(Roughly) Daily

The Gen Z gender divide, especially as it relates to ever-more conservative males and ever-more liberal females, is widely remarked. (E.g., see here [gift article].) Ruth Graham explores that divide in a different dimension– one that may be fueling the political divergence…

… For the first time in modern American history, young men are now more religious than their female peers. They attend services more often and are more likely to identify as religious.

“We’ve never seen it before,” Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, said of the flip.

Among Generation Z Christians, this dynamic is playing out in a stark way: The men are staying in church, while the women are leaving at a remarkable clip.

Church membership has been dropping in the United States for years. But within Gen Z, almost 40 percent of women now describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, compared with 34 percent of men, according to a survey last year of more than 5,000 Americans by the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute.

In every other age group, men were more likely to be unaffiliated. That tracks with research that has shown that women have been consistently more religious than men, a finding so reliable that some scholars have characterized it as something like a universal human truth.

The men and women of Gen Z are also on divergent trajectories in almost every facet of their lives, including education, sexuality and spirituality.

Young women are still spiritual and seeking, according to surveys of religious life. But they came of age as the #MeToo movement opened a national conversation about sexual harassment and gender-based abuse, which inspired widespread exposures of abuse in church settings under the hashtag #ChurchToo. And the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 compelled many of them to begin paying closer 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 place a higher value on traditional family life. Childless young men are likelier than childless young women to say they want to become parents someday, by a margin of 12 percentage points, according to a survey last year by Pew…

… This growing gender divide has the potential to reshape the landscape of not just religion, but also of family life and politics. In a Times/Siena poll of 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 51-point gap far larger than in other generational cohorts.

It is too early to know if this new trend in churchgoing indicates a long-term realignment, said Russell Moore, the editor in chief of Christianity Today.

But he marveled at its strangeness in Christian history.

“I’m not sure what church life looks like with a decreasing presence of women,” he said, pointing out that they historically have been crucial forces in missionary work and volunteering. “We need both spiritual mothers and spiritual fathers.”…

Eminently worth reading in full: “In a First Among Christians, Young Men Are More Religious Than Young Women” (gift article) by @publicroad in @nytimes.

* J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

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As we ponder piety, we might spare a thought for Aimee Semple McPherson; she died on this date in 1944. A Pentecostal evangelist and media celebrity in the 1920s and 1930s, she is best known for founding the Los Angeles-based Foursquare Church and for pioneering the use of media to build her following. She broadcast on radio (spiced with popular entertainment and stage techniques) to draw in both audience and revenue for her weekly sermons at Foursquare’s Angelus Temple, an early megachurch. In her time, she was the most well-known (and publicized) Protestant evangelist, surpassing Billy Sunday and other predecessors.

While McPherson certainly undertook her own promotion, her fame was ignited in 1926, when (a la Agatha Christie) she disappeared– in McPherson’s case for five weeks. The evangelist insisted that she had been kidnapped and taken to Mexico; many believed that she had “retreated” into a tryst with a male colleague. Indeed, she was investigated and charged by L.A. authorities with fabricating a hoax. That charge was never proved, though many still believe that she was in fact the architect of her own disappearance. In any event, the turmoil was national news– and supercharged her rise.

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