The Remarkable Religious Disaffiliation of Young American Women and What it Means for the Future

Underneath all the buzz about the (allegedly) extremely corrupt and definitely just plain weird NYC mayor Eric Adams, the devastation of hurricane Helene, Israel’s operations in Lebanon, and the other major news stories of this week, you may, if you didn’t blink, have noticed the following headline in The New York Times: “In a First Among Christians, Young Men are More Religious than Young Women.” If you, like me, hate yourself and therefore still have a subscription to the Times (and The Atlantic!), you might even have read the article, which I gift link here for those who may want to read it now.

In this article, reporter Ruth Graham looks at how the broad trend of religious disaffiliation among young American women is playing out in newly gender imbalanced evangelical churches at the local level, specifically in Waco, Texas. Graham’s generally pro-evangelical attitude—surely a product of both access journalism and Christian hegemony—makes for a certain cluelessness to her write-up, along with bizarre juxtapositions evidently arising from misplaced fealty to ye olde journalistick “both sides” ideal.

For example, after a paragraph about how abuse in the church and the overturning of Roe v. Wade are important to younger women, Graham tells us, “Young men have different concerns.” DIFFERENT. You can’t make this shit up.

That being said, the findings Graham discusses are in fact a very big deal, even if they did come from the survey arm of the American Enterprise Institute, which released them back in April. It is not yet clear if, with so much else going on, the Right will be able to use the decline of women’s church attendance to gin up a proper moral panic, but there is no question that, for the Right, these findings fall into the “destruction of western civilization” category.

As is well established, Gen Z is America’s most nonreligious generation, with 36% of the cohort identifying as unaffiliated. Millennials and those pensive, jaded, played-Oregon-Trail-in-childhood Xennials like myself are not far behind, at 34%. But here’s where things get spicy, according to AEI’s data. A full 39% of Zoomer women are nonreligious, compared to 34% of Zoomer men. When you take just the nonreligious Zoomers, that translates into an eight-point gender gap (54% of nonreligious Zoomers are female; 46% are male).

For every other generational cohort, the gender gap skews in the opposite direction, but I suspect that Zoomers represent the wave of the future here. And that’s going to have all kinds of interesting implications, changing everything from the makeup and character of movement atheism and secular advocacy for the better (a process already underway) to Americans’ too often taken for granted assumptions about gender.

The shift will likely also hasten the institutional decline of Christian churches in the United States—something that moderate evangelical believer and religion journalist Bob Smietana warns us could have harmful social consequences in his 2022 book Reorganized Religion: The Reshaping of the American Church and Why it Matters. Smietana isn’t wrong that the sudden collapse of churches will leave major gaps in the provision of social services (including food banks) and disaster relief, but he is wrong about the solution, in my view.

Photo from the 2021 Women’s March by Gayatri Malhotra. Via Unsplash.

This is a bit of an aside, but let me just say that the status quo inflicts a lot of injustice by relying on Christian groups for social services: nonbelievers are forced into religious sobriety programs, or may be forced to feign Christian beliefs to get access to helpful programs in prison. Recipients of aid are often subjected to proselytizing, even if that’s not the official policy of the group in question (and even if it technically falls afoul of federal funding rules). And people who need urgent healthcare may find that a Catholic hospital won’t give it to them, if the procedure has something to do with women’s or queer healthcare that falls afoul of the expressly religious rules imposed by the bishops.

We should have long since begun building, funding, and making widely accessible secular alternatives. We also need to reverse the current trend of defunding libraries and to make the social safety net much more robust. New models of community, secular nonprofits, and better government can do the things we’ve been relying on churches and other religious organizations to do, and can do them in a far more fair and equitable way. And we’re going to have to find a different path forward, because there simply is no way to reverse the tendency that has Smietana (and pretty much the entire punditocracy) worried. American Christianity is in deep decline, and will remain so. And now it’s young women who, with very good reasons, are leading the way out of the church.

Graham’s article does mention the theology of “complementarianism”—that is, the idea that God created men and women with, erm, separate but equal roles to play in church and family life, with men leading and women submitting. But Graham implies that women’s roles are much more up in the air in the Southern Baptist Convention (and in similar evangelical churches) than they are, thereby downplaying the extent to which enforced patriarchy (and its concomitant protection of powerful male abusers) gives women a very good reason to leave their churches. In fact, the SBC requires local churches to espouse complementarian theology and, in recent years, has actively purged member churches that have women pastors.

And who wants to attend a church full of incels? Well, other incels I suppose, but presumably no one else. And without actually coming out and saying that SBC and similar evangelical churches are filling up with incels, that is more or less the situation that Graham describes:

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. The young men at Grace and Hope churches ‘are looking for leadership, they’re looking for clarity, they’re looking for meaning,’ said Bracken Arnhart, a Hope Church pastor.

And if that doesn’t quite provide the full picture, to her credit Graham goes on to mention the whopping 51-point gender gap between Gen-Z men (+13 in favor of Trump) and Gen-Z women (+38 in favor of Harris). She also quotes a young churchgoing man saying, “Young men are attracted to harder truths.” Because it’s soooo hard to believe, apparently, that God wants you to be in charge and wants women to submit to you, amirite?

But hey, if you’re not gonna come for the creeps, maybe you’ll stay for the joy of being expected to provide free labor?

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.’

That’s right, ladies! The church needs YOU to volunteer, but will make no concessions whatsoever as to your equality with men so, um… Please clap.

Graham is absolutely right about one thing. Women being less religious than men is historically highly unusual in any social context. What Graham does not do, however is dive much into the reasons why, and they have everything to do with surviving under the yoke of patriarchal societies. When the church’s “good news” means a lot of bad news for you, why should you stay when you have other options?

Today’s young women no longer need churches, and they are voting with their feet. I’ve in fact had the sense this was happening for some time, but now there’s data to corroborate my informed intuition. I also believe this trend is not something church leaders can stop, even by completely abandoning patriarchal theology and adopting abuse prevention best practices. It’s simply too late; the trust is gone.

As some of my readers will know, I was an admin for the Exvangelical Facebook group for several years, starting in 2016. The explosion of exvangelical discussions on social media, along with the hashtag #exvangelical taking off, had everything to do with the massive support for Donald Trump that materialized among America’s right-wing, mostly white evangelicals in that crucial election year. Some of us who left evangelicalism well before 2016 and were probably a little more jaded, like my constitutionally pessimistic Xennial self, did not find this development remotely surprising. Still, in my case (as I’m sure in plenty of others), evangelical Trump love alienated me further from the community I grew up in.

Other people in evangelical communities, often younger and still in an earlier stage of deconstructing their faith, were genuinely shocked at the brazen hypocrisy evangelicals displayed. They suddenly decided—and doubled down after the Access Hollywood tapes dropped—that the character of a potential president no longer mattered; never mind how Ken Starr, an evangelical whose actions were fully supported by his rank-and-file coreligionists, raked Bill Clinton and his administration over the coals for “committing adultery” and lying about it back in the 1990s.

The truth is, this ends-justify-the-means hypocrisy was always baked in to evangelical authoritarianism, but Trump made it obvious. One of the “justifications” that went around in 2016 was that the country wasn’t electing a pastor-in-chief, but a commander-in-chief. Classic evangelical rationalizing.

Trump did what evangelicals wanted him to do—attacked Muslims, trans people, and immigrants; moved the U.S. Embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in line with evangelicals’ apocalyptic beliefs, and illegitimately stacked the Supreme Court with the justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. And because Trump vigorously pursued the (mostly tacit) white supremacist and (explicit) patriarchal goals of his white evangelical base, that base was happy to remain enthusiastically supportive, giving Trump a pass for any and all moral failures.

For exvangelicals (and those who were on their way to leaving evangelicalism), this unfolding series of events was a relentless horror show—and those horrors disproportionately affected women.

More than ever before, we took to social media to find other people from similar backgrounds with similar experiences, people who “get it” because they’ve also lived it. Ultimately, we formed what my friend and colleague Blake Chastain, who coined the term exvangelical and launched a podcast under that name in 2016, calls a “counterpublic” in his new book Exvangelical and Beyond, which I blurbed and which I’m happy to recommend here. If you haven’t read your media studies and public sphere theorists, don’t worry. A counterpublic is simply a discursive space—that is, a space for discussion and reporting and commentary—in which a group of people who are largely excluded from mainstream discourse (e.g., legacy media publications) are able to express their own points of view and speak to their community concerns.

While Twitter was probably the epicenter of early exvangelical activity, the Exvangelical Facebook group became another important part of that discursive space, growing to more than 10,000 members in just a few years. And because I had access to the analytics of that group during my time there, I can tell you that as soon as it grew to a group of any size it consistently skewed disproportionately female. The gender makeup of the membership fluctuated some, but it was often around 60% women. Like evangelicals’ embrace of Trump, that fact never surprised me.

In her article about Zoomer women’s religious disaffiliation, Graham does mention sexual misconduct and abuse in churches as a factor. She does not, however, mention how evangelical purity culture literally grooms women to become victims, to say nothing of its many other devastating consequences that harm both women and men, but especially women.

Christianity’s disturbing weirdness about sex and gender, and specifically about women, is deeply rooted. It’s not going away any time soon. And I think the young women who are deciding that they’re done with church as a result deserve our admiration, regardless of whether they still see Jesus as a savior, adopt some other healthy form of religion, or become agnostics or atheists.

The Bugbear Dispatch extends a special thanks to our founding subscribers Jody, Ryan Boren, Katie in Seattle, Kel, Roslyn Reid, Rob B. and anonymous for their generous financial support of this publication.