The recent Pew Religious Landscape contains both good and bad news for women’s religious participation. The good news is that women are still more religious than men and have not suddenly left religion en masse.
The bad news is that women’s religiosity is approaching men’s levels, and that’s a new phenomenon. So what has changed?
Women have traditionally been more religious than men. According to Pew’s Religious Landscape Survey, women have been more religious than men in each birth cohort until the 1980s. Then, among millennials and younger, the faith gap between genders begins to close. It’s tempting to interpret the narrowing gender gap primarily as evidence that Christian church practices or doctrines are pushing women out the door. For example, conventional theories say women are leaving religion over lack of leadership roles and formal positions of authority.
For instance, the American Enterprise Institute has found that 65% of Gen Z women “do not believe that churches treat men and women equally.” Dr. Beth Allison Barr, a professor of history at Baylor, likewise says younger generations are “definitely more aware” of gender differences in religious leadership.
One would think that churches taking a more liberal position on gender roles would be attracting more membership. Yet “many of the largest liberal denominations that ordain women are in steep decline,” writes Ruth Graham in The New York Times. “Opening more official roles to women … may not win them back.”
She’s right. The percentage of women leaving mainline Protestant denominations — many of which have ordained women for decades — is much higher than both the evangelical and Catholic churches, which are far more theologically conservative.
So, what’s going on? In their book "The Great Dechurching," authors Jim Davis, Michael Graham, and Ryan Burge reveal that 68% of disaffiliates from mainline churches are women, an outlier so significant they say it “should appear in flashing red lights.” Whatever is causing mainliners to disaffiliate is affecting women disproportionately.
While there are many factors driving down religiosity among Americans, two lesser acknowledged influences may be affecting women more particularly: politics and work.
A political scientist and statistician, Burge explores the intersection of religion and politics in his 2021 book “The Nones.” “Partisanship plays a role in religiosity, without a doubt,” writes Burge, pointing out that politics may play some role in narrowing the religious gender gap.
Democrats have seen the traditional gender gap in religiosity reverse, Burge also notes, with nearly 55% of Democratic young women in 2022 having no religious affiliation compared to 51% of young men. This doesn’t appear to be the case for independents or Republicans as Burge notes: “In the case of Republicans, women are about five points less likely to be nones (no religion) compared to men.”
Burge believes Democratic women may experience more “cross pressure” than Republican women, which refers to identities coming into tension with others. For example, Democratic women are much more likely to identify as sexual minorities or support elective abortion, which can put them in conflict with their religious beliefs in ways that Republican women don’t currently face.
According to Pew, workforce participation among women also plays a role in women’s religiosity. Looking at daily prayer, weekly religious service attendance, and the belief that “religion is very important,” Pew’s analysis finds that “women working in the labor force are less religious, on average, than women outside the labor force.”
Labor force participation reduced the religious gap between women and men by nearly half, on average. For example, the gap between women and men who pray daily falls from 13% to 7% percentage points among women in the workforce.
One possible explanation is that busy work schedules and nontraditional family arrangements simply leave women with less time and energy for religion. The Barna group likewise found that weekly attendance for parents of children under 18 is lowest among single mothers.
Working women and single mothers may also sometimes feel like they don’t belong at church, particularly in more traditional congregations.
Davis, Graham and Burge also find that overly rigid gender roles can play a role in people leaving organized religion. In their book’s survey of over 4,000 “dechurched” individuals, they found that 9% of those who have left their Christian denomination “cite misogyny as the reason for their departure.”
The authors point to megachurch Mars Hill, pastored by Mark Driscoll, which was one of the most influential churches of the early 21st century. Mars Hill discouraged women from pursuing ambitions outside of the home, counseling the husbands of such women to “lead your wife better.”
One woman who used to attend Mars Hill described in the book how she thought it might be an overreaction to feminist attacks on masculinity. She said this led to a worship experience in which “women’s rights and women in the workplace and any kind of empowerment of women outside the home was then unfortunately problematized.”
While progressive theology and practices have not halted women’s religious disaffiliation, neither will a fundamentalist approach that condemns those caught up in the complexities of modern life.
Recognizing the generational aspect to declining religiosity, some churches have offered contemporized worship services featuring rock music, casual atmospheres, and PowerPoint sermons. However, demographer Lyman Stone found that a contemporary worship style had virtually no impact on overall church attendance rates and were actually less popular among younger generations than older ones.
“Just 12% of Lutherans under 30 are in praise band services, almost 45% in services with frequent liturgical chanting. For those 50 and older, it’s about a tie game around 25%. Contemporary worship is for old people,” Stone summarizes.
According to “The Great Dechurching,” the most common reason why mainliners stopped attending church (68% of whom were women) was not theological, it was simply “moving.” The failure of churches who “got with the times” to attract secularized youth reflects cargo cult thinking: If young people are embracing the world, we can get them back by embracing it, too.
But perhaps young people are not abandoning religion because they love the world. Perhaps they’re embracing the world because they don’t think contemporary religion offers them something more meaningful.