To The Contrary

Funding for To The Contrary provided by: This week on To The Contrary: Men are drawn to the church because it is an institution that says they have a special role.

They should be the leaders, right, that they should have authority, in the church and also in the family.

Young women want to have more options for how they understand themselves, their identity and disaffiliation, you know, doesn't necessaril mean you no longer are spiritual or have religious practices.

Hello, I'm Bonnie Erb.

Welcome to To The Contrary, a discussion of news and social trend from a variety of perspectives.

For the first time in decades, young men are more religious than young women.

Young women are leaving churches because they feel restricted by traditional gender roles.

Young men especially young Republican men, are finding solace in religion.

This flip marks a huge change in how different gender view faith and politics today.

Joining me this week are Dr.

Christel Manning, professor of religious studies at Sacred Heart University, and Dr.

Nichole R. Phillips, associate professor of religion and society at Emory University.

Welcome to you both and thank you for joining us.

Thank you.

So let's start with you, Ms.

Manning.

Dr.

Manning.

How is this change affecting society?

Well, let me start by saying that this is a big change that really should not be understated.

You know, we've seen a tremendous amount of change in the American religious landscape ove the last couple of generations.

If you look at the numbers for the 20th century.

For most of that century, something like 92% of Americans identified with a religion.

And that began to change towards the end of the century in the 1990s when those numbers began to drop and that accelerated.

And so now there are roughly 30% of the American population who identify as having no religion at all.

The other interesting thin about that is that that change was much more pronounced among young men, among men generally but especially among young men for most of the duration of this change.

And so for this to flip in the way that it has in a significant way, suc as a larger population of women being unidentified with religion versus men, it's really a big deal.

And it's also very new.

So how it will affect society is is going to emerge.

I think it's difficult to say at this point.

So yes, I agree that this is a significant change.

But as you pointed out, and also according to the PRRI data as well as Gallup data, it is also more partisan.

The fact that the increase in males is particular to young white males, who are identified with the Republican Party, and the fact that 68% of Republicans identify as whit Christians versus independents and Democrat is actually also a big deal, so.

And also the fact that when we think about why Christians, there is a level of conservatism or identification more so with evangelical Christianity and Catholicism, and so all of those factors cannot be dismissed or ignored with respect to the increase that we are looking at.

So it's tending towards a more partisan religious identification, respecting the increase of males than not.

And so all of those factors have to be considered as we are thinking about these trends.

And let me jump in here for a second with reacting to this change.

The 60s were the time of, generally speaking, liberation of young people, men and women.

And I could see why women could have felt constrained by limited roles in the church, which have expanded somewhat.

I mean, the Catholic still don't have female priests, at least not the mainstream portion of the church.

But, you know, you could see why women would be turned off to having to do all the grunt work and not getting any of the big rewards, like becomin bishops and that sort of thing.

What's driving the change now toward me wanting to jump into religion?

So I think it's you know, that's an interesting point you make about women in the church.

That's been the case for quite a long time.

Whereas this change that we're seeing now is new.

I think it helps to have some historical perspective here.

The idea that women traditionally are more religious than men, right, goes back more than a century, and you can actually kind of trace it back to the 19th century, when Christianit in the United States experienced what you might call a feminization of religion, where women became more involved in their church.

And so some of this is tied in with the church offering women an opportunity to express leadership, right, to express their organizational skills.

So if you think about for instance, the Victorian era, which was a time when women were protected and kept in the home, and there was this idea that women are more delicate and more pure, and the whole cult of domesticity that was used as a rationalization to justify women not being involved in the workplace, right, and not voting.

Well, some women turned that around and began to argue that, well, since we are morally pure, we should be teaching Sunday school.

And so you have the Sunday school movement, especially in Protestant churches, where women became very visible in the church.

Right.

And they were able to start al sorts of other ministries also.

And then that feeds into the temperance movement.

Right.

Which is all about women leading this charge to purify society and to stop men from going to bars, which then eventually culminates in prohibition.

Right.

And then women are able to us that to make the argument that, hey, maybe you should let us vote.

And women finally get the vote in the early part of the 20th century.

Right.

And so you can think of women's sort of predominant presence in the church as, yeah maybe partly it's about faith.

Maybe women have more faith than men.

Maybe not.

But it's also about the social aspect.

And I think that people are draw to religion for complex reasons.

Right?

Part of it is faith and part of it is other reasons.

And so then you shift forward 100 years and you have a completely different picture, right?

Where women are in a position now, where they are in some way ahead of men in a lot of ways.

Right.

60% of college students today are women.

We hear about boys struggling in school, not doing as well in primary school and in high school.

And there's been, you know a certain amount of discussion about the crisis of boys in America, etc., etc.. Right.

And so, you know, at a time when males aren't doing that well, religion in a sort of odd mirror of what was happening a hundred years ago, offers a place of acceptance and a place that says, you know, you have this special role.

So men are drawn to the church because it is an institution that says they should be the leaders, right?

That they should have authority in the churc and also in the family.

Right.

And so it's providing structure and clarity at a tim when men's role is less clear.

We also know with this feminization of Christianity also comes, I don't want to say a backlash, but a response respecting masculinization of Christianity, a more masculine Christianity that is tied to stability for men, identity formation for men.

And I don't want to just say men, generally speaking, because we're also really talking about a particular history, white men in particular.

And so I also believe that there has to be something has to be said respecting that and the connection between th partisan and religious identity view, and also in terms of the conservatism, I believe that women, young women and the studies which I found very interesting, contributing to the decline of young women being affiliated with Christianity, was an increase in young women of color.

But generally speaking, this emergence of a more conservative Christianity, we see politically with the emergence of MAHA, Making America Healthy Again, which is actually a health movement or part of the or tied to the MAGA movement, but embracing a more healthy lifestyle.

But with that is this and Professor Manning pointed this out, somewhat of a resistance to the feminist movement.

And what that means for means for women.

And so I believe that even if we don't have survey data on this, I believe that the the more conservative MAHA movement or Theo brothers movement, which circumscribes women to particular places in spaces and particular gender norms, is contributing to the disaffiliation of young women who want to, I don't want to say be free, but have more options for how they understand themselves, their identity and disaffiliation, we know, doesn't necessaril mean you no longer are spiritual or have religious practices, but that you are not necessarily connected to any type of denomination or have denominational affiliation.

Let's go back for a second, because you've each now brought this up within several contexts and I want to add one as well.

Immigration.

Because the churches that are growing most quickly in this country are doing it because of where most of our immigrants are coming from, what parts of the world and what religion predominates in those parts of the world.

But why is it thalet's go through the Christian religions that are opening up the hierarchy, if you will, to women, and how women are responding by going back to church or not?

Well, most of the going back to church that you're seeing among women is amon the more conservative churches.

So to the extent that you see women engaged in church and attending church, it's more i the evangelical churches than in the more liberal churches, so.

And why is that?

You know, that' a really interesting question.

You know, if you look at what you might call sort of progress of women achieving leadership within religious denominations in the United States, right?

We begin to see that sort of in the second half of the 20th century, when many of the mainline Protestant denominations and the.= Reform Judaism and then Conservative Judaism all began making formal, official decisions to ordain women right as rabbis or, in the case of Christians, as ministers.

It doesn't We don't see the congregation growing as a result of making these decisions, right?

We don't see them attracting more women to atten as a result of these decisions.

So the churches in the second half of the 20th century, particularly in the lat 70s and 80s that we see growing were actually conservative churches, right.

And so if you look at th numbers now, even in this latest studies, right.

Overall, we see women overrepresented among young peopl who call themselves nuns, right, I have no religious affiliation.

But if you break it down and you look at the women who are attending church, right, it's the evangelical, right.

So it goes back to what Nichole was saying about, you know, also the political angle, right?

If you break it down by party, you see the young Republican women and Republican men are actually appending church.

You can't escape cultural and social factors that are contributin to the increase of young women, or the activity of young women in more conservative Christian spaces.

I mean, the fact that we are in the shadow of the striking down of Roe versus Wade, which points to concerns about birthrate and increasing in America, the population of young women, fertilization, like those type of issues, tend to be more evangelical Protestant.

And I just also want to say that we know that they're different varieties of evangelical Protestantism.

Not all forms of evangelica Protestantism are conservative.

There are more moderate and liberal forms.

But we know those type of issues around childbearing and increasing the population and the fact that women aren't having enough children.

Those type of issues come into play when we are thinking about the increase of women, young women in more conservative, or if not they increase the activity.

And then you also made reference to immigration.

And so we know that for those who are immigrants, they bring their cultural norms and practices and beliefs.

Cultural practices, norms an beliefs cannot be separated from how we and how they understand their religious practices.

And so those cultural norms, beliefs, commitments end up driving their understanding of religious practice here in America, even if they als have been here for generations.

So would you say, is there a reverse relationship, so to speak, with if society becomes more liberal, then conservative churches draw the attention and adherents of a larger percent of the population because people are looking for a haven from too much freedom or are not comfortable with that much freedom?

You're bringing up secularization theory, and we cannot help but to look at this in terms of a more secularized society causes or prompts a response and the response, as we are seeing now for younger men and younger Republican white men, the response is more conservative Christianity.

Yes.

The numbers are smaller or less when we think about more mainline Christianity, which tends to be more liberal in its practice.

But I don't want us to discount the activity of mainline Christianity in this argumentation even though we might be seeing a more operative conservative Christianity.

History always sees pendulum swings.

You know, we've seen a real wave of secularization here.

And even befor these newest numbers came out, the rate of people saying that they identified with no religion had sort of flattened, right.

It kept increasing, increasing, increasing, increasing, sort of hitting 30% of the population even higher among young people.

And now it's flattened, right?

There is reason to believ that it might stay where it is, that we sort of reach the level of where people, the people who don' want to be with religion aren't.

And that's sort of the way it is.

We've seen a similar movement in Europe, right, where that happened a lot sooner than in the United States.

Right.

For much of the 20th century, the US was kind of exceptional in its high levels of religious affiliation compared to Europe.

And then Europe sort of stabilize and the US went through its own secularization wave and now seems to have stabilized.

So I think that's one thing.

The other thing to keep in mind is that, you know, religion always plays a sort of symbolic role, right?

Where religion or identifying with a religion is partly about religion but partly about other things.

Right.

And so in the United States, being religious in recent years has come to mean that you are also socially conservative, right?

And so for for some young people, that simply is not something that they want to identify, right.

They might even have a deep faith or be spiritual, but they don't want to be labeled as being socially conservative.

And so for that reason, they might not identify with religion.

So that also complicates things a little bit, right?

The measures that we use when we ask, do you identify with the religion Do you affiliate with a church?

Right.

Do you attend church?

Those are all different measures.

And they they're sort of imperfect in terms of capturin a person's actual religiosity.

Lastly, I want to get to before we're out of time politics.

We obviously becamewell, we were for a while, and now we are here again after this past presidential election being led by much more religious conservatives.

What do you bot think is the next step in terms of where changes because of people's religion is going to also affect the politics of the United States?

This is the first year that we've seen these numbers specifically about young men, right.

And so we need to kind of wait and see where it goes.

You know, especially in, let's say, three years when the politics may or ma not still be whatever they are.

So assuming that the numbers stay this way and we continue to get these results over the next couple of years, this it might result in a change in how children are raised.

So, I mean, what we've seen in the 20th century is every single generation was less religious than the one before it.

Right.

Which is kind of the logical outcome of each generation being a little bit less committed.

Well, then it's that much harder to drag your kids to church on Sunday and keep it going.

Right.

And so that is part of wha accounts for the secularization.

And to the extent that thi youngest generation, generation Z, as they're sometimes labeled, you know, if these patterns continue and some of them go back to church, then maybe things will change.

It will be it will remain to be seen.

We'r also dealing with young people.

And when it comes to religious belief, behavior and belonging and younger sets of whether you want to call them Christians or religious believers, it's never really consistent.

And so at the same tim that we are saying that there's an increase of younger men being more religiously committed and younger women being on the decline disaffiliated.

We also recognize that in the college years, young people, if they grew u in some type of religious home, sometimes, since thats the tim for exploration, they sometimes don't end up being committed.

That's a really good point.

Yeah, they are It's a time of exploration.

And so exactly what Christel was saying, as they marry, and we know that millennial and Gen Zers are marrying later, but as they marry and they develop families, then they, you know, survey data shows that they end up if they had grown up with some type of religious background, they end up returning to whatever religious affiliation they had in terms of growing up.

So Christianity as well as other faiths.

And so the the trends also cannot be understood outside of how we configure family and configure the development of and how we understand family as well as age.

It can't be understood without taking into account exactly what this conversation is about young people and when and if they and how they understand themselves in family, what is it...dynamics, let's just say that.

Well, I want to thank you both for giving us, you know, generous insights into what is happening on the religious side.

And that's it for this edition of To The Contrary.

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