I’m not a sociologist, but the statistics suggest that divorce is HIGHER in red states vs. blue, is higher among less educated partners who marry younger than their more educated partners, etc.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that marrying young and having children with a husband is a better lifestyle decision- long term- than the alternatives. Perhaps in the near term the husband/family formation stuff is a much more socially acceptable choice. The long term prospects don’t seem quite so sunny. And religious women suffer economically after a divorce in the same way as non-religious.
I agree. I had to respond because this issue really bothered me. There are really good people out there that don’t go to church and yet they’re religious and they’re really good people!
Although I worked crazy hours, I volunteered for years at our church. I stopped attending that church because they had a change in staff:
I was actually berated in public because I was helping the church secretary meet a deadline, that saved them a lot of money, in a mistake that the staff had made! And I was yelled at for it! Who does that in a church?
Several of my very good friends stopped attending because they were also concerned with the direction the church was taking.
My children respect our decision. (My husband sticks by my decision). I’ve always been taught, that I need to serve others by doing what I can, being kind and respectful. But I have a strong faith in my religion so:
I do my daily prayers.
I volunteer with food banks.
I frequently check on elderly neighbors and bring meals.
I’m in the process of developing a community page for the area that I live in.
I sew free items for patients in cancer recovery.
My kids do whatever they want, but they are also considered “religious”. Neither of my daughters will be subservient to anyone because, both my husband and I did not want any of our children to lack in confidence or self esteem. We both had bad experiences in being bullied and we knew that none of our three children would ever have to suffer that.
They know their prayers and they practice them in their own ways. They are religious but they don’t have to go to church to prove that.
Edited to add: I do like what Becca Clark, Grad student at Baylor, stated:
“I can’t go to a place of worship and know that the person next to me thinks that gay people are going to burn in hell,” said Ms. Clark. “I still believe in God and Jesus and all that, I just struggle to call myself a Christian.”
She grew up as a Southern Baptist and has become more leftist in her views as she realizes how women’s roles are viewed within her church. Apparently, her female brethren are in agreement. It’s not that they’re not religious it’s that they’re now becoming aware of their rules in their churches and families.
In the early Christian era women were very important,not just Mary Magdalene. FYI with Paul in Timothy raging against women preaching,scholars are pretty certain that wasn’t written by Paul, that it was a disciple of his that wrote it. Paul earlier simply said women should cover their head when preaching.
There was a lot of erasing of women in the early church that coalesced after the 4th century. For example, the church taught that the Mary in the bible , the prostitute, was Mary Magdelene, it wasn’t until 1922 that the church acknowledged that was a deliberate slight.
There is text in the NT that said a certain woman was Jesus greatest disciple, it was edited in later texts to say her husband was.
I question the article (I don’t read the NY Times any more, I gave up on it for a lot of reasons, mixture of things). It looks like they are using evangelical churches to prove young men are more religious than women, and that to me is confirmation bias, it using a sample that already is likely to lean a certain way.
Based on what I know, young men and women are not that religious at all, at least not traditionally so. One of the big trends, that used to be different when I was growing up, is that the old “young people stop going to church, then come back to it when they have a family”. People I went to high school with were like that, but from everything I hear or know about that is no longer true. I suspect with kids raised Catholic it was the abuse scandals, but I also suspect it is the perception that the Catholic Church in the US is supporting openly right wing politicians (and folks, it is just that, it is opinion) and that the mainstream churches have let the the Church and the evangelicals do this without saying anything. It is not a big sample size, but kids my son’s age (now 29), there aren’t too many kids who id as religious, though many claim they are spiritual.
I saw a pew study on people less than 40 and attitudes towards religion, and it isn’t positive. So I suspect the NYT article was cherry picked.
The related article referred to a different post, introducing it this way:
If you’re looking for grist for the more optimistic reading, I recommend this extensive post by Ryan Burge, the Eastern Illinois University political scientist who is the guru of religion data, digging deeper into the evidence on the nature of the changing gender split in churches.
I don’t have a subscription to the other service, but one set of graphs that is included in the first (free) section is this one:
Essentially, women’s weekly attendance or never attendance status has remained pretty stable from those born around 1975-1980 up until now, whereas men born in the 70s started increasing in weekly attendance and from about 1980 on decreasing in never attendance.
The Eastern Illinois professor concludes the free section with this:
At least on this metric, young men are more religious than young women.
But this is just one look at this. Religion is a multifaceted concept that is more than just how often one attends religious services. There are other survey questions that I want to explore. That’s the rest of this post - trying to really understand if there’s an emerging gender gap when it comes to religiosity.
Which brings us to the point that several people made above…church attendance (or lack thereof) does not necessarily align with one’s degree of faith and religious practices. But it appears that the other religious metrics are behid a paywall. If anyone is a subscriber, I’d love more info on what it shares!
Thanks, I’m in agreement with Douthat’s “tentatively optimistic” conclusion. If not the church, what would you rather young men joined instead? As Churchill supposedly said about democracy, it’s the worst form of government, apart from all the others…
