As a Nicaraguan-born girl growing up in Miami, Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez remembers going to church five times a week. Her father was a pastor, and their fundamentalist evangelical faith taught that a woman’s role was to serve her husband.
At the same time, Mojica Rodríguez saw how essential women were in keeping the pews filled and the church running. Ultimately, dismayed by the subservient role of women and the church’s harsh restrictions on girls, she would leave her faith – and her husband – in her late 20s.
“Women are less inclined to be involved with churches that don’t want us speaking up, that don’t want us to be smart,” said Mojica Rodríguez, who went on to earn a master’s degree in divinity. “We’re like the mules of the church – that’s what it feels like.”
Though the Nashville-based author and activist is now 39, her experience reflects a growing and, for churches, a potentially worrisome trend of young women eschewing religion. Their pace of departure has overtaken men, recent studies show, reversing patterns of previous generations.
Americans have been disaffiliating from organized religion over the past few decades. About 63% of Americans are Christian, according to the Pew Research Center, down from 90% in the early 1990s.
Meanwhile, the share of those who describe themselves as agnostic, atheist, or “nothing in particular” has risen to 28%. But it had been males, especially young men, leading these shifts – until now.
“For as long as we’ve been conducting surveys on religion, men have exhibited consistently lower levels of religious commitment than women – across cultures, class divisions, any way you cut it,” said Daniel A. Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life, whose data helped spotlight the trend. “That’s what made this so notable.”
A forthcoming study from Barna Group and Impact 360 Institute Research reaffirms the pattern, Barna CEO David Kinnaman said. According to the report, Generation Z women, especially those aged 18 to 24, are less likely than young men to identify with a faith or to believe in a higher power.
According to the Pew Center, the shift is occurring primarily among Protestants, 60% of whom identify as evangelical. Experts say multiple factors are driving the trend.
As with Mojica Rodríguez, some fume over gender hierarchies, the inability of women to serve in influential positions, or expectations of chastity placed upon girls. Others, they say, struggle with their church’s positions on reproductive and/or LGBTQ rights.
“Young women are moving farther left politically,” said Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, who has examined the trend.
As partisanship becomes the prime lens through which many Americans see the world, Burge said, it has infiltrated the church environment, leaving many young women disillusioned and caught between their politics and church expectations.
Should the trend continue, it could have major repercussions for faith communities: Women are often the backbone of their congregations, fueling volunteer efforts and instrumental in engaging their families in the faith.
“Women do the majority of the work that keeps the church going,” said former evangelical Sheila Wray Gregoire, who’s studied Christian marriage in the U.S. and Canada for 17 years. “They’re the ones responsible for getting children out of bed and going to church. They’re the ones staffing the Sunday school, making sure potlucks happen or that people are supported when they have an illness or are having a baby. The church is not going to survive without women.”
‘An emerging area of concern’
Burge, of Eastern Illinois, pored through biennial data compiled by the Cooperative Election Study, a national online survey of more than 50,000 people. The numbers showed that since 2012, the share of young women who identify as agnostic, atheist or “nothing in particular” has edged closer to and eventually overtaken that of young men.
He said the trend can’t be written off as an anomaly.
“It’s an emerging area of concern,” Burge said. “Right now the ‘check engine’ light is coming on – not every time you start the car, but sometimes. And you don’t know whether it will fix itself or get worse.”
Likewise, the Survey Center on American Life’s 2023 survey of 5,400-plus adults found men represented 54% to 57% of Baby Boomer, Generation X and Millennial individuals who had left their childhood faith.
Among Generation Z, however, the pattern has flipped: 54% of those who’d left the church are female, Meanwhile, nearly four in 10 Gen Z women identify as religiously unaffiliated, compared to a third of Gen Z males.
One statistic showed the vast difference between young women and their elders: While the share of religiously unaffiliated men was 11 points greater among Gen Z than Baby Boomers (34% to 23%), young women were nearly three times as likely than Baby Boomer women to identify as such (39% to 14%).
The issues that drive young women away from the church
Researchers say there’s usually not just one reason women leave the church. Higher levels of education, career goals and deprioritizing of marriage and parenthood can play a role; alternately, so too can the economic pressures of parenthood as the cost of living rises.
Matters of principle may provide the final push. According to the Survey Center on American Life, Generation Z women are far more concerned than previous generations with inequality and scornful of institutions adhering to patriarchal hierarchies – including more conservative churches, where women are not allowed to preach or hold leadership positions.
“There’s a cultural dissonance with young women being told you can do anything and then being told, well, generally, yes, but when it comes to our place of worship there’s restrictions,” Cox said. “That’s another challenge that these places are wrestling with.”
While many denominations now allow ordination of women, how such policies play out in practice can differ at the local level, where pastors may follow the lead of congregants resistant to such change.
“Why would you want to be at a place where your voice doesn’t matter?” said Gregoire, the former evangelical. “It’s hard when you grow up with a deep, personal faith and then the church you’re in treats you as less than. It’s like having the rug pulled out from under you.”
As incidents of sexual assaults or indiscretions involving church elders have increasingly come to light, the rise of the #MeToo movement and its religious equivalent, #ChurchToo, has “empowered young women to say, I don’t need to put up with this anymore,” Burge said.
Tim Whitaker, director and founder of The New Evangelicals, a digital nonprofit for former evangelicals rethinking their faith, said notions of “purity culture” and “modesty culture” – requiring girls to be chaste and dress modestly – are deeply embedded in some evangelical churches.
“I’ve been told that girls as young as 10 are told, ‘Your dress is too short,’” he said.
Purity culture, Gregoire said, teaches that women are responsible for men’s lustful thoughts. That’s one reason she launched Bare Marriage, a podcast and research effort examining the marital and sexual satisfaction of evangelical women in the U.S. and Canada.
“The way a woman dresses can cause a man to stumble – that’s the phrasing they use,” Gregoire said. “Because of that language, and because churches aren’t good at teaching about consent, if girls are sexually assaulted they can feel like it’s their fault, because ‘he’s just a man.’”
Such ideas, she said, are pushed in books targeted at teens, young men and parents and distributed by pastors during premarital counseling sessions or presented by peers at bridal showers.
“It isn’t from the pulpit all the time,” said Rebecca Lindenbach, Gregoire’s daughter and partner at Bare Marriage. “But they have curricula with recommended readings. That’s how these things get propagated.”
In general, Gregoire said, church attendance benefits women, contributing to higher marital satisfaction and fewer mental health issues. But it becomes harmful when women internalize what she calls “toxic teachings,” such as that a woman should have frequent sex with her husband to keep him from watching pornography.
Such teachings, she said, persist on the conservative fringes of Southern Baptist and independent fundamentalist Baptist circles.
“Not all churches are like this,” Gregoire said. “But the way many churches handle gender, it’s a choice they’re deliberately making, and it’s turning women off in huge numbers.”
Making the break with purity culture
Mojica Rodríguez, the Nashville author, recalled not being permitted to have male friends or to get phone calls from anyone who wasn’t Christian. Meanwhile, while her parents allowed her brother to stay out late, she couldn’t even leave the house.
She recalled attending a youth conference where boys and girls were divided into two groups; the boys split off to discuss leadership while the girls were made to list the attributes they wanted in a good husband.
At age 20, her date with a male friend was chaperoned, and her pastor father policed such interactions with vigilance.
“He would say, ‘If people can see that I can’t contain you, how will they listen to me?’” she said. “I carried the weight of purity culture.”
When Mojica Rodríguez got married, it was to a man she had met seven months earlier.
“The teaching is that you have get married fast, because lust is a powerful thing,” she said. “They sort of thrust you into marriage with strangers to keep you from the sin of fornication. As far as my mom knows, she witnessed our first kiss at the wedding.”
Mojica Rodríguez gradually realized her marriage also was about escape. Leaving home gave her the freedom to pursue graduate school studies at Vanderbilt University, where she was able to put the teachings of her upbringing into context. Her father had no interest in her theological views, she said, because of her gender.
She was still in the program in 2013 when she decided both to divorce herself from her husband – and her church. When she called her mother for emotional support, she said, her mother instructed her to return to her husband, with no questions about why she had left.
Soon afterward, she discovered she was pregnant, suddenly faced with another difficult choice. She ultimately decided to get an abortion.
“Those two things back to back went against everything I had ever been taught,” she said. “It was like, am I going to feel shame for the rest of my life, or am I going to be OK? It was hard, but it was even more heartbreaking to be so deeply misunderstood by my family and have them vilify my choices through their church lens.”
How will churches respond to the crisis?
Whitaker, of The New Evangelicals, said while many of these issues affect women broadly, young women have fewer ties to the church than their older peers who are more established with families and community bonds.
He partly credits the exodus of young evangelical women to the rise of social media spaces that facilitate sharing and affirmation of discontent. His organization, which launched in 2022, built an audience on Instagram and now has about 116,000 followers, about 70% of them women.
“These platforms have given them a place to express their thoughts and be heard,” he said. “Seeing other people’s stories, and seeing them make the change, has given them permission to take seriously their own concerns.”
Whitaker hears mostly from those who have left white evangelical churches, but doubts many institutions will adapt to stem the tide.
“A lot of them think God has given them clear commands around sexuality, gender and hierarchy, so when people leave for those reasons they see them as defecting from the church completely,” he said. “I don’t think the evangelical church is going to change its tune anytime soon.”
The Rev. David Gushee, author of “After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity” and a professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, said that while some evangelical leaders are trying to respond constructively, “others are tripling down on toxic masculinity. It’s very sad, really.”
Tod Bolsinger, an ordained Presbyterian pastor who runs a consulting firm working with churches trying to navigate a changing world, said most are struggling to determine their identity moving forward.
“The challenge is that you’ve got to get really clear on what is so deeply important that it will never change and be prepared to change everything else,” he said.
Bolsinger, an associate professor of leadership formation at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California, said cultural shifts mean church leaders can no longer rely on old ways of thinking.
“For generations, people would say young adults will leave, but when they get married and get their babies baptized, they’ll come back,” he said. “No longer. You have to have something to offer people … If we are losing the people who have historically been the most loyal, that’s a four-alarm fire.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Gen Z women are increasingly leaving organized religion behind