Recent reporting has indicated a purported rise in religiosity in the United States, which, despite being the most religious of the rich Western nations, has seen long-term secularizing trends. The Catholic Church, for example, reported a significant number of entering new converts this past April at Easter. And, this surge has reportedly been concentrated among young men – religiosity has classically been higher among women. Is there anything real here, or is this just the stuff of anecdote or statistical “noise”?
The answer is a little bit of everything. Long-term trends still show a significant decline in religious belief and practice, though spiritual and other practices on the fringes of religion still thrive, often with diminishing returns. The title of a recent book by a scholar who is himself religious, Why Religion Went Obsolete, is indicative of the larger picture. The author Christian Smith argues in that book that contemporary social conditions, far from presuming the relevance of religion to people’s lives, now go in the opposite direction and presume against it. His book would tend to recommend pessimism in the face of the largely anecdotal data cited above.
That concrete reported data discussed – an increased number of Catholic converts – itself comes accompanied by the much larger number of people who cease practicing that and other faiths at various points in life, though most typically at some point in adolescence or young adulthood. Religion is not necessary for them to make sense of their world and often grates against it, both on social issues and in general patterns of life. This is felt more acutely in liberal settings where congregants are overall more comfortable with modern life. Many mainline Protestant denominations find much of their remaining vibrancy in exiles from more conservative churches such as the Catholic Church who often consider themselves to still be members of those at heart. More conservative churches, particularly Evangelical ones, see higher levels of participation, though there is often significant membership churn. Increasingly low rates of return to religion at the end of young adulthood have frustrated many parents and contributed to political polarization.
Why has religiosity traditionally been gendered as female, given most traditions’ histories of patriarchy? A Sunday morning visit to a traditional town in southern Europe where the women attend church while the men smoke cigarettes in the square is illustrative. The church becomes an extension of domestic space, attended to by the women and children they are tasked with rearing, as well as celibate priests coded as feminine, whereas the men spend time in the public space of the square. This pattern has mostly held even as social and religious life have changed significantly.
Why has the contemporary U.S. disrupted this historical pattern? The answer appears to be politics. As conservatism, particularly in the Trump era, has become associated with a certain kind of manliness and attitude toward women, it has associated religion with these things also. This has attracted men into religious spaces while alienating many women who associate religion with restrictions on their rights. On a related note, as declining numbers of young people pursue marriage and family, these reasons which traditionally attracted women to religious practice give way to more esoteric rationales which in this case tend toward a greater preponderance of men.
Will this change to traditional patterns “stick” or will it be a blip on the radar? Some of this, of course, depends on the sustainability of current sociopolitical trends. It is certainly ironic that a political movement attempting to reinstantiate traditions associated with religion might actually be disrupting longstanding traditional patterns in this regard.
Daniel Rober is a Professor of Catholic Studies at Sacred Heart University.