NY Times: In A First Among Christians, Young Men Are More Religious Than Young Women

New York Times, In a First Among Christians, Young Men Are More Religious Than Young Women, by Ruth Graham:

At Grace Church in Waco, Texas, the Generation Z gender divide can be seen in the pews. It has the potential to reshape both politics and family life.

On a beautiful Sunday morning in early September, dozens of young men in Waco, Texas, started their day at Grace Church.

Men greeted visitors at the door, manned the information table and handed out bulletins. Four of the five musicians onstage were men. So was the pastor who delivered the sermon and most of the college students packing the first few rows.

“I’m so grateful for this church,” Ryan Amodei, 28, told the congregation before a second pastor, Buck Rogers, baptized him in a tank of water in the sanctuary.

Grace Church, a Southern Baptist congregation, has not made a conscious effort to attract young men. It is an unremarkable size, and is in many ways an ordinary evangelical church. Yet its leaders have noticed for several years now that young men outnumber young women in their pews. When the church opened a small outpost in the nearby town of Robinson last year, 12 of the 16 young people regularly attending were men.

“We’ve been talking about it from the beginning,” said Phil Barnes, a pastor at that congregation, Hope Church. “What’s the Lord doing? Why is he sending us all of these young men?”

The dynamics at Grace are a dramatic example of an emerging truth: For the first time in modern American history, young men are now more religious than their female peers. They attend services more often and are more likely to identify as religious.

“We’ve never seen it before,” Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, said of the flip.

Among Generation Z Christians, this dynamic is playing out in a stark way: The men are staying in church, while the women are leaving at a remarkable clip. ...

It is too early to know if this new trend in churchgoing indicates a long-term realignment, said Russell Moore, the editor in chief of Christianity Today.

But he marveled at its strangeness in Christian history.

“I’m not sure what church life looks like with a decreasing presence of women,” he said, pointing out that they historically have been crucial forces in missionary work and volunteering. “We need both spiritual mothers and spiritual fathers.” ...

For decades, many American churches and ministries have assumed that men ... must be wooed into churchgoing and right living. Publishers promoted books like “Why Men Hate Going to Church” and “No Man Left Behind,” which assumed that many men are reluctant Christians at best — and that their wives and children would follow them to church. Pastors emphasized Jesus’s masculinity, and men’s ministries like Promise Keepers exhorted followers to embrace their roles as husbands and fathers. ...

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. She graduated in 2020 and spent that pandemic summer mostly inside, watching the fallout from the murder of George Floyd by a police officer.

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.

Ms. Clark, 22, is straight, but almost three in 10 Gen Z women identify as belonging to the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community.

“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.”

In surveys, women like Ms. Clark are common. They still score higher than men on measures of spirituality and attachment to God, suggesting that they are not necessarily abandoning their internal beliefs, said Sarah Schnitker, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor who co-directs the longitudinal Developing Character in College Communities study.

But, she said, “they’re exiting traditional faith practice.”

It is young men who now register higher in attachment to basic Christian beliefs, in church attendance and in frequency of Bible reading, according to an analysis for The Times by Dr. Schnitker.

Ms. Clark has occasionally attended a more progressive Baptist church. But she is realizing that churchgoing is simply no longer a priority for her. She is busy, and her friends are doing other things.

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