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    Home»Opinions»Opinion | The Shifting Gender Balance in American Religion
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    Opinion | The Shifting Gender Balance in American Religion

    Team_Benjamin Franklin InstituteBy Team_Benjamin Franklin InstituteJanuary 22, 2026No Comments3 Mins Read
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    Let’s start by talking about men versus women. What is the historical pattern of gendered behavior around religion, and how is that changing, maybe? In most countries where we can get data, women are more religious than men. But what we’re seeing, interestingly enough, among Gen Z is that women are still leaving the church at an incredibly rapid rate and men are still leaving, but at a slower rate. And what that ends up being is the religiosity of Gen Z men and women is probably about the same now. It’s not that men are returning to church. This is a really important point. The data does not. … Well, some men are. Some men are. But in the aggregate. In the aggregate, we’re not seeing Gen Z men become more religious. It’s just they’re secularizing slower than young women are. And that’s allowing those lines to cross when it comes to religiosity. Now, can you tell in the data, what this means for specific churches? So, for instance, there are a lot of stories, and I’ve heard them myself, about male converts to Eastern orthodoxy being a big thing. There’s less than a million people going to Orthodox Church in America, of a country of 330 million people. Southern Baptists, there’s seven million Southern Baptists who go to church every Sunday. So, like, let’s put things in their proper orbit. I still think the reality is that American religion, mainstream American religion, is still going to be majority female, because boomer women are more religious than boomer men and Gen X and millennials. So this is a small trend that we would need to see continue for decades to actually see a difference you would feel on the ground if you went to an average church. It seems like you can tell, you can tell a lot of different stories. But one story would be OK, It’s obviously good for churches to have more men in the pews. But if organized religion generally, Christianity in particular, has a specific problem losing young women, then you get a bro-tastic wouldbe patriarchal culture in these churches, and maybe it accelerates a female exodus. Or alternatively you say, look, no, actually, if you have a lot of churches that are suddenly 50/50 male/ female, these are the only institutions in American life maybe that might have that kind of balance. You get more marriages, more successful communities. Which of those two stories sounds more realistic to you? I mean, 50/50 is a good outcome, but you’ve got to understand the types of Christianity that are still dominant in American life, which is evangelicalism and the Catholic Church, are both male dominated across the board. That is not changing demonstrably, I think, over the next 20 or 30 years. But I will say it’s probably not a bad thing if you’re a young man or a young woman trying to find someone to marry and have kids and build a life with when there’s 50/50 young men and young women in the pews. In that way, I think it’s actually a very good thing. If you walked into a church and it was 90 percent Gen Z men and 10 percent Gen Z women, that’s a real problem. I mean, 50/50 is a lot. Well, for the man. Well, yeah, I mean, but for the future of the church, too, though, because then you become unattractive to young women because they walk in and go, whoa, dude, there’s no place for me here.



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