Are women more religious than men?

[Dilettante]

It seems to be an observable, tried and true principle that women are, in general, more religious or spiritual than men. Where I live, if you peek into any church any Sunday you'll see that the vast majority of churchgoers are female, with only a few scattered males here and there. Does anyone have a theory to explain this? Is it nature or nurture? I'm curious to hear what you think, since you always come up with interesting stuff.

[pandorasbox]

I am definetely not saying that women want something else to be needed for, I think they may actually feel needed in a mental spiritual way, and not physical (cleaning, cooking etc.) I was wondering if there was ever a time in history where men outnumbered men in Churches?

[author@ptgbook.org]

I have a couple of guesses:
- Females feed of off intimate relationships. Going to prayer meetings, Bible studies, etc help to meet this need.
- Males feed of off mental challenges. Listening to a one way sermon on Sundays is boring, but being involved in debates is more fun.

At the risk of sounding gender-biased, it's been my experience that women tend to be more interested in personal relationships, which is what being at a church in-person gives them. Males tend to be more interested in cold, hard ideas, which I suppose is why we tend to think nothing of carrying on deep, heated conversations with people we've never really met.

I think both comments are right on target. Women, on average (there are exceptions), tend to be more oriented towards relationships between people. Men, on average, tend to focus on ideas and the relationships between things.

My background is Church of God. There was a church called "Radio Church of God", later renamed "Worldwide Church of God", that was led by a man named Herbert W. Armstrong from 1934 till his death in 1986. This church grew from less than 100 members to about 100,000 during that time, mostly through the preaching of Herbert Armstrong on radio and television. When I came into that church in 1982, most of the members had come in to the church from the broadcasting efforts, but some were "second generation" members who were raised in the church because their parents learned about the church through the broadcasts.

One notable feature was that single men outnumbered single women by at least two to one. That is because many men were willing to listen to the broadcasts, study and evaluate the doctrines, and then come into a new church independently of any help from family and friends. But that almost never happened with the women. Almost invariably, the women became members because of family connections to members or because they learned about the church from a friend.

So in stable, long-established churches, the women outnumber men because the church community satisfies a need for human relationships. And I think religion itself may be more attractive to women because the Bible and Christianity places such a heavy emphasis on relationships between people. But in a forum like this, where ideas are discussed and debated, men outnumber women because men get more satisfaction from working with new ideas even apart from face-to-face relationships.

[sue]

On the other hand, males enjoy going to football (or in my part of the world, soccer) games, where there is also a sense of community and of belonging to somehing bigger than oneself.

It's not community that brings men together for sporting events, it's competition. Same here. Most boys are socialized to value and engage in competition from a young age.