When Adreanna Pulliam signed up for the Christian dating app Upward over the summer, she was prepared to come across men who identified as hyperconservative.

So when she swiped on a guy’s profile that listed “a progressive donkey or a ‘ Trump is King’ elephant” as his relationship deal-breaker, she was shocked. “I hadn’t expected to see a moderate libertarian” on the app, she says.

It only got more bizarre from there. There was the guy advertising his Snapchat with the username “Yaboi Blaze reallysexgod.” Another dater, for reasons she still can’t fathom, included a photo of him at a funeral, standing in front of a poster-size image of the deceased.

While Pulliam was apprehensive about the prospects, she wanted to see how different Upward, one of the lesser-known apps in Match Group’s sprawling portfolio of dating platforms, was from Hinge and Tinder. She hadn’t had much luck with either of them.…