The Unexpected Reason for Masculine Religious Revival
Going to church has always been a statistically feminine activity—more women attend on average than men. This gap has been well-documented since early Greco-Roman churches, where women were given higher social standing and domestic protections than in secular society. Contemporarily, the phenomenon is still known and accounted for, with a book coming out as recently as 2018 entitled Why Men Hate Going to Church. As the gap seemed to widen in the mid-2010's, there was real panic about this issue. Since then, however, something has shifted. A recent New York Times article outlined a staggering new trend: within the United States, Gen Z men have not only returned their proportional attendance to pre-2010 numbers, but they have also almost closed the gender gap entirely. What has caused this?
The masculine religious revival has been left largely without satisfactory explanation, with reductive answers understating the complex cultural origins of this very significant demographic change.
I believe that this movement has occurred in response to an actively shifting power dynamic between genders. We live in a fundamentally patriarchal society, as has been the case for most of Western history. The idea that a man is a powerful figure within his family and social sphere is baked into most of the modern world's institutions, a prime example being the US government, where the development of women's rights has historically lagged far behind those of men. Obviously, modern society has tried to amend itself of this. Third and fourth-wave feminism made important social strides and, along with modern empowerment movements of other marginalized groups, created an awareness of implicit and institutionalized biases against women in countless industries, cultural settings, and social dynamics. These efforts allow greater social, legal, and professional mobility to women that want to take advantage of opportunities that have been afforded to their male counterparts for decades.
This modern climate of equality, however, does not exist in a vacuum.
Men have been on top of society for too long to level the playing field immediately, so one strategy taken to mitigate the harm that can be inflicted on still-marginalized women is that of increased accountability. With the advent of social media and generalized female empowerment and solidarity, crimes that had been perpetrated by men and endured in silence by women for years came to light. The #MeToo movement exemplifies the bolstering of channels by which men have been held more accountable to the office of their power than ever before.
There are many different ways that popular consciousness has defined the office of power. Spider-Man's "with great power comes great responsibility" has been parroted in three film adaptations since 2001, giving us a modern folktale of what happens when the office—the responsibility—of power is upheld. We look up to Spider-Man because of his integrity; he can quite literally do anything he wants with very little consequence (he has a secret identity and superpowers with which to evade any sort of social or institutional repercussions) and yet chooses to do good purely because it is good. Spider-Man is our conceptual model for power used properly. The unshakeable integrity of Spider-Man contrasts with the real-life newsworthy faces of high-profile scandal and embezzlement, the powerful figures that seemingly inevitably abuse their power. We click our tongues and shake our heads at the headlines, repeating another cliché property of power: absolute power corrupts absolutely. It seems true. What else could explain the correlation between the power a person holds and the odds of having skeletons in their closet? I posit that power does not corrupt absolutely. It merely grants the agency to act on what is already an absolutely corrupt human will. With greater power, we are accountable to no one, and the depths of our desires can finally be realized. Indeed, there are no deterrent guardrails keeping the powerful from committing offenses, only reactionary punishments when they do. Where the average person does not even have the position to embezzle millions of dollars, the powerful CEO does, and so their profile of potential offense is far more expansive.
This is the dynamic of a post-feminist, pre-total-equality cultural landscape. Men still hold more cultural power than women, but they are guarded by vigilant accountability channels, ready to catch them in any abuses of their power. For malicious men this system works well, administering proportional consequence for blatant and intentional abuses of their power. For a well-meaning man, however, the power of a patriarch becomes like an unwanted firearm. Because he has never carried a gun before, he is a total beginner at gun care and gun safety, and he has no definitive model for how to use it the way it was designed to be used—to protect and empower the less powerful. With no intention of abuse, he carries it gingerly everywhere he goes, taking special care to try not to set it off and hurt someone. The people around him are terrified of being shot, and he is just as mortified at the prospect of shooting them.
In this cultural moment, we have corrected and continue to correct the abuses of patriarchal power that proliferated for so long without a system of accountability, but the new paradigm has not existed long enough to produce bona fide role models in contemporary pop culture.
Gen Z men are growing up constantly bombarded with examples of what not to do with their cultural privilege, without a definitive and practical example of what post-feminist masculinity should look like. This means that the contemporary model of a man must be developed through trial and error, a terrifying proposition for a beginner holding a gun with a head full of pictures of the atrocities it can cause.
These men have divided into three camps in response to this situation that can be analogous to the responses of the servants in Matthew 25:14-30. Three servants are entrusted with money while their master is away. The first camp is not even mentioned by Jesus because of the blatant immorality of their actions. This camp steals the money and uses it for their own benefit, disregarding the responsibility that came with the money that was entrusted to them. These men embrace the power of their masculinity, but wield it self-servingly, without care for those it harms. For these men, it is too difficult to be a good man, so rejecting the newly established channels of accountability and proudly returning to self-serving misogyny is the logical course of action. This is a rejection of accountability and embrace of power.
The next servant buries his money. The men in this camp shy away from traditional expressions of their masculinity and gravitate towards expression that signals that they are not dangerous. They successfully mitigate any unintentional harm, but reject the gifts of strength, protection, and leadership endowed to them. In doing this, they avoid causing harm with their power but steward it poorly because they are afraid of causing harm. This is a fear of accountability and subsequent rejection of power.
The third servant turns the five talents entrusted to him into ten talents.
These men recognize that they cannot possibly navigate masculinity from adolescence to death without mistake.
They recognize both the consequences of their mistakes in this endeavor and the necessity that the endeavor continues to be undertaken. Most importantly, they recognize their moral inadequacy, and their inability to succeed on their own. And so, they fall at the knees of the only man to be sinless. The only man to have all power, and therefore every opportunity to sin, and yet remain blameless. Giving up control to Jesus is the only way that these men can execute the office of the power entrusted to them, and when they do, they are gradually shaped into men after God's heart. Because of the Spirit of the only perfect man, they can be strong and tender, courageous and meek, forgiving and just.
The current masculine revival may find its roots in cultural developments borne out of injustice and deep injury, but has been transformed into a breathtaking display of God's ability to guide his children through the face of the certain failure they would face on their own. The same circumstances that have driven men to misogyny and shirked responsibility has led others to the loving arms of the Father and the vibrant eternal joy of His Kingdom.