Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez remembers going to church five times a week when she was a girl from Nicaragua living in Miami. She grew up with a fundamentalist evangelical faith that taught women should help their husbands. Her father was a pastor.
At the same time, Mojica Rodríguez knew how important women were to keeping the church full and running. In the end, she would leave her faith and her husband in her late 20s because she didn’t like how women were treated as servants and how strict the church was with girls.
The woman who went on to get a master’s degree in divinity said, “Women are less likely to be involved with churches that don’t want us to speak up and that don’t want us to be smart.” “We’re like the mules of the church – that’s what it feels like.”
The author and campaigner from Nashville is now 39 years old, but her story shows a growing trend of young women rejecting religion, which may be a worry for churches. Recent studies show that the rate at which they are leaving has surpassed that of men, going against what happened in previous generations.
In the last few decades, more and more Americans have stopped being part of organized church. The Pew Research Center says that only 63% of Americans are Christians. This is down from 90% in the early 1990s.
The number of people who say they are indifferent, atheist, or “nothing in particular” has also gone up to 28%. But until now, these changes had been led by men, especially young men.
“As long as we’ve been doing surveys on religion, men have consistently shown lower levels of religious commitment than women—across cultures, class lines, and any other way you cut it,” said Daniel A. Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life, whose data helped bring the trend to light. “That’s what made this so notable.”
David Kinnaman, CEO of Barna Group, said that a new study from the Impact 360 Institute and Barna Group will confirm the trend. The study says that young women in Generation Z, especially those between the ages of 18 and 24, are less likely than young men to have a faith or believe in a higher power.
The Pew Center says that the change is mostly happening among Protestants, with 60% of those people calling themselves conservative. Experts say that the trend is caused by several things.
Like Mojica Rodríguez, some people are angry about gender roles, the fact that women can’t hold powerful jobs, or the idea that girls should be chaste. Others, they say, have trouble with how their church stands on LGBTQ rights and/or reproductive rights.
“Young women are moving farther to the left politically,” said Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Charleston’s Eastern Illinois University.
Burge said that as ideology becomes the main way many Americans see the world, it has made its way into the church, leaving many young women disappointed and stuck between what they believe in and what the church expects of them.