Texas.- On a beautiful Sunday morning in early September, dozens of Waco youth began their day at Grace Church. Men greeted visitors at the door and distributed bulletins. Four of the five musicians on stage were men. So was the pastor who gave the sermon and most of the college students in the front pews.
“I’m so grateful for this church,” Ryan Amodei, 28, told the congregation before a second pastor, Buck Rogers, baptized him in the sanctuary. Grace Church, a Southern Baptist congregation, is in many ways an ordinary evangelical church. However, its leaders have noted for several years that young men outnumber young women on their benches. When a small additional campus opened near Robinson last year, 12 of the 16 youths who regularly attended were boys.
“We’ve been talking about it from the beginning,” said Phil Barnes, pastor of that congregation, Hope Church. “What is the Lord doing? Why is he sending us all these young men?” The dynamic at Grace reflects a new truth: for the first time in modern American history, young men are now more religious than young women. They attend religious services more frequently and are more likely to identify as religious.
Among Generation Z Christians, this dynamic is clearly playing out: men are staying in the church, while women are leaving. Church membership has been declining in the US for years. But within Generation Z, nearly 40 percent of women now describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, compared to 34 percent of men, a survey of more than 5,000 Americans conducted last year by the Center of American Life Surveys of the American Enterprise Institute.
In all other age groups, men were more likely to be unaffiliated. This coincides with research that has shown that women have been consistently more religious than men. Gen Z men and women also follow divergent trajectories in nearly every facet of their lives, including education, sexuality, and spirituality. Young women remain spiritual, surveys about religious life show. But they came of age when the #MeToo movement opened a national conversation about sexual harassment and gender abuse, inspiring widespread exposures of abuse in church settings under the hashtag #Church-Too. And the repeal in 2022 of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 US Supreme Court ruling establishing a constitutional right to abortion, prompted many of them to begin paying more attention to reproductive rights. Young men have different concerns. They are less educated than their female peers. In major cities, including New York and Washington, they earn less. At the same time, they value traditional family life more. Young men without children are more likely than young women without children to say they want to be parents someday, by a margin of 12 percentage points, a survey conducted last year by Pew found. Young men at Grace and Hope churches “are looking for leadership, they are looking for clarity, they are looking for meaning,” said Bracken Arnhart, pastor of Hope Church. The growing gender gap has the potential to reshape not only religion, but also family life and politics. In a New York Times/Siena poll conducted in six swing states in August, young men favored former President Donald J. Trump by 13 points, while young women favored Vice President Kamala Harris by 38 points, a gap of 51 points much higher than in other generational cohorts. It’s too early to know whether this trend in church attendance indicates a long-term realignment, said Russell Moore, editorial director of Christianity Today. “I’m not sure what church life will be like with a diminishing presence of women,” he said, noting that they have historically been crucial forces in missionary work and volunteerism. “We need both spiritual mothers and fathers.” Kitron Ferrier is a senior at Baylor University in Waco, where Grace Church draws young attendees. Ferrier, 21, attends two services most Sundays. In the morning he goes to a large church in Waco popular with students. In the afternoon he usually attends Hope Church. Following Jesus is difficult, Ferrier said. “It’s about denying yourself and denying the desires of the flesh,” he said. He appreciates a church like Hope, where leaders are frank about the intensity of self-sacrifice that he considers a requirement for the Christian faith. “Young men are attracted to the hardest truths,” Ferrier said. Sometimes, he added, he wants to hear messages with a little “wrath of God.” For decades, many American churches and ministries have assumed that men like Ferrier must be courted to go to church and live right lives. Pastors emphasized the masculinity of Jesus, and men’s ministries like Promise Keepers urged their followers to embrace their roles as husbands and fathers. Derek Rishmawy, who runs a ministry at the University of California, Irvine, says some young people he mentors perceive Christianity as “an institution that is not initially and formally skeptical of them as a class,” he said. “We’re telling them, ‘You’re meant to live a meaningful life.'” The fellowship was evident after Sunday worship at Grace last month. A circle of young people remained in the sanctuary, talking and laughing. Will and Andrew Parks, two triplets who would turn 21 in a few days, were chatting with newcomers. “There are so many really good kids that are literally always here to help you,” said Andrew Parks, who has been attending Grace for several years. Parks, a computer science major, would like to get married and have children someday. First, you want to get a job where you earn enough to support a family. The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the US to which Grace Church belongs, continues to fiercely debate the place of women in leadership and family life. The denomination’s statement of faith says that only men can serve as pastors and that a wife must “submit with grace” to her husband. At their annual meeting this summer, delegates voted to condemn the use of in vitro fertilization. Discussions in other Christian institutions about the role of women have gone on for decades. And it seems young women are leaving the debates behind and heading out the door. About two-thirds of women ages 18 to 29 say that “most churches and religious congregations” do not treat men and women equally, the Survey Center on American Life found. Young women are asking more questions than their forebears, said Beth Allison Barr, a Baylor historian. “This generation is definitely more aware of the lack of women in leadership.” However, opening more official roles to women may not bring them back: many of the largest liberal denominations that ordain women as pastors are in steep decline. Becca Clark, a graduate student in social work at Baylor, grew up in a Southern Baptist home and enjoyed church. But in high school she became more attuned to issues related to gender and sexuality. As her politics shifted to the left, she began to feel less comfortable in the kind of churches she grew up in, where, she said, homosexuals and racism were treated as a joke. Clark, 22, is straight, but nearly three in 10 Gen Z women identify as being in the LGBTQ+ community. “I can’t go to a place of worship and know that the person next to me thinks gay people are going to burn in hell,” Clark said. “I still believe in God and Jesus and all that, I just have a hard time calling myself a Christian.” In surveys, women like Clark are common. They still score higher than men on measures of spirituality and attachment to God, suggesting they are not necessarily abandoning their internal beliefs, said Sarah Schnitker, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor. But, he said, “they are abandoning traditional religious practice.”
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