a follow up to the article i posted last week. worth a thought, is this why men generally either don't go to church or don't engage in church. the worrying statistic is Christianity is the only major faith that has this issue!
by BRETT & KATE MCKAY
by BRETT & KATE MCKAY
Welcome back to our series on the relationship between Christianity and masculinity, which aims to explore the historical and cultural factors that have made women statistically more likely to be committed to the religion than men.
In our last post, we weighed one of the more popular explanations for this gender gap: that the theology, story, and ethos of the Christian gospel was intrinsically feminine from the start, and thus naturally attracts more female than male adherents.
We ultimately dismissed this theory by showing that it’s possible to see both traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine traits in the religion. The fact that the softer, gentler side of Christianity has long been emphasized over its harder qualities, then suggests that factors above and beyond the faith’s intrinsic narrative and theology led to one side being privileged over the other.
Today we will explore theories as to what exactly those “feminizing” factors were, beginning with a discussion of when exactly they may have emerged.
3 Notes Before We Begin

• To trace the feminization of Christianity, this article largely focuses on factors related to church attendance. Obviously, there is an imperfect relationship between religious commitment and church attendance, in that someone may feel committed to their faith, but not attend services regularly. However, a belief in the viability of this disconnect (sometimes referred to as being “spiritual” rather than “religious”) is largely a very recent phenomenon; commitment and church attendance went hand-in-hand for most of Christianity’s history. Additionally, churches are and remain the epicenters from which the faith’s culture, and how it is perceived by society at large, emerges, and church attendance provides the best, most objective data and set of observations — the most viable entry point — with which to examine the more abstract issue of the religion’s overall feminization.
• This article also focuses on the culture of Christianity in the United States, as this provides a concentrated lens through which to explore the subject; Christian churches in nearly all countries have a gender gap, but they’ve all taken slightly different trajectories to arrive there, and it would be impossible to cover each in detail. Nonetheless, much of what is discussed here in regards to American Christianity, will also apply abroad.
• “Feminine” and “masculine” are used in this article to denote those qualities that, on average, tend to cluster most often in females and males, respectively, and have traditionally been associated with each sex. Feminization is not bad, nor masculinity inherently good; every human possesses both masculine and feminine qualities to greater and lesser extents. And Christians would say Jesus too embodied both. The question to be explored then is not why Christianity isn’t wholly masculine, but why a feminine ethos has come to predominate in the religion.

Brett and Kate McKay | August 1, 2016

Attend a Christian church service anywhere in the world this Sunday and take a look around at who’s sitting in the seats.
What will you see?
Almost certainly, more women than men. Women with husbands and families, but also married women attending without their husbands, widowed women, and single women, both young and old. You likely won’t see any husbands who are attending without their wives, or very many single guys.