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There are many problems, of course, with letting the opinion of modern irreligious women override centuries of Christian theology. But what is more interesting here is how neatly this picture maps onto another interesting development in our modern era, that of feminized higher education. In 2021, the Wall Street Journal published a bombshell report titled “A Generation of American Men Give Up on College.” The report detailed the ever-widening education gap between men and women: Both in acceptance rates and graduation rates, men are falling far behind women. Even those schools putting a gentle thumb on the scales have not been able to close this gap.
What might it mean for young women to outnumber young men at elite universities, while young men outnumber young women at church? Certainly, these two pieces—women leaving church and men leaving college—say something about the relative status of men and women today, and perhaps also about the two sexes’ penchant for prestige. To be a Christian in America today is undeniably low-status, and all the more so if one ascribes to any form of orthodox theology. High status jobs, meanwhile, are cordoned off by advanced degrees, and therefore inaccessible to men who do not graduate college. (It is worth noting the difference between high-status jobs and high paying jobs: Real estate, trucking, and trades jobs are highly lucrative, but do not infer the social status of titles like “professor,” “lawyer,” and “doctor.”) Young women leaving church might be doing so due to a staunch commitment to egalitarianism, but more likely they are leaving because of a more general sense that church is not cool.
Most young women, and indeed most young adults today, are more readily shaped by peers and power than by deeply held moral convictions. This squares with the education trends, too: The atmosphere on most college campuses is not merely irreligious, but often anti-religious. Students have great negative incentives to leave the faith while pursuing an advanced degree. This might begin at the peer level, but it is also often advanced by faculty and staff, since the general milieu is one which views religion, especially Christianity, as a belief system opposed to intelligence. The men who have left higher education might be influenced by the same phenomenon, but in the opposite direction: Once they have rejected the prestige of the Ivory Tower, what is there to lose, in terms of social status, by becoming or staying Christian? As it turns out, not much. Indeed, young men today are developing parallel status economies quite comfortably, and quite without regard to what young women think of them.
Continued below.
www.theamericanconservative.com
What might it mean for young women to outnumber young men at elite universities, while young men outnumber young women at church? Certainly, these two pieces—women leaving church and men leaving college—say something about the relative status of men and women today, and perhaps also about the two sexes’ penchant for prestige. To be a Christian in America today is undeniably low-status, and all the more so if one ascribes to any form of orthodox theology. High status jobs, meanwhile, are cordoned off by advanced degrees, and therefore inaccessible to men who do not graduate college. (It is worth noting the difference between high-status jobs and high paying jobs: Real estate, trucking, and trades jobs are highly lucrative, but do not infer the social status of titles like “professor,” “lawyer,” and “doctor.”) Young women leaving church might be doing so due to a staunch commitment to egalitarianism, but more likely they are leaving because of a more general sense that church is not cool.
Most young women, and indeed most young adults today, are more readily shaped by peers and power than by deeply held moral convictions. This squares with the education trends, too: The atmosphere on most college campuses is not merely irreligious, but often anti-religious. Students have great negative incentives to leave the faith while pursuing an advanced degree. This might begin at the peer level, but it is also often advanced by faculty and staff, since the general milieu is one which views religion, especially Christianity, as a belief system opposed to intelligence. The men who have left higher education might be influenced by the same phenomenon, but in the opposite direction: Once they have rejected the prestige of the Ivory Tower, what is there to lose, in terms of social status, by becoming or staying Christian? As it turns out, not much. Indeed, young men today are developing parallel status economies quite comfortably, and quite without regard to what young women think of them.
Continued below.
The Gender Gap in Religion
What does it mean that many more young women than young men are leaving American churches?
