Why Are Young Men Returning to Church?

The New York Times created a stir last month with an article on the increasing number of young men going to church. The Times article said, “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.” For decades the religious surveys have always showed that women are more religious than men and that would still be true in older groups of Americans. But not for those under 30.

The statistical guru Ryan Burge weighed in on this and made a couple of trenchant observations. The current crop of young men is clearly more religious than the men in the generation preceding them. And regarding youth in their teens and twenties, the gender gap is gone.

If Burge is right then this would be the first time in American history—or at least since religious surveys have been collected—that men are as religious or more religious than women.

Why has this happened? I don’t think the answer is that complicated.

Our cultural elite and the Progressive Left are waging all-out war against men. And it’s not a recent development:

More than two decades ago Christina Hoff Summers wrote, “The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies Are Hurting Our Young Men.” I had a chance to speak with her personally about this. She said the turning point in her life as a gender feminist came when she got married and had two boys. The reality of that experience caused her to challenge Progressive orthodoxy.

But forty years ago in graduate school I read a book by a Harvard professor, Anne Douglas, called “The Feminization of American Culture.” It spoke of the conspiracy even then to turn little boys into little girls. And she observed nothing has been more feminized than the clergy.

Young men have lived their entire lives listening to a negative, destructive narrative about who they are as human beings.

Liberal men have gone along with this in order to establish their left-wing bona fides. They don’t want to appear sexist after all. And the Democratic Party has found this to be an excellent electoral strategy. 75% of single women will pull the lever for their candidates in this year’s election.

Theologian Andrew Walker observes: “Aside from all the ways that men play the role of American culture’s scapegoat (“toxic masculinity”), mainstream American life is deeply feminine (as is much of modern American evangelicalism). The feminine gaze is the operating assumption of modern life. To partake in polite society requires adopting a feminine instinct to operate in today’s mainstream.”

Walker adds, “Elite American culture simultaneously mocks men who are unapologetic in their masculinity as simpletons and cavemen while upholding the gender-sensitive metrosexual or finely draped homosexual as the epitome of masculinity.”

Young men hate this and are sick of it. Even the Times observed that young men place a higher value on traditional family life than young women. 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 Research. Feminized Christianity is DOA. The mainline denominations have cultivated female clergy for sixty years and they are on their way to extinction.

My favorite liberal writer is Matt Taibbi. Recently he reviewed a book by Ruth Whippman entitled, ‘BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity.’”

Taibbi draws out several choice quotes from the book that characterize so much of the modern narrative about men.

Whippman was going to have a baby and she said: “We had known this baby was male even before I got pregnant. “Known” not in some mystical feminine-intuition sense, but in the more concrete way that he had been a leftover frozen embryo from the IVF cycle that conceived his older brother, and we had done genetic tests.

Friends had told me I was crazy. “I could understand it for a girl,” said one, when I told her we were going to defrost the embryo. “But why go through all that just for another boy?”

I was frightened both for and of the tiny piece of patriarchy growing inside me, worried sick over what he and his brothers might become. The potential for darkness that I might be powerless to stop.”

So Whippman tells us that men only have “potential for darkness.” No wonder men hate the modern Left.

The Christian church and Christian doctrine is the antithesis to all this madness. The Bible is very clear—men and women are different. They play different roles in society, in church, and in the home. The Bible, as you would predict, reflects reality. And the reality is that God has built patriarchy into our institutions and young men know this. They know they were born to lead, born to protect, born to provide.

Again, Andrew Walker: “The Democrats’ assault on Biblical creation order is the most significant explanation for their male voter problem. It’s the logical outcome of an entire worldview that is denatured and even anti-nature.” Modern left-wing politics and feminism are decoupled from reality and men know this. As a result the Christian church is the only major institution in our society that treats men the way they ought to be treated. We have reality on our side which is always the case when you have God and God’s Word on your side.

Christians offer a better alternative. We are champions of common and saving grace. We encourage men toward self-control, vocational excellence, and family formation. That will not save them apart from Christ, but Christians can be an aroma of Christ in the message of common grace that may be a bridge to saving grace.

We offer young men the opportunity to do what they are hungry to do. To lead, to have worth and value, to become the patriarchs of families. So it’s no surprise that since the church is the only one doing this, young men are returning to church.

More: What is the Role of Women in the Church? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyhSitSo_nM

Are Young Men Returning to Religion?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/23/us/young-men-religion-gen-z.html

Ryan Burge:

https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/the-religion-of-americas-young-adults

Andrew Walker:

https://wng.org/opinions/why-do-the-democrats-have-a-masculinity-problem-1728382964

Matt Taibi reviewing a book on toxic masculinity: https://www.racket.news/p/the-robin-diangelo-of-gender?utm_campaign=email-post&r=ljoms&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email