Hilarity ensues as women continue to leave evangelical churches

Last week, a remarkable story unfolded at the New York Times about the growing absence of women in evangelical churches. This in itself is not too surprising. Just a few months ago, we covered the beginning of that story. Women are, indeed, finding their freedom from that oppressive system in greater and greater numbers.

What really got my attention in this story was a ramification of women’s absence that I don’t think evangelicals understood was coming. Today, we’ll cover that developing situation—and speculate about where it may lead.

(For a great deal of background about this topic, please see this post. Related: The Southern Baptist Convention is still arguing about women pastors; Back when Al Mohler supported women pastors; A 2020 post about women leaving churches; Cherchez la femme.)

(From introduction: Post-Helene charities helping survivors recover and rebuild.)

(This post first went live on Patreon on 10/4/2024. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available to anyone now!)

It’s raining men (in evangelical churches)

Many years ago, evangelical churches skewed female. Even as recently as the 2010s, it wasn’t too uncommon for me to hear about even large churches whose congregation was 80% women—if not 100%. In these churches, the only men to be found were its leaders: the pastor, elders, etc.

During that phase of evangelicalism’s decline, I often wrote about how churches’ lack of eligible bachelors affected evangelical women’s hunt for husbands. In general, women classified the men remaining in evangelical churches into two groups: those in great demand and those who, to put it gently, were not in demand at all. Often, these women didn’t realize that they, themselves, had been separated into two similar groups by the few high-demand men in these churches. Rather than find mates among that second group of men, the women in their own second group often chose to seek more palatable mates outside of evangelicalism.

(See: The great evangelical husband hunt; Leaving the ring.)

But times change, and so do evangelicals—despite their view of change as being less-than-divine. Around 2020, I began seeing a shift in the demographics of evangelical congregations. At first, it was single women leaving. Again, that was not at all unexpected: young women had learned to hunt for their M-R-S degrees, to use the Christianese, outside of their churches.

Meanwhile, married women with kids still attended church often enough to keep the church’s bills paid. Even if their husbands opted out, pastors could still count on the wives to show up and drag the kids along.

And now those women, too, appear to be leaving.

Imagine: A church full of men doing the work women once did

In this story from the New York Times (relink), we get a look at how one small Reformed/Calvinist church has been flooded with young, single men. Here’s how its writer describes it one fine Sunday morning:

Men greeted visitors at the door, manned the information table and handed out bulletins. Four of the five musicians onstage were men. So was the pastor who delivered the sermon and most of the college students packing the first few rows.

Grace Church Waco isn’t much to look at. It’s barely more than a warehouse with a blink-and-you’d-miss-it sign. Inside, photos reveal the usual “Contemporvant” evangelical stage setup with a simple cross in the background, interesting upturned floor lights, and a single guitar on a stand like it’s Tiny Tim’s crutch or something.

In beliefs, Grace Church Waco seems to fall right into line with most hardline Reformed/Calvinist churches. These folks are culture warriors and misogynists-for-Jesus. In fact, there’s an identical Grace Church in Hewitt. Its website even uses the exact same layout. This second Grace Church is way, way more tightly affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), as well as more entwined with Reformed/Calvinist church planting and pastor-resource groups. Technically, it’s also in Waco, but they use “Hewitt” as their campus name.

But “our” Grace Church is the one in the NYT story. One of its pastors, Buck Rogers (YES), is mentioned directly in the story. He doesn’t appear on the Hewitt church’s leadership roster.

Waco, Texas also happens to be a college town. Grace Church is almost on the banks of Lake Waco, near the so-called “Heart of Texas.” Not far to the east, we find Baylor University—an evangelical school. To the north, we find a number of vo-tech, community, and state-run colleges. On the other side of the downtown district to the northeast, Texas State Technical School at Waco sprawls across a huge campus right by the airport.

To church leaders and aspiring church planters, Waco must seem like a target-rich environment—or perhaps more accurately, like fields white unto the harvest, to use the Christianese.

It’s little wonder Grace Church’s congregation skews not only male, but young. When it sent out offshoots to a small community nearby to the southeast, Robinson, the NYT article says, “12 out of the 16 people regularly attending were men.” (The article doesn’t tell us which one of the more than dozen churches in Robinson was this one. I’m guessing Grace Family Church just because the other two have “Grace” in their names, but who knows?)

SHOCKING: A message very purposely tailored to men and not women somehow calls mostly men to its banner

Hilariously, evangelicals may have made another of their famous over-corrections. As the NYT article tells us:

For decades, many American churches and ministries have assumed that men like Mr. Ferrier must be wooed into churchgoing and right living. Publishers promoted books like “Why Men Hate Going to Church” and “No Man Left Behind,” which assumed that many men are reluctant Christians at best — and that their wives and children would follow them to church. Pastors emphasized Jesus’s masculinity, and men’s ministries like Promise Keepers exhorted followers to embrace their roles as husbands and fathers.

Very much so. Much digital ink got spilled between 2000 and about 2020 about the so-called “feminization” of church culture.

That term was always a pejorative. Moreover, it was an intentional one.

To evangelical men, women are the enemy

Unless you understand evangelicals’ misogyny, you won’t understand much else they do. It is central to their dysfunctional authoritarianism and control-lust. It is why these men have such big problems with anger, and why they get so outraged and violent when they feel “disrespected” by others, especially by the women they think they own the most: their marital partners. There’s a reason why evangelical-pandering politicians stopped pushing racism so hard in the 1970s and went with anti-abortion stuff instead: Racism didn’t sell too well outside of the Deep South. But misogyny is universal with that crowd.

To evangelical men, the very worst thing anything can be is female. Women are the lowest of the low. For an evangelical man—and yes, for a male-dominated culture like evangelicalism—to become woman-like is to be humiliated, degraded, rendered impotent. Un-manned. It’s the worst thing that could possibly happen to a man. Calling such a man feminine or womanly is fightin’ words.

For years, I used to wonder if evangelical men thought about how the women in their churches might interpret their snarling rage and hatred toward the “feminization” of churches. By this term, they meant more relationship-focused, less screeching about hellfire and brimstone, more community and charity oriented, etc. To evangelical men, these were all bad things. They were womanlike things.

I wondered if these men ever thought about the message they constantly sent evangelical women about how welcome they—and their utterly disgusting womanhood—were.

The answer to that question appears to be that no, they didn’t think about it at all.

Men must be at the center of everything an evangelical church does, even if they’re absent

They were thinking only of themselves and their dominance. To an evangelical man, the universe begins and ends with himself. So even if a church contained only 10% men, or even none at all beyond its leadership, it still had to cater to utterly-misogynistic, woman-hating men. Otherwise—and this is the really interesting part—men simply wouldn’t show up to church.

When I figured out what these men were demanding, it blew my mind. I mean, why wouldn’t an evangelical pastor cater his message to the people actually paying his bills? But that is exactly what evangelical men didn’t want him to do! And most of these men deploying this extortion were the Reformed/Calvinist crowd, who almost always believe that church attendance is mandatory no matter what! Apparently, their beliefs have a loophole: Mandatory—but only so long as a pastor centers them entirely.

Whatever the women in these churches thought of the situation, it didn’t matter to evangelical men. It enraged them even to imagine a church community that didn’t completely center them and their desires.

If evangelical men could be summed up in one phrase, it’d be “Does not play well with others.”

So women are finally taking the hint

Despite their hatred and disgust, though, evangelical men were still very happy to take advantage of women’s free volunteer labor! Very few evangelical pastors seemed to think about what would happen when—not if—women finally got the tribe’s hint and left.

One evangelical pastor kind of did, though. In the mid-2010s, he wrote a book about it, The Resignation of Eve. Unfortunately, it didn’t change anything. Its call to action involved pastors radically changing how they viewed the women in their churches. If pastors had ever been capable of doing that, they wouldn’t have been evangelical in the first place. More than that, they also wouldn’t have needed a book to tell them to do it because they’d already have been doing it.

(Any time you see one of these exhortations, add “…or else what, asshole?” to the end. If the answer is “nothing,” evangelicals simply won’t do it.)

To be an evangelical man—even one of meager means and no good qualities—is to feel superior to every woman on Earth. It’s to have an infinite god smiling down at him and encouraging him to do it, too. It’s like living in David Bowie’s “Boys Keep Swinging” universe.

“Heaven loves ya, the clouds part for ya
Nothing stands in your way
Luck just kissed you hello
When you’re a boy”

Now imagine an entire culture that operates with this song as its holy writ. As Shakespeare’s Sister observed years ago:

When your gods are male, your males become gods.

Promises made to men but not women about a long-gone culture

Indeed, in the NYT article we also find hints about why all of these young men seem to be flocking to Grace Church Waco. To me, it sounds like they’re chasing the promises evangelicalism has long made men in their culture:

Following Jesus is difficult, Mr. Ferrier said. “It’s about denying yourself, and denying the lust of the flesh,” he said. He appreciates a church like Hope, where leaders are frank about the intensity of the self-sacrifice he sees as a requirement for the Christian faith.

“Young men are attracted to harder truths,” Mr. Ferrier said. Sometimes, he added, he wants to hear messages with a little “wrath of God” in them. [. . .]

“Religion is coded right, and coded more traditionalist” for young people, said Derek Rishmawy, who leads a ministry at the University of California, Irvine.

For some young men he counsels, Christianity is perceived as “one institution that isn’t initially and formally skeptical of them as a class,” especially in the campus setting, Mr. Rishmawy said. “We’re telling them, ‘you are meant to live a meaningful life.’”

Alex, I’ll take “Things said by dysfunctional authoritarian college kids who are spinning off the rails” for $500. Now that Mom and Dad aren’t there to humiliate their sons for doing off-limits stuff and force them to follow various rules, it sounds like these guys are just lost! They have no clue how to function without someone controlling them. It’s not “harder truths” they love. It’s just feeling secure in a tightly-controlled, rigidly-authoritarian, rules-oriented culture.

Derek Rishmawy is generally an oblivious idiot even by Reformed/Calvinist standards. But he’s correct here about what else draws dysfunctional authoritarian men to evangelicalism: its leaders’ outright pandering.

These young men grew up in a culture that prized them just for being male. That offered them a world where competition for favored roles would be much easier, simply because their tribe disqualifies half the human race from ever achieving any real power over men.

Most of all, their tribe promised them a divine mandate to rule. Told them they were uniquely suited for leadership in ways that women simply aren’t. That their futures would be “meaningful.” That’s Christianese, by the way, for their god’s cosmic plan.

Hopefully, women can derive meaning from those boring jobs that men emphatically don’t want. After all, they’ll get meaning nowhere else. Any jobs that any men might want are off-limits to them.

(I’m thinking suddenly of my second pastor, Gene. One morning, he leaned back against a pew in mid-conversation. After a pause, he told me, “You’d have made such a great preacher if you’d been born a man.”)

I’ve seen countless Gen X and Millennial men spin out on far fewer promises. I wonder what these Zoomers will do when they, too, find out that those promises are false for all but a tiny fraction of men?

And women, having gotten the hint, are leaving

The real surprise is that it took evangelical women this long to realize how much evangelical men despise them. The NYT article theorizes women figured it out over the past few decades of evangelical infighting about reproductive rights (including both abortion and assisted fertility), the role of women in the church, and even how men and women ought to conduct their private romantic relationships.

GEE, YA THINK?

Their writer tells us that young women “are moving past the debates — and out the church doors.” As an illustration of this point, they present a young woman’s story. She specifically started college as a true-blue evangelical. But then, she “grew disturbed over the church’s treatment of women.” She ended up leaving her church. Soon, she joined one that doesn’t relegate her to second-class status because of her sex. And now, she plans to become a pastor.

Other young women interviewed for the article are simply abandoning church culture entirely. Some even seem to be on the cusp of deconversion.

I’m wondering how long evangelical churches can run without women

Similarly, the real mystery is why anyone in the Christ-o-sphere seems so surprised about this shift, given how evangelical churches have been pandering to misogynists for decades now. I suppose they just expected evangelical women to adjust to the new normal of Sexism-for-Jesus. Evangelical pastors seem to have just expected women to remain where they’re treated like second-class citizens, subjected to abuse, and silenced by their leaders when they dare speak out about that abuse.

Instead, more and more women are leaving evangelical churches to the men who clearly want to be the only power there. Those men end up lording power over each other—and doing all the scutwork women once performed without complaint. In the NYT story, we see men acting in volunteer roles such as ushers, worship team musicians, and greeters. All of these functions are acceptable to evangelical men; these roles do, after all, place the volunteer at a higher social level than the people interacting with them.

I want to know who’s cleaning the church building. Who’s teaching and babysitting the few kids I saw in congregation pictures? Who’s arranging post-service snacks and drinks?

Are all of these jobs falling to the few women there? Or are men having to step in to fill the gap?

Cuz I’m betting few men will be sullying themselves like that. I’m betting the church will hire a cleaning service before its men lower themselves to such a humiliation.

Do evangelical pastors realize exactly what’s coming their way with more and more young women walking away from church culture?

So far, we have only a few observations about women’s defection, like this one from Russell Moore:

“I’m not sure what church life looks like with a decreasing presence of women,” he said, pointing out that they historically have been crucial forces in missionary work and volunteering. “We need both spiritual mothers and spiritual fathers.”

By “historically,” of course, we mean back at the beginning of the SBC itself. Indeed, back then enterprising women went abroad as missionaries. But Moore makes it sound like evangelical men were supportive of women evangelists.

They weren’t.

In fact, the famous evangelist Lottie Moon is mentioned in the 1873 Annual Report (p. 41, as “Miss Moon”). We get a brief report about her progress, too (pp.42-43):

This year Miss Moon has come from America to join with us. She is now learning the Chinese language very rapidly, and expects ere long to open a school for girls, and to aid in spreading the Religion of our Lord. [. . .] Bro. Crawford writes: “Miss Moon is making rapid progress in the language. She promises to be a real missionary. Only send out another of the same character to live and labor with her. The women of China must be converted to Christ.”

However, Lottie wasn’t the first single woman in the SBC to do this. Her sister Edmonia, appointed to China the year before in 1872, was. If you’re wondering, Edmonia’s not as famous because she didn’t spend nearly as much time there as Lottie due to illness, and she didn’t immerse herself in Chinese culture like Lottie did. Lottie was dedicated.

It’s worth noting, though, that the Southern Baptists in China tried to sabotage Lottie’s progress purely because they were so indignant over the idea of a woman doing any kind of ministry:

In China, Lottie became committed to being “out among the millions” and was determined to participate in direct evangelism. This would prove an issue, however, as women were discouraged most of the time from ministering to people. For a while Miss Moon was assigned to become a school teacher to particularly unruly children.

Nowadays, I don’t hear a whole lot about single evangelical women doing that kind of volunteering. Instead, married evangelical women go with their husbands. Or else women volunteer in their home churches by doing the woman-coded jobs that evangelical men don’t want.

So it’s really funny that Russell Moore’s giving this idyllic little word-picture of women acting as missionaries. In reality, Southern Baptist men did their best to get rid of the first one, and they’re supremely uncomfortable with any women achieving Lottie’s level of power.

In the land of no women

As for these young men getting baptized into Grace Church in Waco, Texas, they will likely be wielding that power over only over each other for a good long time. It’s nowhere near as fun for them that way, I know. But it’s reality.

What should be of far more concern to them is the future. When they’re ready to get married, they fully expect Jesus to provide them with wives and quivers full of babies. They may expect to find those women in evangelical groups outside their home churches, as one young man thinks he has in the NYT article. But they aren’t thinking about the ticking demographic time bomb that young women have presented evangelicalism.

A few of these men won’t notice. They will be good-looking, ambitious, and well-connected enough to make it happen. But most men won’t achieve the evangelical dream life.

Churches are already full of men of all ages who are invisible to the congregation’s women. Soon, the pews will be overflowing.

Already, I hear young women saying they will not ever date or marry evangelical men. It’s about as big a dealbreaker as being a vocal Donald Trump supporter. These men’s misogyny, dysfunctional social system, anger problems, and refusal to act as equal partners all ensure that today’s women don’t even notice them as potential partners. They’re as invisible to young women as older women are to evangelical men.

With the 4-14 window already closing on Zoomers and Gen Alpha kids being even less interested in evangelicalism, evangelical churches are going to be interesting to watch over the next few years. Me, I just wanna know exactly who is gonna be mopping their churches’ floors and wiping runny noses in the nursery and cleaning up after post-service snacks.

The answer to that question promises to be interesting.

NEXT UP: Somehow, the deeper I swam into Christianity, the more trouble I got into. We’ll explore why next time. See you soon!

Please support my work!

Thanks for reading, and thanks for being part of our community! Here are some ways you can support my work:

• Patreon, of course, for as little as $2 a month! I now write Patreon posts twice a week. They drop on Tuesday and Friday mornings for patrons, then a few days later on the main site, Roll to Disbelieve.
• Paypal, for direct one-time gifts. To do this, go to paypal.com, then go to the personal tab and say you want to send money, then enter captain_cassidy@yahoo.com (that’s an underscore between the words) as the recipient. It won’t show me your personal information, only whatever email you input.
• My Amazon affiliate link, for folks who shop at Amazon. Just follow the link, then do your shopping as normal within that same browser window. This link adds nothing to your Amazon bill, but it does send me a little commission for whatever you spend there.
• And as always, sharing the links to my work and talking about it!