Our Church in the 21st Century

No surprise: [bold added]

by a whole series of yardsticks, women are generally more devout than men....Some 60% of American women consider religion very important, against 47% of men. Daily prayer is practised by 64% of female Americans against 47% of males; and weekly church-going is a habit among 40% of American women versus 32% of men.

A quick glance at the various churches that I have attended supports the Pew global survey. (Of course, the anecdotal observations of your humble blogger mean nothing, but that's what we do with surveys/statistics/science---if it agrees with our personal experience, or biases, it must be true!)

The older U.S. population skews female (Wikimedia)

The Economist's writer traces the American church-going female majority back to the same tendency in European Catholic culture, but I suspect there's a simpler explanation: people tend to become religious as they age, and women outlive men. We have a half-dozen widows whose husbands used to attend our 100-family church.

Regardless of the explanation, there are more women than men in all of our ministries, e.g., choir, teaching Sunday School, community outreach (except for ushering, which has strangely remained a male province oblivious to the attentions of feminists). Older, female, and dwindling: our church in the 21st century.