The Religion of America's Young Adults

And how the gender gap could be the story going forward

There’s a lot of helpful data here for folks who work with youth, young adults, and college students. If you fit that criteria, get in contact with me and I can provide a discount code for 20% off an annual subscription.

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The gender divide among younger Americans is one of the most hotly discussed topics right now among social scientists. My friend Melissa Deckman just published a book, The Politics of Gen Z: How the Youngest Voters Will Shape Our Democracy, which spends quite a bit of time exploring the gender differences in the political posture of Gen Z. Another friend, Dan Cox of the American Enterprise Institute just signed a book deal for a volume called UNCOUPLED which will focus on “the growing gender gap in American society.” Back in January, John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times published a piece entitled, “A new global gender divide is emerging.” And a graph from that article went viral on social media.

Let me throw my own hat into the ring on this just a little bit, too. I think there are some interesting things afoot when it comes to the younger generations, gender, and religiosity. For decades, folks who study religion have always assumed that women exhibit higher levels of religious devotion and attachment. This Pew Research Report is worth perusing on that point.

But I think there’s a very real possibility that this narrative is a whole lot muddier when we look at Millennials and Generation Z. A tweet I sent out a few weeks ago really took off and led me to want to drill down into the nuances of religiosity among young men and young women.

Let me show you two bits of analysis side by side. The first is a graph of the share of folks who reported attending religious services at least once a week. I divided the sample into men and women and then I calculated the share who were weekly attenders at the birth year level for the sample. Then, I did the same calculation but this time it’s the share who indicated that they never attended religious services.

In terms of weekly attenders, it’s pretty clear that older women are more religiously active than men of the same age. The gap is not huge, but it’s pretty consistent. Women are 2-4 points more likely to be attending weekly compared to men. But that’s only true for the part of the sample that was born between 1940 and 1970. Then the lines start doing something weird. For women, it basically flattens out. About 23% of women who were born in 1970 are weekly attenders. It’s the same share of women born in 2000.

But for men, there’s an inflection point right around the 1970-1975 birth year. Weekly attendance bottoms out there and then among men born in more recent years, regular church attendance actually increases. The weekly attendance rates for men born around 2000 is 25% - that’s about three points higher than men who were born twenty-five years earlier and 2-3 points higher than young adult women.

When you look at the ‘never attending’ graph on the right you get to a pretty similar conclusion. The share of never attending women increased in a pretty linear fashion from those born between 1940 and 1980. But then trace that orange line for those born in 1980 or later. It’s completely flat - sticking around 33%. A woman who is in her mid-forties is just as likely to be a never attender as a woman in her early twenties.

For men, something even wilder happens. The share of men who never attend religious services hits a peak among those born around 1980. About 36% of men born in the early 1980s are never attenders. Then that share begins to actually decline pretty dramatically. Among the youngest adult men in this sample, never attendance is just 32%. A decline of four points from middle-aged men and it’s about two points lower than younger women.

At least on this metric, young men are more religious than young women.

But this is just one look at this. Religion is a multifaceted concept that is more than just how often one attends religious services. There are other survey questions that I want to explore. That’s the rest of this post - trying to really understand if there’s an emerging gender gap when it comes to religiosity.