Experts agree: Women have long served as the heart of Christian churches in America. It was often the men who had to be dragged along to services. But now that’s changing.
“Men are staying in church,” Ruth Graham said at The New York Times, “while the women are leaving at a remarkable clip.” Church membership has been dropping in the United States for years, but the exodus is particularly marked among young women: 40% now call themselves “religiously unaffiliated,” while just 34% of young men say the same. How significant is that? For decades before now, research found that “women have been consistently more religious than men,” said the Times. The shift away from that longstanding dynamic could profoundly reshape “family life and politics” in America.
Women ‘moving farther left’
Why are women leaving? Polling shows that two-thirds of Gen Z women “do not believe that churches treat men and women equally,” Daniel A. Cox and Kelsey Eyre Hammond said at the Survey Center on American Life. Conservative churches tend not to let women serve as pastors or in other leadership positions, believing the Bible commands women to “submit” to male leadership. But 61% of Gen Z women identify themselves as “feminist” — a record — meaning “this message is becoming more difficult to digest.”
There are growing gender gaps in other segments of American society. Women are increasingly more likely to vote Democrat or get a college degree than men. “What might it mean for young women to outnumber young men at elite universities, while young men outnumber young women at church?” Carmel Richardson asked at The American Conservative. Education confers status, Richardson said, but churchgoing doesn’t. Her conclusion? Women aren’t leaving the church for egalitarian reasons, but out of a “more general sense that church is not cool.”
Male-led churches “increasingly seem to be preaching to a choir that is missing women’s voices,” Patricia Miller said at Religion Dispatches. Women’s participation in church has been dropping since the 1980s, about the same time American Catholics and evangelicals joined together and “fused religion with the culture wars.” College-educated women’s attendance dropped below men’s in 2016, when “evangelicals cozied up to Donald Trump.” It fell even further after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade. The more churches work at “denying women and others bodily autonomy,” Miller said, the more women “respond by walking out the door.”
The ‘backbone’ of churches
It may be difficult for churches to “stem the tide” of departing women, said USA Today. They believe their theological and doctrinal stances — on male leadership, abortion and other gender-related issues — are rooted in eternal truth. That is an obstacle to change, said Tim Whitaker of The New Evangelicals, a nonprofit group: “I don’t think the evangelical church is going to change its tune anytime soon.”
There are ramifications. Women are often the “backbone of their congregations,” said the paper, spearheading volunteer work within the church and guiding families in the faith at home. Their departure will leave many Christian congregations in a lurch. “The church,” said ex-evangelical blogger and author Sheila Wray Gregoire, is “not going to survive without women.”