On a beautiful Sunday morning in early September, dozens of young men in Waco, Texas, started their day at Grace Church.
Men greeted visitors at the door, manned the information table and handed out bulletins. Four of the five musicians onstage were men. So was the pastor who delivered the sermon and most of the college students packing the first few rows.
“I’m so grateful for this church,” Ryan Amodei, 28, told the congregation before a second pastor, Buck Rogers, baptized him in a tank of water in the sanctuary.
Grace Church, a Southern Baptist congregation, has not made a conscious effort to attract young men. It is an unremarkable size, and is in many ways an ordinary evangelical church. Yet its leaders have noticed for several years now that young men outnumber young women in their pews. When the church opened a small outpost in the nearby town of Robinson last year, 12 of the 16 young people regularly attending were men.
“We’ve been talking about it from the beginning,” said Phil Barnes, a pastor at that congregation, Hope Church. “What’s the Lord doing? Why is he sending us all of these young men?”
The dynamics at Grace are a dramatic example of an emerging truth: 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% of women now describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, compared with 34% 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. 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.
He added, “There are guys that are just hungry.”
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 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.”
Harder Truths
Kitron Ferrier is a senior at Baylor University in Waco, from which Grace Church draws a sizable portion of its young attendees. Baylor, a Christian school with Baptist roots, is the kind of place where the school newspaper runs a feature for new students headlined “Church Shopping: A Beginner’s Guide to Finding a Spiritual Home in Waco.”
Ferrier, 21, attends two services on most Sundays. In the morning, he goes to a large church in Waco popular with students. In the afternoon, he often attends Hope Church.
Ferrier was raised in a large Christian family, and his own faith has grown stronger lately, he said. On a church trip this year, he ran into an influencer he follows on Instagram who for several years has carried a large wooden cross around the country. Ferrier got to carry the cross himself for awhile, which he said was a powerful experience.
Following Jesus is difficult, Ferrier said. “It’s about denying yourself, and denying the lust of the flesh,” he said. He appreciates a church like Hope, where leaders are frank about the intensity of the self-sacrifice he sees as a requirement for the Christian faith.
“Young men are attracted to harder truths,” Ferrier said. Sometimes, he added, he wants to hear messages with a little “wrath of God” in them.
For decades, many American churches and ministries have assumed that men like Ferrier must be wooed into churchgoing and right living. Publishers promoted books like “Why Men Hate Going to Church” and “No Man Left Behind,” which assumed that many men are reluctant Christians at best — and that their wives and children would follow them to church. Pastors emphasized Jesus’ masculinity, and men’s ministries like Promise Keepers exhorted followers to embrace their roles as husbands and fathers.
“Religion is coded right, and coded more traditionalist” for young people, said Derek Rishmawy, who leads a ministry at the University of California, Irvine.
For some young men he counsels, Christianity is perceived as “one institution that isn’t initially and formally skeptical of them as a class,” especially in the campus setting, Rishmawy said. “We’re telling them, ‘you are meant to live a meaningful life.’”
The camaraderie was easy to see after the Sunday service at Grace this month. A circle of young men lingered in the sanctuary, talking and laughing. Will and Andrew Parks, two in a set of triplets who were turning 21 in a few days, chatted with newcomers.
“There’s so many genuinely good guys that are just literally always here for you,” said Andrew Parks, who has attended Grace for several years.
Parks, a computer science major, would like to get married and have children someday. First, he wants to get a job where he earns enough to support a family.
“I want to be the sole provider if that’s what she wants,” he said, but has no problem with his wife working outside the home. He is in a new relationship with a woman he met through a “Christ-centered” campus choir, so he is confident she shares his values.
Done With Debating
The Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest Protestant denomination to which Grace Church belongs, continues to fiercely debate the place of women in leadership and family life. The denomination’s statement of faith says that only men may serve as pastors, and that a wife is to “submit herself graciously” to her husband. At its annual meeting this summer, delegates voted to condemn the use of in vitro fertilization.
Arguments in other Christian institutions about women’s roles have been raging for decades. Some churches have cracked down in recent years on practices like women speaking from the pulpit. The theology of complementarianism, which asserts that men and women have some separate roles in marriage and church leadership, is resurgent. And many of these same churches are beginning to speak more openly about their conservative political convictions.
Young women, it seems, are moving past the debates — and out the church doors.
About two-thirds of women ages 18-29 say that “most churches and religious congregations” do not treat men and women equally, the Survey Center on American Life found.
Young women are asking more questions than their forebears, said Beth Allison Barr, a historian at Baylor. Her book “The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth” was a surprise bestseller in 2021, sparking widespread conversations in conservative evangelical circles.
“The complementarian turn has really reduced the visibility of women in the church,” Barr said over coffee at a bookstore in Waco. “This generation is definitely more aware of that lack of women in leadership.”
Opening more official roles to women, though, may not win them back: Many of the largest liberal denominations that ordain women are in steep decline.
Greer Rutt, 24, a graduate student at Baylor’s Truett Seminary, hopes to be a pastor someday. But it has been a rocky road to what she sees as God’s design for her life.
Rutt attended a conservative Christian high school in Kentucky, where her cheerleading team was not allowed to wear skirts because of concerns they would “distract the guys,” she said.
As an undergraduate at Baylor, she attended a large evangelical church where at first she felt welcome and happy. But she grew disturbed over the church’s treatment of women.
Once, a heated discussion broke out over whether women should ask men out on dates. Afterward, some women gathered in Rutt’s room and lamented the church’s lack of female pastors to teach on such topics.
She left that church earlier this year, and now attends a church where the pastor “talks about poverty, racism and sexism, and attacks them head-on,” she said. She has come to feel confident that God does call women to leadership, a belief affirmed and strengthened by conversations with Barr and other faculty members.
And, Rutt said, many female classmates share her ambition to preach and lead churches.
“I thought it was my mind wanting to rebel for the longest time, but now I think it wasn’t rebellion,” Rutt said. “It was God saying, ‘This is truth, this is how I made women.’”
Becca Clark, a graduate student in social work at Baylor, grew up in a Southern Baptist home, and enjoyed attending church with her parents. But in high school, she became more attuned to issues related to gender and sexuality. She graduated in 2020 and spent that pandemic summer mostly inside, watching the fallout from the murder of George Floyd by a police officer.
As Clark’s politics moved left, she started to feel less comfortable in the kind of churches she grew up in, where, she said, gay people and racism were treated as punchlines.
Clark, 22, is straight, but almost 3 in 10 Gen Z women identify as belonging to the LGBTQ+ community.
“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,” Clark said. “I still believe in God and Jesus and all that, I just struggle to call myself a Christian.”
In surveys, women like Clark are common. They still score higher than men on measures of spirituality and attachment to God, suggesting that they are not necessarily abandoning their internal beliefs, said Sarah Schnitker, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor who co-directs the longitudinal Developing Character in College Communities study.
But, she said, “they’re exiting traditional faith practice.”
It is young men who now register higher in attachment to basic Christian beliefs, in church attendance and in frequency of Bible reading, according to an analysis for the Times by Schnitker.
Clark has occasionally attended a more progressive Baptist church. But she is realizing that churchgoing is simply no longer a priority for her. She is busy, and her friends are doing other things.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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