I haven’t written anything here about religion for a while, but it’s featured a few times on the blog in past years. If you look back you’ll find some interesting stories, such as this one from 2015 on unbelief in America, this from the same year on George Brandis and bigotry, this from 2020 on Donald Trump and the evangelicals, and, most recently, this from 2023 on religious belief and conspiracy theories.
A common theme is that religious belief is often not quite what it might appear to be, and that religious movements – notably the evangelical movement in the United States – can often be more accurately described as political movements. Striking confirmation of that comes this week from a study by Adelaide academic Intifar Chowdhury, reported in the Conversation.
The background is that for as long as anyone has surveyed such things (and probably much longer), it’s been a truism just about everywhere that religious belief is more prevalent among women than among men. You can pick your favorite stereotype there (emotional women vs rational men, nurturing women vs warrior men, etc) and then argue about cause and effect, but the reality of the data point wasn’t challenged.
Fifty years ago, you would have said something similar, at least in most countries, about politics: women, probably for some of the same reasons (whatever they are), tended to vote more conservative than men. But more recently that has reversed itself, and in most of the democratic world a large “gender gap” has opened up, with women voting significantly more for parties of the left than men do.
What Chowdhury reveals is that the same thing is now happening with religion. Among the youngest generation surveyed in Australia,* men are now more likely to report a religious identification than women, and the gap is increasing over time. Her conclusion is that “political identity plays an important role in shaping the new religious divide”; in previous work she has found a similar “male-centric religious revival” in other countries as well.
I’m always sceptical of claims of a shift to religion and/or conservatism among the young; it usually turns out to be slight and transient if not wholly imaginary (here I am skewering Paul Kelly on the subject almost twenty years ago). But if the religious gender reversal is real it marks an important step in the transformation of religious identity into political identity.
The time lag hints clearly at the direction of causation. Young men haven’t embraced political conservatism because that’s where their religious beliefs led them; the (relative) shift to the political right happened first, and the religious change followed. Right-wing politics has become more explicitly gendered, more antifeminist, and also more of a package deal, leading its youngest initiates to a whole set of associated positions, including religion.
As Chowdhury emphasises, her figures are tracking religious identification rather than belief, and while for obvious reasons the two tend to move in the same direction, it would be unwise to assume much about what this politico-religious cohort actually believes. In fact a common complaint about modern right-wing politics is that its practitioners, especially among the young, don’t really believe in anything, in the sense of taking political positions seriously.
Rather, political activity often seems like a species of trolling, where the object is more to score points and annoy people than to achieve anything constructive, and which preserves a element of deniability for those pushing authoritarian politics – “a way for fascism to hide in plain sight,” as Jason Wilson once described it. It would not be at all surprising if those concerned also approach religion in the same way.
The further thought that perhaps religion across the ages has all been one gigantic troll can be left for another day.
* I can’t help but note the oddness of Chowdhury’s generational categories, although whether they are her own or just taken over from the Australian Electoral Study I’m not sure. Baby boomers and Generation Y are each defined by a 15-year interval (1946-60 and 1980-94), but Generation X is 19 years, 1961-1979. The logic of this quite escapes me, but there’s nothing to suggest that it makes a difference to the conclusions.
The World is Not Enough 