The Church’s Gender Gap Problem

When I was growing up, it wasn’t uncommon to hear women bemoan their husbands’ absence from church. I remember scanning the pews of St. Peter’s in Plattsburgh, New York, a French Catholic town in the North Country. Most of the men were either elderly or sleeping.

This was not just my imagination. Today men born between 1960 and 1980 attend weekly church at rates between 20 and 25 percent, with women of the same age running two to four points ahead. But even looking back the discrepancy was there. A 2002 study found that, among Catholics, 26 percent of men and 49 percent of women attended weekly church. Among Protestants, 42 percent of men and half of women attended weekly church. The laments I heard growing up were statistically valid.

But something has changed—dramatically.

A recent report from the Public Religion Research Institute found that 43 percent of women under the age of thirty now identify as having no religious affiliation. In 2013, that number hovered around 30 percent. Meanwhile, a recent Gallup poll shows that 42 percent of young men consider religion very important to their lives, compared to only 29 percent of young women in the same age group. The proportion of young Republican men attending church at least monthly has risen from 40 percent in 2019 to 52 percent in 2025—below the 60 percent recorded before the financial crisis of 2008, but still a significant reversal.

There’s also a stark party difference at play that is not inconsequential to the data. More than half of young Republicans attend a church, synagogue, or temple at least once a month. Conversely, among Democrats, only 26 percent of men and 31 percent of women attend at least monthly. (In 2000, about half of both did so.)

What’s driving the gender divergence? My suspicion is that the very thing pushing young women away from church is drawing young men toward it: community founded on countercultural moral strictures.

Scholars such as Ryan Burge have lamented the slow death of the Protestant mainline and the collapse of moderate religious identity. But the mainline did not simply shrink. It failed, capitulating to the demands of secular culture. A church that offers only what the world already provides is simply superfluous. Jesus did not promise his followers an easy ride but trials and tribulations.

Young people ages eighteen to twenty-nine have come of age amid profound cultural changes: the financial crisis of 2008, the rise of progressive feminism as a totalizing moral framework, the social media revolution, and the epidemic of loneliness and alienation that followed. Young men experienced these events differently than young women, and the church sits at the fault line between them.

For many young women, the church represents everything at odds with the progressive feminist outlook. It presents moral limits as blessings. It frames dependence and submission as God-honoring rather than oppressive. It offers cosmic meaning that grounds and structures the self rather than liberating it beyond all constraints.

#MeToo was the accelerant. The cultural sea change that #MeToo produced pushed many young women inside the church to re-examine its structures. Male leadership, once accepted with theological conviction, was decried as one more example of institutional power oppressing women. 

Within the church, #MeToo was driven in large part by women who believed themselves to have been harmed by purity culture. At its most overbearing, purity culture bred anxiety toward the opposite sex and replaced repentance with shame. When #MeToo arrived, many young women connected that shame with the shame weaponized by abusers, and concluded that the church was the problem, not the cure.

Young men experienced the same cultural moment from the other side. #MeToo put masculinity itself on trial. The movement’s cultural logic held that the abuses it exposed were not failures of particular men but symptoms of masculinity as such. Toxic masculinity can only be cured by dismantling male authority. Young men, told that their instincts and ambitions were inherently suspect, either accepted the verdict and retreated, or they rejected it and searched for an alternative.

The rise of Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan must be understood in this context. These figures did not create a hunger for meaning, order, and masculine purpose—they found it already there and gave it a vocabulary. 

What is easy to miss is that young men and women are responding to the same underlying wound: the collapse of community and the epidemic of loneliness. Men’s social networks have disintegrated more severely than women’s. In the absence of genuine community, many young men found their way to the manosphere—a kind of church of the self, offering moral clarity, structure, and belonging organized around masculine identity. Young women, equally lonely, found feminist influencers waiting for them online, ready to monetize their isolation and channel it into righteous grievance. Both, in other words, wanted community, moral structure, and a shared account of what human life is for. They just went looking for it in all the wrong places.

As young women pulled away from institutional authority, young men drew closer. The progressive cultural script offered men guilt and deconstruction. The church—at least traditionally ordered churches—offered something different: a story in which strength has a proper use, sacrifice is a virtue, and the call to lead isn’t suspicious but carries weight and responsibility.

What the church does not need right now is a softened, middle-of-the-road version of itself designed to offend no one. That church has been tried. It is called the mainline church, and it is all but dead. What people need—and what our moment creates space for—is a church more fully and confidently itself. Young men returning to tradition are right to do so, but aesthetics and structure alone are not enough. There must be institutional trust, a shared narrative, moral order, and a vision of human flourishing powerful enough to address the exhaustion of liberal progressivism. 

The data for young women are bleak. But the restlessness driving them away from the church is the same restlessness Augustine described: a heart that will not find rest until it rests in God. Young women need to see the church not merely as an institution that ignores or validates their grievances, but as a spiritual community with a compelling vision of who they are and what they are made for. The biblical account of womanhood is not a concession to patriarchy, but a liberation from the world’s diminished vision of women. 

Man and woman were created as such, and will flourish only when they do so together, in submission to God’s authority and in the life of his church.