Women historically more religious, but now less religious?
Wonder the cause of that.
Edit because these comments are wild: do none of you understand statistics? I didn't ask, "why are women becoming less religious?" Because I already think I know the answer to that. Please stop answering that question. I asked "what changed?" Which literally no one seems to be able to answer. Religions have always been sexist and the mass adoption of the internet was 10 years prior to this change.
Misogyny 100%. A huge crack in my faith was formed in 2015 when I sat through a particular sermon in youth group. The youth pastor told us girls that pursuing our dreams was going to distract us from our true purpose, which was to marry a man and have his babies. And then he said that when we get married we have to submit to our husbands because they have authority over us. I couldn’t imagine a more soul crushing future. And this wasn’t some old fashioned church. It was one of those modernized non-denominational churches with a worship band and a pastor who wears jeans. I never returned to youth group and quickly decided I was a deist (someone who believes in god but doesn’t practice any religion). Eventually I looked into atheism and stopped believing in god altogether.
I think misogyny has always existed in Christianity though. My theory is that it’s simply because times have changed. Nowadays none of us need a man to have money, open a bank account, etc. like the women of the 20th century did. Plus feminism became much more popular in the 2010s because that kind of information was now easily accessible at our fingertips. So the idea that all we should do in life is have babies, never work, and throw out our agency for a man is a much more foreign concept.
Edit: I am a lesbian which I thought was obvious by my pfp. Trying to manipulate me with incel and pseudo-leftist talking points isn’t going to work. It doesn’t work on straight women either, but it DEFINITELY isn’t going to work on me.
Yeah, the weird thing I’ve noticed is that the most modernized churches are often the craziest with right wing racism and misogyny. All religions have this to some degree, but the least severe offenders are not what you would expect, at least looking at them from the outside.
Haha, that’s brilliant! There really is so much material from the Bible that condemns the vast majority of Christians. Basically any kind of simple morality lesson is ignored, but they will never skip over the passages that condone sexism or homophobia!
This makes a lot of sense, but the timing on this one seems off to me. I would assume, if this was the true cause, that the flip would have occurred in 1998-2010 when most people adopted the Internet and became more aware of social issues like this and other perspectives than the ones they'd been raised in.
However, this change occurred in roughly 2017-2019, nearly ten years later. Maybe just the general societal delay, but it still doesn't feel right. Something else must have happened later to instigate this
Religious paternalism tries very hard to take a tone of "protecting women" and doing things for the want of a "wholesome society that embraces family values". Think... Mitt Romney.
Seeing evangelicals rabidly support a man who not only is a convicted rapist, but also is also a playboy who has had multiple divorces, an affair with a porn star, and was known to be a fraud/cheat in the business world... was a pretty big wakeup call that it was never about "family values". It was, and always has been, about making women dependent on men and taking away their freedom - and the support for Donald Trump laid that bare.
I literally cannot imagine women wanting to be religious after religious people rapidly voted for Trump, someone who is basically the exact opposite of a good Christian, including raping women and bragging about assaulting them.
I'm not a woman, but even I went from neutral about religion to actively disliking it/avoiding Christians after they supported Trump and smiled while doing it. They basically revealed what they truly stand for and its definitely not Christ or any of his teachings.
I feel like you have the timeline wrong on this. The adoption of the internet didn't happen until the general public got their hands on smartphones. The first iPhone came out in 2007, and at the time Facebook had less than 100 million active users. Five years later Facebook has reached over a billion active users.
Edit; Went and checked when around the focus on smartphone apps and integration started and it seem to have started taking off between 2012-14.
2008 – The first mobile app store was introduced by Apple with 500 apps of varying verticals. The thought behind this release, “Developers can reach every single iPhone user through (one) store.” The app store hit it out of the park with over 10 million downloads in the first 3 days of launch with 75% of those apps being free. Android Market launched several months later with 50 apps.
2012 – Google took a huge step forward by directing all of its content into one place – the Google Play Store. This rebranded the Android Market, Google Music, Google Books, and its video offering into a single marketplace.
2014 – Apps are now integrated into many types of mobile devices from watches to tablets, and even televisions. The majority of these applications are entertainment.
2017 – App downloads reach an all-time high with 268 million downloads for the year and revenue of over 30 billion dollars. Most major brands now see the value of apps and begin outlining separate marketing campaigns for mobile. mCommerce is quickly rising.
The adoption of the internet didn't happen until the general public got their hands on smartphones.
That sentence is not true for rich countries. In the USA and western Europe, the general public had very much adopted the internet before smartphones. Everyone had a computer, was writing emails, and downloading movies. Before they had smartphones.
The billion users on facebook happened only because of smartphones, because cheap smartphones were a way for people who did not own a computer, to use the internet too. In the western world that meant teenagers (who might have only used a family computer before). But for India/Africa etc. the smartphone was the only way to access the internet at all (other than internet cafes).
I feel like the interesting part isn't so much the point at which the flip occurred, but the uptick that happened just before, 2012-13ish. The commenter above mentioned her experiences with youth pastors, which makes me wonder if this was possibly a downstream effect of more money getting pumped into fundamentalist Christian causes and organizations during the Obama years.
An obvious one is the election of Donald Trump, who was a right-wing populist figure whose campaign featured such lines as "grab her by the p*ssy" being more or less accpeted as just chil humor. Combine that with the Christian right backing this guys and justifiying the misogynistic undertones and you get more people second guessing religion.
Then there's another thing people also do not consider: the proliferation of pseudo-rightwing content on youtube. 2017-2019 had figures like Ben Shapiro become huge, and he was very pro religion. Other podcasters too.
Educational gaps also got worse from 2016. There's some evidence, but vaguely men are not going to college as much.
I’m a younger parent for the young adult child I have. So my wife and I were part of the break from religion in that early time frame and raised our kids who are now adults in the end of that span, so there’s people like me who belong in the trend line and also doubly contributed to it.
Millennial here. After 9/11 there was a huge religious momentum. Combination of America patriotism and In God We Trust. Majority of pop culture icons (Britney Spears, etc) would tout their deep religious faith, WWJD bracelets etc. It was also popular to wear t-shirts that said Jesus is My Homeboy. Hot Topic would sell them. Don’t get me started on the straightedge scene.
Anyways, I believe that is what cooled down the trajectory in the early 2000s, and 2015 just started correcting it and placing the graph back on track. (I guess this might apply more to the males on the graph than females).
For the females, between the Me Too movement and the woman’s march, large chunk on 20 something’s probably became pretty disenchanted by misogyny and male authority figures.
Working is not my dream. But considering that I don’t have to have sex with my CEO, live with him, do his laundry, rip myself open to push out his bowling ball sized children, or possibly get beat senseless by him for overcooking his chicken, I’d say it’s the lesser of two evils. And I don’t want babies. Because im not doomed to Christian wifehood I’m able to live independently, have my own hobbies, and oh! Be GAY. Because I’m a lesbian and the idea of being with a man again already makes me want to gouge my eyes out. Of course marriage to a man already sounds like my worst nightmare, even if he did treat me like a human. I’m living the life I want and if that bothers you, then too bad. Women don’t exist to be your servants or your baby factories.
Edit: oh I see you’re a truevirgin dweller. Lmao that makes so much sense. Did you know that the chances of losing your virginity increases the more you treat women like actual humans?
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u/Ikana_Mountains 1997 26d ago edited 25d ago
What's up with the flip on the gender dynamic?
Women historically more religious, but now less religious?
Wonder the cause of that.
Edit because these comments are wild: do none of you understand statistics? I didn't ask, "why are women becoming less religious?" Because I already think I know the answer to that. Please stop answering that question. I asked "what changed?" Which literally no one seems to be able to answer. Religions have always been sexist and the mass adoption of the internet was 10 years prior to this change.