An April headline announced that ‘Young Women Are Leaving Church in Unprecedented Numbers.” After many years of right-wing Christian men’s complaints about the ‘feminization’ of Christianity, one would think they’d be happy to hear this news. After all, that means their pastors now have a lot more time to cater to men and men’s interests! But for some weird reason, they’re keeping fairly quiet about this news.
Today, let’s check out this new and exciting trend in the ongoing secularization of America—and wonder together why right-wing Christian men aren’t all over that news like white on rice.
(This post went live on Patreon on 7/2/2024. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available now!)
The role of women in right-wing Christianity and marriage
For almost all of their history, Christians in all flavors have considered women in much the same way: They are bangmaids, broodmares, and surrogate mommies for their husbands. Single women languish as they wait for Jesus to drop their hoped-for husbands into their outstretched hands—or take matters into their own hands and hunt for a marriage partner outside of their church community. Infertile wives face endless scrutiny, unwanted pity, and even-more-unwanted advice from their communities.
Throughout Christianity’s history, that’s been the rule. Even when Catholic leaders allowed women to join convents and become nuns, they didn’t usually help these convents survive. The leaders idolized by today’s right-wing Christians, like Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin, weren’t much better in how they regarded women. They all tend to make the same mistake, too, in confusing a male-dominated society constructed by men and ruled by men for an illustration of how nature itself should operate.
Around the 1980s and 1990s, a regressive relationship model called complementarianism took the right-wing Christian world by storm. In a lot of ways, it served as a furious reaction to feminism. Based loosely on an imagined sort-of-Victorian, sort-of-1950s marriage ideal, complementarianism solidified and put into words what regressive Christian men have thought about women and marriage for centuries. Its hucksters promised men and women that if they pursued this relationship model, their marriages would be long, affectionate, respectful, and happy—as well as filled with passels of happy, obedient children who’d be Christian for life.
In my direct experience, married women quickly figure out the truth about complementarianism. When I was Pentecostal, I sure saw and shared some raised eyebrows when the menfolk got started talking about how they’d ever-so-graciously spared us women from the heavy lifting of leadership! But we all knew better than to speak the truth, just as today’s right-wing women obviously know now.
Incidentally, when I say “right-wing,” I refer to all the super-conservative flavors of Christianity. That term includes evangelicals, traditionalist Catholics, Mormons, and all the rest like them.
That said, I don’t think it’d matter either way if right-wing women spoke or held their peace. By now, complementarianism is far too entrenched for anyone to dislodge it. In complementarian communities, men have systematically stripped women of all power.
The role of women in right-wing Christian churches
Men in right-wing Christianity do not allow women to hold any real power in their churches. Oh, sure, pastors graciously allow women to volunteer within the church as cleaners, clerks in the church bookstore, potluck organizers, welcome-wagon greeters, and the like. Sometimes, pastors even hire women to do their bookkeeping or secretarial work. Women may also embrace meatier volunteer roles as Sunday School teachers and as singers and instrument players in music ministry.
But the music minister will be a man. Rarely will a right-wing church ever tolerate a woman as the leader of any ministry that includes men in any capacity. At the very most, a married woman may co-lead a Young Marrieds Sunday School class alongside her husband.
If the church has a ministry aimed directly at women, of course, often women will head that too. After all, a woman heading Women’s Ministry is no danger to a right-wing man’s delicate, easily-destroyed sense of dominance.
In all ways, women are ornaments to prettify the church. But they are also the scullery maids doing the scutwork that men consider below men’s illustrious station as Jesus’ mini-mes. Women are the worker bees in the church’s baby crèche, too, since men also don’t see routine childcare and baby-minding as “men’s work.”
Without women doing all this work for free, very few churches would survive. There’s no way they could afford to hire workers to do all this volunteer labor.
Little wonder that in 2012, an evangelical pastor wrote a book about a trend he found very troubling: women were starting to leave church culture behind. In his book, Jim Henderson evocatively painted a haunting, frightening (for pastors) picture of a busy evangelical church in which all of the women volunteers simply decided not to show up one Sunday morning. I’m sure it pairs nicely with David Murrow’s 2011 book, Why Men Hate Going to Church.
But these fantasies aside, even over the next 10 years women continued to be the lifeblood of churches.
Right-wing Christians despise women and femininity
One cannot discuss church feminization without stereotypes, caricatures, and misogyny. The one cannot exist without the others.
To the men locked in right-wing Christianity’s culture of toxic masculinity, the very worst thing that they or their churches can be is female. To be female is to be shameful and shameworthy. Worse, to be female is to be weak—and thus vulnerable to control-grabs, particularly from other men.
Oh, they may say all day long and twice on Sundays that men and women are complementary to each other. That they fit together. That one’s weakness is the other’s strength, and so on and so forth. And they definitely do say this all the time. It’s how they rationalize complementarianism itself: by saying that this relationship model shows great respect to men and women by forcing them to adopt rigid gender roles.
But in their sneering condescension to women and their obvious revulsion at anything that smacks of femininity, the truth becomes obvious.
To these men, a feminized church is, first and foremost, “relational.” Yes, these are the same numnuts who constantly tell us that Christianity “is a relationship, not a religion.” It’s just not that kind of relationship, apparently.
That’s why they keep referring to that kind of Christianity as “sissified.” They must draw upon kink imagery to convey their full disgust. More than that, they must draw upon the most unholy and degenerate kink they can possibly imagine: A man dressing as a stereotypical sexualized woman and taking on a submissive, stereotypically female sexual role.
Case in point: Mark Driscoll’s bizarre obsession with sissies
In the late 2000s, Mark Driscoll drew some heat on himself for complaining about sissies in evangelicalism. But his target audience of hardline right-wing evangelicals adored him for it. They still do.
In 2014, he got in hot water again for having declared America “a completely pussified nation.” He wrote that in 2000 using a sockpuppet account on his church’s internet forum. Obviously, he embodied the heroic ideal of evangelicalism, rather than looking like an abject coward who can’t handle criticism or accountability!
Naturally, Driscoll always blamed women for this “pussified” situation. And somehow, that outburst wasn’t the final straw for his leadership of the Mars Hill megachurch—not in 2000, not in the late 2000s, and not in the mid-2010s. (Plagiarism actually spelled the beginning of his end, weirdly enough.)
Indeed, he has always known exactly who butters his bread. Less than a year ago, he published a Rumble video asking his followers: “Are you a sissy?” Dude just cannot let go of this accusation.
A romp through his secret porn folder might be illustrative. But we don’t have to speculate about his sexual proclivities to guess why he keeps harping on this imagery.
Driscoll’s misogynistic rhetoric resonates with the insecure man-children of right-wing Christianity. They need their leaders to act like pompous blowhards and caricatures of masculinity. More than that, they need to feel superior to women—at least as much as they need to feel superior to non-Christians.
The only way they can feel superior to women, though, is to be as completely non-womanlike as they possibly can.
Any hint of womanish-ness could destroy their self-conceptualization. And so woman-ness must be fought with men’s full strength. Woman-ness, along with women themselves, must be brought to heel, subjugated, and forever utterly dominated. If women don’t adhere to the rigid gender roles prescribed for them by right-wing Christians, right-wing Christian men can’t properly gauge their masculinity.
Right-wing Christian men do not like churches being geared toward women
Just as right-wing Christian men consider being female the worst thing anyone could possibly be, they also complain about any hint of woman-ness in their churches.
If someone ran a business whose customers were overwhelmingly female, that person—if wise—would gear it toward whatever interested that demographic. It’d make no sense for, say, a skiing shop to stock only men’s skiing gear if 80% of their customers were women. In a similar way, clothing shops nowadays tend to stock way more large sizes than small ones because that’s who is primarily shopping there. Smaller people might not like that fact, but they must deal with it as best they can—or find new places to buy clothes.
However, right-wing Christian men do not like it when everything in Christianity is not completely geared toward their interests. Even though churches skew distinctly female and women do almost all the volunteer work within the church, these men want pastors to cater to them and not women.
For years now, they have complained about the “feminization” of Christianity. Here’s an entire series about it written by a Men’s Right Activist (MRA). Somehow, this guy thinks that a religion led entirely by men for millennia, one whose rules, practices, and customs were entirely created by men, one that has stripped women of any power whatsoever for centuries and refused to allow women any power even over their own bodies, one that saw no need whatsoever even to educate women, has unaccountably favored women over men and catered specifically to women since at least the 1300s.
They’re not historians. That much is certain.
It’s obviously the fault of women, this feminization thing
This idea has crept into evangelicalism to the point where it’s simply an accepted belief. Even women lament the “feminization of Christianity,” and they clearly believe women are to blame for it.
Even back in 1998, evangelical men complained about it. Here’s a Calvinist talking about “the feminized religion practiced by sissy evangelicals, curling-iron conservatives, and the blandly (but not truly) Reformed, among many others.”
Then in 2006, Biola Magazine ran a post that explored Christian music as the most visible aspect of the feminization of Christianity. The post parroted all the usual hand-wringing over men who thought church was too girlie for them. It quotes a man expressing his certainty that “our whole society has tended to deprive men of their biblical and creational strengths and empower women.” (In other words, feminism is demonic. Other evangelicals get more to the point there.)
In 2009, an evangelical blogger shook her finger at her fellow women: “Is your church a place where men can be men? Where they are fed by Christ’s body and blood and by His nourishing word?” Funny, right? She talks as if women have anything to do with the leadership of evangelical churches.
In 2013, apologist William Lane Craig discussed it while hand-waving away accusations of stereotyping and sexism from a female questioner:
Third is my claim that the church is becoming increasingly feminized. What I mean by this is that church services and programs are increasingly based on emotional and relational factors that appeal more to women than to men. The problem of the church’s lack of appeal to men has been recognized by men’s movements like Promise Keepers and books like John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart. Nowhere is this feminization more evident than in contemporary worship music. Someone aptly remarked that if you were to replace references to God in many praise songs with “Baby,” they would sound just like romantic songs between a man and a woman! This is not true of classic hymns like “A Mighty Fortress” or “And Can It be?” Talking with young men, I find that many of them are just turned off by these touchy-feely worship services and would rather not go.
Why, Craig even continues, even sportsball games and the Olympics are getting all feminized! THE HORROR! He then discusses his great fear: “I’m very worried that the church is on a course that will end in relatively few men’s being active Christians.” For his grand finale, he smugly condescends to the letter-writer:
I doubt that what I’ve said in response to your question, Alexandra, will do much to rebuild your faith in my words! My observations about the peculiar attraction that Christian apologetics has for men may not be politically correct, but I believe that they are accurate, even if disappointing and shocking to some.
Really, endless decline and utter irrelevance could not happen to a more deserving bunch of asshats and windbags than this.
Then in 2018, Rod Dreher took a little break from fretting about men’s boners (seriously) and pushing a community model that encourages abuse and breaks families apart (also seriously). In a post he wrote for The American Conservative, he took the time to complain about “the feminization (and decline) of religion.” He called this trend a “big mistake.”
Almost all of these complaints feature quotes from a Catholic’s book on the topic from 1999: Leon Podles’ The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity. If anything, Catholicism apparently has suffered even worse from this dreaded feminization.
Whether they were Catholic or evangelical, though, misogynistic men hated the idea that their religion had become somehow “feminized.” One even summarized Podles in 2016: “If the church is ‘feminized,’ most men want out.”
As a counterpoint, I’ve seen Christians expressing irritation with this idea. Here’s a 2015 Reddit thread about just that! But the men in right-wing Christianity wouldn’t have cared at all.
In the wild: Blaming women for everything began early
Here’s that Calvinist at Chalcedon Foundation to tell us why he’s so disgusted with relational Christianity. He wrote this all the way back in 1998!
By a feminized faith, however, I refer not merely to the organized goddess religion of allegedly Protestant churches: this expression of feminist religion is obvious. I refer mainly to the feminized religion practiced by sissy evangelicals, curling-iron conservatives, and the blandly (but not truly) Reformed, among many others. [. . .]
First, feminized faith stresses the relational rather than the theological. The very essence of womanhood is relationalism. [. . .] A feminized faith substitutes man’s relationship with man not merely for man’s relationship to God, but also for the very objectivity of the Faith. What becomes important in the church, therefore, is not its fidelity to the teachings of Scripture (which, to be sure, includes the proper relationship between our brethren), but the camaraderie among the members.
Just imagine being a Christian who is so outraged by differing beliefs that he calls other churches “the organized goddess religion” and “allegedly Protestant”! My sides are in orbit here.
He couldn’t make his abject hatred of women and womanhood more clear, either. It’s no coincidence that he calls differing churches followers of “the organized goddess religion.” He has no clue what that even is, except for a church he doesn’t like. It’s no coincidence, either, that he accuses differing Christians of being pagan goddess-followers rather than snarling that they’re followers of some random pagan god that he also doesn’t understand at all.
(How very postmodern of him, too—at least as evangelicals misdefine the term—to decide words don’t mean anything and that the objective truth doesn’t matter, hmm? I suppose postmodernism is okay when he does it. If his god existed, he’d have far more to fear from it than we heathens.)
Part of me would love to get a very close look into this guy’s church congregation. Well, one of them anyway. Unsurprisingly, he’s bounced around. I know his churches have got to be just absolute cesspits of cruelty, control-grabs, politicking, and abuse. But the rest of me knows better than to get too close.
Even right-wing Christian women blame women for sissifying the church
That 2009 blogger I mentioned earlier (relink) reaches for purely absurd comparisons to illustrate her hatred for feminized Christianity:
Men, as a rule, don’t like the modern church. They have in general found a very feminine culture there; an atmosphere where emotion is glorified and the ‘meek and mild’/turn the other cheek philosophy is king. True biblical masculinity has been lost and men are left feeling out of place: like the burly guy wondering around in Victoria’s Secret holding a tiny piece of lingerie. This is especially true in more contemporary worship where the music often has the overtones of “Jesus as my boyfriend”.
In response, I need only say that in the churches she favors, men pastor congregations and lead music ministries. So they’re big grown-up boys. They don’t get to blame others for their own choices. But she reprimands (male) church leaders as well:
Most pastors seem to be watering down their message of redemption and salvation and spiritual warfare to another list of 7 things the poor guy needs to do to be a better husband/father/leader. [. . .] Men want meat…..for supper and from the pulpit. They crave serious doctrine and truth and need to hear, over and over again, that Christ has come in the flesh to slay our enemies and to bear our overwhelming burdens. Then they would be free to slay the dragons that breathe fire down the backs of their families.
I could be snarky here and say that right-wing Christian men apparently need to hear this message “over and over again” because nothing in reality would ever bring them naturally to any such conclusion.
Instead, I’ll say that pastors preach messages they think their congregations as a whole want to hear. They’re entertainers in that way. A lot of pew-warmers have a lot of ideas about what pastors ought to preach every Sunday. If their pastors thought that’d work to draw in and keep more people in the pews, they’d already be preaching that way.
Even the decline of Christianity overall is the fault of women
Over and over again, we see right-wing Christians blaming women for this notion of “feminized Christianity.” These folks tell us that that trend, in turn, has caused Christianity’s entire decline in the Western world. As Rod Dreher put it (relink):
Most men are bored to death by Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. [. . .]
If you are a man who thinks Christianity is not for you, and who (quite rightly!) wants to avoid the Mark Driscoll style of cheesy churchy machismo, you would do well to investigate Eastern Orthodox Christianity, where struggle against the passions is at the center of the spiritual life, as it was in the early church — and indeed, in the first millennium of Christianity everywhere.
If you’re wondering, “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” is a snarl word that right-wing Christians apply to differing interpretations of Christianity. Put this phrase in the same mental category as “postmodernism”. It reminds me of that silly meme, “Everyone I Don’t Like is Hitler”:
But have women finally gotten the hint?
After decades of being blamed for every Christian trend that right-wing men hate, maybe women have finally gotten the hint.
Writers for the Storylines Substack, Daniel Cox and Kelsey Eyre Hammond, published a post on April 4th declaring that “Young Women Are Leaving Church in Unprecedented Numbers.” In the post, they point out that for decades now, more men than women have disaffiliated from Christian churches. But recently, Gen Z women (who are roughly 12-27 years old now) have been leaving at greater numbers than Gen Z men.
The male-female split has never been super-dramatic, as this graph shows, but Gen Z definitely represents a change:
I saw a similar split during the Great Keyboard Wars of Evangelicals and Atheists back in the mid-2010s. In the atheist Skept-o-Sphere, way more movement-atheist men than women appeared in all media. Compared to women, men overwhelmingly told researchers they were atheists as well. In fact, one big-name atheist leader, Sam Harris, got in some trouble in 2014 for saying that movement atheism lacked an “estrogen vibe,” implying that it couldn’t attract women in great numbers. Things have changed since then!
But the type of people to disaffiliate tend to be very different from the type of people to join movement atheism. Disaffiliation from church can occur with or without leaving Christianity itself, as legions of what I call churchless believers can attest. All basic disaffiliation requires is abstaining from attending church.
The Substack writers go on to tell us that within each generation, a majority of men tend to believe that churches treat men and women equally. But with each new generation, fewer and fewer women agree. They’ve seen Christian unfairness up close. They know it for what it is.
Indeed, almost 40% of Gen Z women are religiously unaffiliated now, compared to only 34% of Gen Z men.
Right-wing Christians conclude: Blame women more!
I love to see what Christians say among themselves in response to news about their religion. And they are, indeed, talking about it.
Over at Catholic News Agency (CNA), Kate Quiñones analyzed the news. She came up with a few factors that might be leading more women than men to disaffiliate from religion:
- Young women tend to be liberal and progressive, which conflicts with Catholic teachings—especially at a time when younger Catholic priests trend more and more right-wing.
- Young Catholic women may particularly disagree with Catholic leaders’ adamant opposition to abortion.
- A lack of sufficient Jesusing and TRUE CHRISTIAN™ beliefs lead young women astray.
- Ickie gross feminism is involved here somehow.
Somehow, that CNA writer finds an interview source who promises that friendship evangelism will totally bring all those young women back:
[Noelle] Mering suggests “the apostolate of friendship, hospitality” for bringing Gen Z women back. Mering co-authored the series “Theology of Home” about how women can live out their vocations at any stage of life through bringing beauty into the home.
See? Women can do anything—as long as they’re doing it in their own homes as wives and mothers!
The subreddit r/Christianity had a lively discussion about the news as well. That subreddit is not captured by right-wing Christians, at least not yet. So we see a number of Christians and even non-believers pushing back against the sexism-for-Jesus hardliners who are all certain that women are completely to blame for tanking their religion.
I haven’t seen evangelicals talking much about this study, though. I haven’t heard anything on the usual sites I lurk. Some ex-Mormons brought it up, and here of course we’re talking about it. I haven’t seen much else. Interesting!
What’s probably really happening has nothing to do with women themselves, nor even with feminized Christianity
I’d like to propose another reason for this news.
The decline of Christianity in the West—in America particularly, even—has nothing to do with “relational” church culture of the supposed “feminization” of church culture. It also has nothing to do with a lack of TRUE CHRISTIAN™ teachings or too many “Jesus is my boyfriend” worship songs.
Rather, it has to do with churches’ growing loss of coercive power over people.
We stand together at a truly breathtaking point in history. Religious affiliation is more voluntary now than it has been for about 1800 years. Christians today find themselves in the same position as the very first Christians (and they don’t like it at all—any more than those first Christians did). In more and more parts of the West and in America particularly, fewer and fewer people need fear church retaliation for leaving or never joining churches.
This astonishing shift in culture has changed the entire game for churches. These days, most people won’t be part of a church unless they want to be there.
I don’t think right-wing church leaders and believers like this new normal. They keep pretending like a church’s doctrinal teachings and culture-war stances have anything to do with growth or decline. One look at megachurches proves them wrong. But they persist.
Christianity now sits on the same shelf as a Costco membership
Voluntary-joining groups attract members for the same basic reasons everywhere. It doesn’t matter if the group is a wholesale purchasers’ club, a members-only golf range, a kids’ tree fort posse, or a modern American church.
- They offer perks that potential members want at prices they think are reasonable.
- The group offers members no obvious red flags or dealbreakers that would cause members to leave.
- No alternatives exist that would give members more of what they want for less outlay of resources.
Men have been melting away from churches for decades. They leave not because churches have become all ickie and “feminized,” but because church culture stopped being the best investment of their limited resources. As men’s resources of time and money have shrunk, more and more of them have kept away from church. Further, church leaders lost the ability to retaliate against men who chose not to attend church far earlier than they lost that ability regarding women. From what I’ve read, from about the 1950s onward a man who didn’t attend church was a far different social proposition than a woman who didn’t.
(See: “No Money, No Honey, No Church,” a groundbreaking 2015 paper. It discusses the striking effects of poverty on men’s marital success and church membership.)
In past decades, women found church membership far more rewarding than men did. They invested considerable amounts of their free time into church volunteering. Their efforts made them feel appreciated and productive. For many women, church membership and volunteering brought them significant social rewards as well. Though right-wing churches offered dealbreakers and red flags to them, they still felt that membership and volunteering were important.
As I said, pastors are entertainers at heart. When they know their congregations skew significantly female, they alter their soft-shoe routines accordingly. For all the sexists-for-Jesus bellowing for more macho sermons tailored to MANLY MEN WITH MANLY BREATH, it’d make as much sense in these churches as a barbecue restaurant focusing on vegan food.
But when women began to feel the squeeze, they reacted much as men had decades earlier: They began drifting away. Between their growing rejection of the red flags and dealbreakers and their shrinking wells of money and free time, women no longer see church membership as a worthwhile investment of their resources.
Blaming women might be backfiring on right-wing Christians
My kokoro (“heart”) wish is finally coming true. For decades, right-wing Christians have blamed women for every single bit of bad news that’s ever come their religion’s way. And now, it seems like women have finally gotten the hint. They’re leaving.
Let’s just see how sassy these hardliners act when they have to hire cleaners and forego Sunday School classes. They’ll be just thrilled as the congregation skews more and more male and sermons get more and more macho and chest-thumpy—and yet the decline of their religion only continues.
Oh yes, my heart yearns to see hardline right-wing churches full of dour, angry men. It yearns to see them beating their chests and yelling out big macho prayers to Bubba Jesus and glaring around themselves.
Who will they blame for their decline then?
My mind boggles. I mean, the women will be gone already! Their church will be as anti-relational as it can get! They’ll be as un-feminized and un-sissified and un-pussified as any congregation can possibly be!
No, they won’t understand how much they need women until the women leave.
Right-wing Christians can try to bamboozle young women back with friendship evangelism, sure. Or they can try to shame them into whimpering back into the pews.
But the important stuff that leads young women to disaffiliate? Right-wing men idolize that stuff too much to consider changing it.
And there’s nothing right-wing Christians can or will do about this news
What right-wing Christians can’t do is force women to return. We’ve already covered that. They lack the coercive power to do it.
And what they won’t do is alter their product. They like it as is! They think Jesus himself demands they believe and act this way!
So they won’t drop their post-racism culture wars against women’s bodily and civil rights. Nor will they abandon that dysfunctional relationship model of complementarianism. They don’t care how often it results in abuse and heartache for one or both spouses. Both sources of dysfunction vastly benefit the men who love it, and so they’re going nowhere.
After all, right-wing Christians have always been their own worst problem. Every one of the sources I’ve quoted, be it from a man or woman, is a little bitty part of exactly why Christianity is in decline.
But all that said, I understand. I understand why right-wing Christians blame women. It’s so much easier to blame the powerless than to address one’s own shortcomings. Something something, motes and beams, the way of a man always seems right to him but leads to death, something something.
What do I know? I’m just a heathen apostate. I try not to get in the way of terrible people making huge mistakes.
NEXT UP: Walking pilgrimages have long been a mainstay of Catholicism. Protestants lost that practice somewhere along the way. But now, people who aren’t even Christian are discovering the joys of long, undistracted walks along centuries-old paths. We’ll explore why next time. See you soon!
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