Sep 23, 2024 07:07 PM
RELATED TOPIC (scivillage): The campus ministry boom
Cynic's Corner: Fewer Gen-Z women will miss the guys, though. Since almost 30% have converted or progressed to LGBTQ+ identity, with that figure probably rising to 50% in ten or twenty years (factoring in Generation Alpha, too).
Gallup poll: Women are more likely than men to have an LGBTQ+ identification in the three youngest generations, especially in Generation Z and the millennial generation. Close to three in 10 Gen Z women, 28.5%, identify as LGBTQ+, compared with 10.6% of Gen Z men. Among millennials, 12.4% of women and 5.4% of men have an LGBTQ+ identification.
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With Gen Z, men are now more religious than women
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/23/us/yo...gen-z.html
EXCERPTS: 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 percent of women now describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, compared with 34 percent 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 J. 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.”
[...] “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, Mr. 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.
[...] 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 to 29 say that “most churches and religious congregations” do not treat men and women equally, the Survey Center on American Life found.
[...] 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. [...] 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 Dr. Barr and other faculty members.
[...] “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.”
In surveys, women like Ms. 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.” (MORE - missing details)
Cynic's Corner: Fewer Gen-Z women will miss the guys, though. Since almost 30% have converted or progressed to LGBTQ+ identity, with that figure probably rising to 50% in ten or twenty years (factoring in Generation Alpha, too).
Gallup poll: Women are more likely than men to have an LGBTQ+ identification in the three youngest generations, especially in Generation Z and the millennial generation. Close to three in 10 Gen Z women, 28.5%, identify as LGBTQ+, compared with 10.6% of Gen Z men. Among millennials, 12.4% of women and 5.4% of men have an LGBTQ+ identification.
= = = = = = = = = = = =
With Gen Z, men are now more religious than women
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/23/us/yo...gen-z.html
EXCERPTS: 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 percent of women now describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, compared with 34 percent 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 J. 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.”
[...] “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, Mr. 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.
[...] 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 to 29 say that “most churches and religious congregations” do not treat men and women equally, the Survey Center on American Life found.
[...] 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. [...] 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 Dr. Barr and other faculty members.
[...] “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.”
In surveys, women like Ms. 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.” (MORE - missing details)