (1845) Marx and Engels' foundational text on ideology explains how 'the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas'—essential for understanding the Church's attempt to maintain ideological authority as its material base erodes.
- Prison Notebooks (Selections) by Antonio Gramsci (1935) Gramsci's concepts of hegemony and the role of civil society institutions in maintaining consent illuminate how the Church functions as an ideological apparatus and why its crisis reflects deeper shifts in capitalist social reproduction.
- Women, Race & Class by Angela Davis (1981) Davis's analysis of how family structures, gender relations, and reproductive labor intersect with class provides crucial context for understanding what's actually at stake in declining marriage rates and the Church's gendered messaging.