Young men are increasingly more likely than young women to be religiously affiliated.
Photo: Eze Amos/The New York Times/Redux
It’s often suggested that in Christian cultures, women are more likely to be observant and faithful than men. Explanations range from biological arguments about the incompatibility of testosterone with spirituality to cultural claims that Christianity, with its demand to love enemies, is “unmanly.” But the numbers are pretty clear: A 2016 Pew study of religion and gender showed that worldwide, 53 percent of Christians who regard themselves as religious affiliated are women and 47 percent are men. The religious gender gap in the U.S. — long the most religiously observant of “Western democracies” — has been even larger: 64 percent of U.S. women, as opposed to 47 percent of U.S. men, pray daily, according to Pew. Sixty percent of U.S. women, as opposed to 47 percent of U.S. men, regard religion as “very important.”
But as Ruth Graham reports in the New York Times, among Generation Z, this long-standing gender pattern has changed:
[W]ithin Gen Z, almost 40 percent of women now describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, compared with 34 percent of men, according to a survey last year of more than 5,000 Americans by the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute.In every other age group, men were more likely to be unaffiliated. That tracks with research that has shown that women have been consistently more religious than men, a finding so reliable that some scholars have characterized it as something like a universal human truth.
Graham’s basic explanation for this new gender gap is that young women are rapidly becoming more liberal and feminist, while young men seem to be attracted to belief systems that reinforce traditional families and gender roles:
Young women are still spiritual and seeking, according to surveys of religious life. But they came of age as the #MeToo movement opened a national conversation about sexual harassment and gender-based abuse, which inspired widespread exposures of abuse in church settings under the hashtag #ChurchToo. And the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 compelled many of them to begin paying closer attention to reproductive rights. …
Young men have different concerns. They are less educated than their female peers. In major cities, including New York and Washington, they earn less.
At the same time, they place a higher value on traditional family life. Childless young men are likelier than childless young women to say they want to become parents someday, by a margin of 12 percentage points, according to a survey last year by Pew.
Graham also notes that “almost three in 10 Gen Z women identify as belonging to the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community,” and homophobia is often described as a reason younger folk become estranged from Christianity. But reading Graham’s accounts of disillusioned young women and stability-seeking young men, one is struck by the extent to which her reporting is focused almost exclusively on conservative Evangelicals. And indeed, the religious gender gap she identifies among Gen-Zers looks an awful lot like a pale echo of the political gender gap that has been identified repeatedly in recent polls, as the Times’ John Otis recently reported:
There is a significant gender gap in the political preferences of Gen Z voters in the United States, as evidenced by New York Times and Siena College polls conducted this month in six swing states.
Young women — those ages 18 to 29 — favored Vice President Kamala Harris for president by 38 points. And men the same age favored former President Donald J. Trump by 13 points. That is a whopping 51-point divide along gender lines, larger than in any other generation.
Is it possible this political gap, which appears to reflect diverse reactions to changes in gender roles and the perceived status of young men and young women, is contributing to the religious gap? I have to wonder, as an observant Christian of the often-ignored mainline Protestant tradition. At my church, there is no gender discrimination in clerical or lay offices; LGBTQ folk are expressly welcomed; reproductive rights are respected; equality is considered one of Jesus Christ’s primary teachings; and the desire to have power over other human beings, whether it’s women or foreigners, is thought to be inherently sinful. There’s not a lot to repel spiritual-minded but progressive young women, but perhaps in this country the Christian “brand” has been tainted by Christian nationalism and fundamentalism, as one of Graham’s interviewees suggests:
Becca Clark, a graduate student in social work at Baylor, grew up in a Southern Baptist home, and enjoyed attending church with her parents. But in high school, she became more attuned to issues related to gender and sexuality. …
As Ms. Clark’s politics moved left, she started to feel less comfortable in the kind of churches she grew up in, where, she said, gay people and racism were treated as punchlines. …
“I can’t go to a place of worship and know that the person next to me thinks that gay people are going to burn in hell,” said Ms. Clark. “I still believe in God and Jesus and all that, I just struggle to call myself a Christian.”
The flip side of that perception is the possibility that many young men are attracted to Christianity precisely because they feel it gives divine sanction to their craving for power and status within their own homes and in society as “servant-leaders” (as conservative Evangelicals like to rationalize exclusive male leadership in churches and families), breadwinners, and disciplinarians. For bros like that, liberal Christianity may seem singularly unreassuring.
In other words, it may be secular ideology that is driving the religious gender gap as much as anything else: If church is regarded by one and all as a bastion of conservative culture where men can mock “the woke,” scorn feminists and their God-defying reproductive rights, and try to instill the fear of God in their unruly kids, the religious gender gap can and will begin to perpetuate itself, and even the Sabbath will provide no respite from culture wars. To put it another way, if young people believe Christianity is simply the MAGA movement at prayer, then God help us all.
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