For some time now, going back to the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, if not earlier, I’ve been hearing anecdotes about young men showing up at churches in unexpected numbers. Unexpected because a gender gap in religion, where women are more likely to identify with and practice Christianity, has been a consistent feature of the American religious landscape going back generations.
But maybe not any longer, or at least not for America’s younger generations. My newsroom colleague Ruth Graham has a report this week that cites data from the American Enterprise Institute showing that more Gen Z women than Gen Z men describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated — a reversal of the pattern for every older age group. And she gives life to that data point with vignettes from the religious culture of Waco, Texas, where both church and campus life (at the Baptist-founded Baylor University) offer examples of greater male investment paired with female disaffection.
Since this is a newish trend, it’s amenable to all manner of speculative interpretations, but two competing ones stand out. A masculinization of American Christianity could be seen as yet another force driving the polarization of the sexes — the diverging ideological and educational paths of men and women that are probably linked to the declining rate at which they’re pairing off. Or it could be seen as a potential answer to that polarization, a positive sign for male-female relations in the long run.
The first and more pessimistic interpretation would argue that younger men are becoming more religious in the same spirit that they’re embracing various masculinist influencers, from Joe Rogan to Jordan Peterson, along with toxic figures like Andrew Tate. They’re seeking male-friendly refuges from what they perceive as an increasingly feminized and even misandrist liberal culture.
But the aspects of organized religion that they find attractive, the support for traditional gender roles above all, are simultaneously alienating many young women from the churches of their upbringing. And the more male the conservative churches become, the less likely they are to take this female alienation seriously, and the more they’ll lose women to either more liberal churches or just to secular progressivism, which in its awokened form has some aspects of a rival faith.
These trends might then feed one another. Imagine masculine-inflected conservative churches getting steadily more patriarchal and also featuring skewed sex ratios that make it impossible for many would-be patriarchs to actually find a spouse, encouraging increased young male hostility to nontraditionalist women. Imagine more gender-egalitarian churches with notably female-skewing sex ratios and an atmosphere that younger men find uncongenial finding themselves pulled completely into the orbit of a similarly feminized progressivism. In the long run, imagine conservative Christianity as a male-coded realm of religious edgelords and reactionaries in chronic conflict with a female-coded liberal establishment — a war between the sexes that’s also a religious war.
Now let’s consider the more optimistic scenario. Start with the idea that present-day gender polarization is as much about structural socioeconomic forces like deindustrialization and stagnating male wages as it is about ideological conflict. In which case, nothing might matter as much to the happy remarriage of the sexes as making men, especially working-class men, more stable and successful and, well, marriageable.
It may be, then, that churches that seem like home to young men are particularly well positioned to do that kind of work — stabilizing and elevating men who are currently adrift and making them more appealing as potential spouses than any currently available force in either “normie” or very online culture.
In this theory, any downside to churches becoming somewhat more masculinist could be more than offset by the upsides of having more young men attached to a mixed-sex, relatively stable, intellectually and spiritually rooted institution. And then further, to an institution that has a lot of experience (centuries, even) attracting both men and women to its message, whatever the particular obstacles to offering a mutually appealing form of evangelization today.
Even if the frictions between more traditionalist and modernist believers tend to divide men from women, in other words, it’s still better to have those frictions working themselves out among people who are inside churches (or synagogues and mosques) than to have men and women flying off into competing forms of post-Christianity — leaving us polarized, not between Baptists with differing views on women’s ordination, but between Bronze Age Pervert and woke Wiccans, macho Norse gods and a matriarchal New Age.
If you’re looking for grist for the more optimistic reading, I recommend this extensive post by Ryan Burge, the Eastern Illinois University political scientist who is the guru of religion data, digging deeper into the evidence on the nature of the changing gender split in churches.
As Burge notes, any measurement of piety you choose yields somewhat different results for what’s happening with men and women. But his broad read is twofold. First, so far, the shift in Gen Z seems mostly to be bringing men and women into rough parity in terms of religiosity (itself a big change, to be clear) rather than creating a male-dominated Christianity that women are precipitously fleeing. There’s some evidence that Gen Z men are slightly more likely to be weekly church attendees than Gen Z women. But in other measures of believing and belonging the notable thing is the absence of clear sex differences, not a big male piety advantage.
Then second, Burge points out, this shift toward parity is coinciding with a larger stabilization in American religiosity, wherein Gen Z-ers and millennials are both much less pious than their grandparents were, but the Zoomers are not noticeably less religious than the millennials. Religiousness isn’t necessarily reviving in a big way, but “secularization has largely stalled out among young adults”; again, the same cohort wherein men are surprisingly likely, relative to past expectations, to be showing up for church.
We’ll see where things stand in 10 or 20 years, once the Zoomers are deeper into their life cycle. But for now, Burge’s reading is enough for me to give a tentative edge to my optimistic scenario — which would be good news not just for America’s churches but also for the wider culture that stands to gain a great deal from men and women reuniting.
Breviary
The sources of British stagnation.
The roots of French resilience.
The origins of the crisis of masculinity.
The unfinished story of communism.
The odyssey of Stanley Kubrick.
A variety of religious experience.
A variety of internet fandom.
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