Are Women More Loyal to Their Childhood Religion Than Men?
Is the there a gender gap in religious mobility?
One of the most interesting types of questions that I get is about how people move around the religious landscape. It makes sense, right? If someone is an evangelical right now — were they always an evangelical, or did they come from an atheist, Catholic, or some other type of religious background? I wish we had better answers to questions like that, but in most cases, we simply don’t. The reason is pretty easy to explain - the data is not there.
Most of what you see on this Substack uses data about religion that comes from surveys that are not really focusing on answering questions about religion. Their aim is almost always to learn about things in the political world. In my mind there are three large scale, longitudinal surveys out there - the American National Election Study, the Cooperative Election Study, and the General Social Survey. Only the last one of those takes more than a passing interest in religion.
In fact, it’s basically the only way that I can answer a question about how people have changed religion over time. It asks people about the religion in which they were raised. No other big survey does that.
About a year ago, I wrote a general post about how people change religion, but I wanted to do a variation on that today - does religious switching look different for women compared to men?
This is the retention rate for each gender across six different faith traditions. Retention is defined here as someone who indicates that their current religion is the same as the one in which they were raised. If someone was born evangelical but is currently a mainline Protestant, they are not retained.