Working as a Christian minister years ago, Landon Schnabel noticed a paradox common to many U.S. churches: Men filled leadership roles, implying that religion is masculine and patriarchal, but many more women participated in services, Bible study and other activities.
Now an associate professor of sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences, Schnabel learned that researchers have long interpreted this disparity as evidence that women are inherently more religious than men, and have treated that idea as a universal fact.
But not all religions demonstrate gender gaps in religiosity, Schnabel argues in a new book, "Is Faith Feminine? What Americans Really Think About Gender and Religion" (Oxford University Press 2026), and gender gaps are shaped by external forces rather than internal natures, he writes.
Drawing upon gender theory, social psychology and new national surveys that oversample Jewish, Muslim and secular Americans, along with international data, Schnabel introduces a new theory that distinguishes between organized and individual faith and reveals differences across faith traditions. The analysis connects gendered religion to political polarization and the rise of individualized spirituality.
"The same gendered forces that created the original 'men in the pulpit, women in the pews' paradox are, in the 2020s, driving a historic transformation," Schnabel writes. "The paradox is resolving itself through a sorting that separates those who find meaning in managed religious environments from those who seek dynamic and expressive encounters with the sacred."
Schnabel discussed the book with the Chronicle.
Question: Why would a religion be perceived as more masculine or feminine?
Answer: It depends on which part of religion people look at. When the Americans I surveyed explained why religion struck them as feminine, they talked about personal faith, its comfort and its care for others. When it struck them as masculine, they talked about the institution, often calling it "patriarchal."
It also depends on whose religion it is. People tend to judge their own faith by the believers they know and other faiths by their institutions. That helps explain why Muslims in my surveys most often picked "gentle" and "comforting" to describe Islam, while the mostly Christian general public picked "assertive" and "dominant." Christianity, the faith tradition most Americans know from the inside, also has teachings that prize humility, gentleness and compassion, traits American culture treats as feminine.
Q: What are some strategies churches have tried to increase male attendance - and what do you argue have been some unintended consequences?
A: Among the best known are services built for men: "cowboy church," "biker church" and even "fight church," where pastors step into mixed martial arts cages. When I was a minister, I tried milder versions, such as basketball nights and backpacking trips, and quickly learned that having some activities that men tend to do won't address underlying push and pull factors. As a sociologist I came to see why: Religion can offer women more and can expect more of them than of men. Despite creative efforts, women still fill most of the pews in American churches.
Some religious leaders have gone further, turning to militant rhetoric and nationalist themes that emphasize masculinity. That has largely failed to bring men in, too, and just because men might subscribe to something like Christian nationalism doesn't automatically mean they're going to go to church, read religious texts or pray. In my view, it has instead helped reshape American Christianity, contributing to the politicization of faith, pulling some believers toward a more nationalist, combative religion and pushing others away from churches altogether, especially progressives and young people, above all young women.
Q: Is this push to recruit men to church a recent phenomenon?
A: No. In the 19th-century revivals of the Second Great Awakening, men typically preached and the audiences were mostly women. In the Victorian era, many Christians worried that their faith had gone soft, prizing "feminine" virtues like gentility, modesty and restraint. Their answer was "Muscular Christianity," which set out to rebrand faith as vigorous and rugged and helped shape the YMCA. A century before today's fight-church pastors and Christian nationalism, the evangelist Billy Sunday was condemning "effeminate, ossified" Christianity. The push has continued: Billy Graham's tougher, more political evangelicalism at midcentury, the militant masculinity of the religious right in the 1970s and '80s, the gentler Promise Keepers men's movement of the 1990s and, after 9/11, a turn from sports metaphors to military ones.
Men's hold on leadership is old, too. I grew up Seventh-day Adventist, in a church co-founded by a woman, Ellen White, who was also considered the religion's prophet and I wondered why it wouldn't ordain women. Adventism fits a broader pattern: Women founded or co-founded several 19th-century new religious movements, and men took control as those movements became institutions.
Q: How did you determine that this assumption that women are universally more religious was flawed?
A: By looking beyond Christianity. For decades, researchers called the gender gap in religion "universal," but most of the research had studied Christians, and when exceptions turned up, some studies set them aside. One, in a footnote, dropped Turkey, Albania and Bulgaria as "deviant cases."
The World Values Survey, which in 2017-2022 covered 66 countries and territories on every inhabited continent - 18 of them Muslim-majority - shows how much the gap varies. On a combined measure that includes prayer, attendance and the importance of religion, women tend to be more religious than men among Christians, but among Muslims, especially in Muslim-majority countries, men tend to be more religious. Part of that reflects religious rules: Muslim men are required to attend Friday prayers, while for women attendance is typically optional.
My own surveys of Americans, with extra samples of Jewish, Muslim and secular Americans, found a similar pattern at home. Christians were the religious group in which women consistently rated themselves more religious than men did. A difference rooted in biology, such as the hormone explanation some scholars proposed without measuring hormones, should look much the same everywhere, and this one does not.
Q: Did this approach help you resolve the paradox about whether faith is patriarchal and masculine, or comforting and feminine?
A: Yes, because it shows the answer is both. Women are drawn to personal faith despite institutions being run by men. The people I surveyed said religion gives women more comfort, strength, community and hope. They also described a double standard. As one 20-year-old woman put it, "Men who stray from religion are often hailed as intellectual, whereas women are questioned and scrutinized." Asked in my survey to choose whether it's more acceptable for men or women to be nonreligious, almost nine in 10 picked men.
In my national survey, once I statistically account for the extra comfort women get from religion and for personality traits American culture treats as feminine, like being sympathetic, the gap flips and men come out more religious.
One could say that personal faith is comforting and feminine-typed whereas institutional religion is arguably patriarchal and masculine, and that it is faith and what it offers, not the organizational structures and who they exclude, that draws women to participation. I know that might seem somewhat obvious, and actually a lot of what I found sort of seems like common sense once you see it, but much of the literature seemed to miss some of the basic things I'm pointing to.
Q: Is America becoming more secular and less religious?
A: Less attached to religious institutions, yes. In the General Social Survey, which has tracked Americans since 1972, the share with no religion has risen sharply, while weekly attendance and calling oneself "very religious" has fallen or held flat. But belief in an afterlife has held steady, and more Americans call themselves "very spiritual." To me, that looks more like migration than just secularization, with faith moving out of institutions.
Gender is shaping that move. Among young adults, the old gender gap seems to be shrinking if not closing, and recent surveys by the Pew Research Center and the Public Religion Research Institute find that this is mostly because young women are leaving, not because young men are becoming more religious. As I argue in the book, young women are distancing themselves from institutions they see as more about politics and control than care and community. Some of the young men who do attend are drawn, as I read it, to churches that offer political identity and clear lines of authority. If that continues, the pews could balance out by losing women rather than gaining men, and organized religion may grow more masculine in tone.
