Why are young women turning away from religion?

Young men in greater numbers are cleaving to conservatism and all the traditional comforts this offers them, while young women are veering off into something else.

Many women are leaving behind what men think is best for them.

Organised religion is a man-made construct, of course, not woman-made. Yet how comfortably does this sit with the young females of today, roaring up strong, in this post #MeToo existence? There are no successful, widespread woman-made religions, which would look very different indeed. And a new dynamic – of aware, questioning young females – is having profound repercussions for the Church, and Christianity in general.

All this as seismic gendered shifts are underway across many arenas of political, social and family life. The result: young men in greater numbers are cleaving to conservatism and all the traditional comforts this offers them, while young women are veering off into something else. A dreamed-of rebalancing, perhaps. Fact: an intriguing change is underway in America, for the first time in its modern history. Young males, its Gen Z, are now considered more religious than its young women. They’re attending church services more often than the girls around them and identifying as religious in greater numbers. It’s an astonishing reversal of a norm.

Findings from the Pew Research Centre in Washington DC have long shown that women are consistently more religious than men – a conclusion so pervasive it’s been cemented, by some, as a universal gendered truth. But recently that balance has shifted. Young women are moving away from organised religion while young men are finding comfort in it. “We’ve never seen it before,” Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University, told The New York Times.

A recent American Enterprise Institute survey found that almost 40 per cent of Gen Z women now say they’re religiously unaffiliated, compared to 34 per cent of men. And young males are placing a higher value on traditional family life. Childless young men, according to Pew Research, are much likelier than childless young women to aspire to parenthood someday, by an enormous 12 percentage point margin. What ramifications will this have for birth rates? Marriage rates? The Church’s future as we know it?

Young women are moving away from organised religion while young men are finding comfort in it. Picture: istock

It’s all happened, of course, in the wake of #MeToo and the pervasive conversation it kicked off about sexism, gendered ghosting and harassment. Then there’s the horrific sexual abuse uncovered in churches, enabled by an entrenched power imbalance between leaders and congregants, coupled with America’s overturning of Roe v Wade, which has focused attention on reproductive rights and what power females have over their own bodies. There’s also the desire among more conservative elements of Christianity for young women to aspire, primarily, to wifedom and motherhood; a coveted aspiration for some young women, but not all, by a long shot.

According to surveys of spiritual life, some of these alienated young women are still yearning for something more, something else; still spiritually seeking. Just not within organised religion. What’s in it for us?, they ask. They’ve still got, possibly, a great spiritual thirst, they just don’t want it serviced by an old-fashioned and patriarchal model.

These young women are questioning how spirituality is actually delivered. How it’s shaped for consumption, by men. All this speaks to the ever-widening divide between young men and women in so many social arenas now. Boys veering to the comforts of patriarchal conservatism, and girls … questioning. Many women are leaving behind what men think is best for them; they want to find something they think is best for them. The answer? A new spirituality, new movement perhaps. Something that provides solace and nourishment without the power imbalances of organised religion. But where’s it coming from?