by Eddie Larow, First Things
When I was growing up, it wasn’t uncommon to hear women bemoan their husbands’ absence from church. I remember scanning the pews of St. Peter’s in Plattsburgh, New York, a French Catholic town in the North Country. Most of the men were either elderly or sleeping.
This was not just my imagination. Today men born between 1960 and 1980 attend weekly church at rates between 20 and 25 percent, with women of the same age running two to four points ahead. But even looking back the discrepancy was there. A 2002 study found that, among Catholics, 26 percent of men and 49 percent of women attended weekly church. Among Protestants, 42 percent of men and half of women attended weekly church. The laments I heard growing up were statistically valid.
But something has changed—dramatically.
A recent report from the Public Religion Research Institute found that 43 percent of women under the age of thirty now identify as having no religious affiliation. In 2013, that number hovered around 30 percent. Meanwhile, a recent Gallup poll shows that 42 percent of young men consider religion very important to their lives, compared to only 29 percent of young women in the same age group. The proportion of young Republican men attending church at least monthly has risen from 40 percent in 2019 to 52 percent in 2025—below the 60 percent recorded before the financial crisis of 2008, but still a significant reversal.
There’s also a stark party difference at play that is not inconsequential to the data. More than half of young Republicans attend a church, synagogue, or temple at least once a month. Conversely, among Democrats, only 26 percent of men and 31 percent of women attend at least monthly. (In 2000, about half of both did so.)