Young women, more than men, are fleeing organized religion.

Jessica Grose, Young Women Are Fleeing Organized Religion. This Was Predictable. NYTimes, June 12, 2024.

But even surrounded by believers as a college student, Draut began to question some of the values she was brought up with. Specifically, she took issue “with the sexism, with the purity culture, with being boxed in as a woman.” She couldn’t stomach the notion that “you only have these specific roles of childbearing, taking care of the children, cooking and being submissive to your husband,” she told me. “That was also around the time that Donald Trump was elected president,” Draut added. “So I didn’t want to associate with that kind of evangelicalism.”

Draut is representative of an emerging trend: young women leaving church “in unprecedented numbers,” as Daniel Cox and Kelsey Eyre Hammond wrote in April for Cox’s newsletter, American Storylines. Cox and Hammond, who both work at the Survey Center on American Life at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, explain: “For as long as we’ve conducted polls on religion, men have consistently demonstrated lower levels of religious engagement. But something has changed. A new survey reveals that the pattern has now reversed.”

While over the past half-century, Americans of all ages, genders and backgrounds have moved away from organized religion, as I wrote in a series on religious “nones” — atheists, agnostics and nothing-in-particulars — young women are now disaffiliating from organized religion in greater percentages than young men. And women pushing back on the beliefs and practices of several different faiths, particularly different Christian traditions, is something I have been reading about more and more.

Clash with conservative ideas about gender roles:

Over the years, reinforcement of conservative beliefs about gender (and about sexuality and in vitro fertilization, which, the president of the S.B.C.’s ethics committee recently declared in a letter to the U.S. Senate, “specifically results in harm to preborn children and harm to parents”) has set various denominations on a collision course with religious Americans’ attitudes about gender equality. The coming clash is evident when you look at polling over the past 50 years.

In their 2010 book, “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us,” Robert Putnam and David Campbell describe the change in attitudes among religious Americans that began taking place in the 1970s. Religious women entered the work force at similar rates to secular women, Putnam and Campbell write. Perhaps surprisingly, “as Americans became more liberal on gender issues in the ensuing decades, religious Americans became feminist at least as fast as and sometimes even faster than more secular Americans.”

There's more at the link.