NY Times Op-Ed: The Impact Of A Masculine Religious Revival On The Church And Society

Following up on last week's post, New York Times, In A First Among Christians, Young Men Are More Religious Than Young Women:  New York Times Op-Ed:  The Possible Meanings of a Masculine Religious Revival, by Ross Douthat:

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. ...

If you’re looking for grist for the more optimistic reading, I recommend this extensive post [The Religion of America's Young Adults] 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. ...

[H]is 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. ... [S]econd, 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. ...

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.

• Fox News, Gen Z Men Pour Into Church Pews More Often Than Women, Flipping the Trend on Faith: 'What's the Lord Doing?'
• New York Magazine, Will Young Men Take Over American Christianity?
• Aaron Renn, Young Men Will Disrupt the American Church

Other New York Times op-eds by Ross Douthat:

• Harrison Butker’s Very American Catholic Traditionalism (May 26, 2024)
• Can Conservative And Liberal Catholics Coexist? (May 12, 2024)
• What Will American Religion Look Like On Easter 2050? (Mar. 31, 2024)
• There's No Better Time To Be A Catholic Than Christmas 2023 (Dec. 25, 2023)
• Conservative Church Critics Of Pope Francis Get Fired, While Progressive Critics Get Sternly Worded Letters (Dec. 3, 2023)
• Where Should Agnostics Go On Sundays? (Sept. 2, 2023)
• Does God Control History? (Aug. 20, 2023)
• What Has Trump Cost American Christianity? (May 28, 2023)
• Pope Francis’ Decade Of Division (Mar. 19, 2023)
• The Rationality And Danger Of Spiritual Experimentation (Feb. 5, 2023)
• The Americanization Of Religion (Jan. 29, 2023)
• In The Modern Era, The Idea Of God Is More Plausible Than Ever (Aug. 22, 2021)
• The Overstated Collapse Of American Christianity (Nov. 9, 2019)

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