Opinion | Young Women Predictably Flee Organized Religion
Alexis Draut, 28, was raised Christian in Kentucky. Her parents took her and her sister to nondenominational megachurches that adhered to a lot of Baptist and Pentecostal ideals, she said. As a kid, she loved the way every service felt “like a concert,” filled with music and light, and she made loads of friends through church. She went to Berry College in rural Georgia, a place that she described as “steeped in Southern culture, where religion is incredibly important.”
But even surrounded by believers as a college student, Draut began to question some of the values she was brought up with. Specifically, she took issue “with the sexism, with the purity culture, with being boxed in as a woman.” She couldn’t stomach the notion that “you only have these specific roles of childbearing, taking care of the children, cooking and being submissive to your husband,” she told me. “That was also around the time that Donald Trump was elected president,” she added. “So I didn’t want to associate with that kind of evangelicalism.”
Draut is representative of an emerging trend: young women leaving church “in unprecedented numbers,” as Daniel Cox and Kelsey Eyre Hammond wrote in April for Cox’s newsletter, American Storylines. Cox and Hammond, who work at the Survey Center on American Life at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, explained: “For as long as we’ve conducted polls on religion, men have consistently demonstrated lower levels of religious engagement. But something has changed. A new survey reveals that the pattern has now reversed.”
While over the past half-century, Americans of all ages, genders and backgrounds have moved away from organized religion, as I wrote in a series on religious nones — atheists, agnostics and nothing-in-particulars — young women are now disaffiliating from organized religion in greater percentages than young men. And women pushing back on the beliefs and practices of several faiths, particularly different Christian traditions, is something I have been reading about more and more.
Cox and Hammond wrote:
What’s remarkable is how much larger the generational differences are among women than men. Gen Z men are only 11 points more religiously unaffiliated than baby boomer men, but the gap among women is almost two and a half times as large. Thirty-nine percent of Gen Z women are unaffiliated compared to only 14 percent of baby boomer women.
The proportion of unaffiliated millennial women is pretty close to that of Gen Z women: 34 percent. The big shift seems to have taken place between Gen X and millennials, as only 23 percent of Gen X women described themselves as nones, according to Cox and Hammond’s analysis. They argued that increasingly, there’s a cultural mismatch between young women — who are more likely to call themselves feminists and to support L.G.B.T.Q. rights and reproductive rights — and the teachings of some of the largest Christian denominations in America, which are veering right and turning toward more retrogressive ideas about women’s place in their organizations.
The Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, may be the most glaring example of this tension. As my newsroom colleagues Elizabeth Dias and Ruth Graham reported last year, an “ultraconservative” wing of the church’s leadership flexed its muscles and voted to bar women from its leadership ranks, ousting several churches that retained female pastors. The final vote on the issue is taking place this week at the denomination’s annual convention.
“The crackdown on women,” Dias and Graham reported, “is, on its face, about biblical interpretation. But it also stems from growing anxieties many evangelicals have about what they see as swiftly changing norms around gender and sexuality in America.”
Melody Maxwell, an associate professor of Christian history at Acadia Divinity College in Nova Scotia, told me that it’s not really a surprise that Southern Baptists’ conservative wing rallied in opposition to women as pastors. Since the 1970s, she said, “the S.B.C. has been enforcing more conservative gender roles for women.”
This direction included the idea of complementarianism, the notion that men and women have different roles in life that are defined and affirmed by God. (This view is understood in a variety of ways, and there’s a good deal of disagreement about how it is interpreted.)
In a 2021 article for Georgetown University’s Berkley Forum, Maxwell explained that years earlier, Southern Baptists doubled down on a specific vision of complementarianism “with the publication of the Baptist Faith & Message 2000, which proclaimed that wives should submit to their husbands and that pastors should be men.” Even so, there have been women in the S.B.C. who gained great prominence as Bible teachers and speakers outside of the formal role of pastor; several people mentioned to me Beth Moore, who left the S.B.C. in 2021 over its handling of sexual abuse scandals and many members’ embrace of Trump.
Over the years, reinforcement of conservative beliefs about gender (and about sexuality and in vitro fertilization, which, the president of the S.B.C.’s ethics committee recently declared in a letter to the U.S. Senate, “specifically results in harm to preborn children and harm to parents”) has set various denominations on a collision course with religious Americans’ attitudes about gender equality. The coming clash is evident when you look at polling over the past 50 years.
In their 2010 book, “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us,” Robert Putnam and David Campbell described the change in attitudes among religious Americans that began taking place in the 1970s. Religious women entered the work force at similar rates to secular women, Putnam and Campbell wrote. Perhaps surprisingly, “as Americans became more liberal on gender issues in the ensuing decades, religious Americans became feminist at least as fast as and sometimes even faster than more secular Americans.”
“By 2006, majorities of every religious tradition except Mormons had come to favor women clergy.” Further, the authors wrote, “nearly three-quarters of Americans said that women have too little influence in religion, a view that is widely shared across virtually all religious traditions and by both men and women.” Putnam and Campbell wrote, “While evangelicals as a group are somewhat more skeptical” of what the authors called religious feminism, “that difference is almost entirely concentrated among an extremely fundamentalist minority of evangelicals.”
Since Trump emerged on the political scene in 2015, however, the voices in this minority have become louder and more aggressive. Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University and the author of “The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are and Where They Are Going,” told me that the combination of declining numbers of white evangelical Protestants and Trump’s influence has encouraged some conservative Christians to become more extreme in their messaging.
These conservatives argue, for example, that the S.B.C. is losing adherents because it has become too liberal on female leadership, Burge said, and Trump’s rhetorical style has “given people, conservatives, permission to be as conservative as they want to be to say inflammatory things. And social media has allowed that to proliferate and metastasize in ways that it would not have 20 years ago, 15 years ago, even 10 years ago.”
While several denominations allow women to be ordained, the more that conservative attitudes about gender roles are culturally associated with Christianity, the more that young women are going to feel alienated. American religion is a story of constant change, and I think it would be better for society, and healthier for church attendance, for denominations to evolve. In “American Grace,” Putnam and Campbell quoted the historian Laurence Moore, who wrote, “Religion stayed lively and relevant to national life by reflecting popular taste.”
For her part, Alexis Draut has dabbled in other denominations over the past few years. “I think there’s beauty in all sides of the spectrum and there are good things in all avenues of religion,” she said. But ultimately she found she couldn’t get past the sexism and the limits to her individuality that she associated with being an observant Christian. “I’ve just kind of been focusing on my individual spirituality, whatever that might mean,” she said, “or even just not doing anything spiritual at all.”
For a future newsletter, I’m looking to talk to anyone who identifies as “spiritual but not religious.” If that describes you, drop me a line here.
