Young men heading to church. . .

According to reports among those who chart such things, young men are heading to churches in greater numbers than young women.  While that ought to be something to celebrate, some are not so sure.  After all, they are heading to churches which have charted a course different from the one embarked upon by liberal and progressive Christians.  You can read all about it in this new Ryan Burge study: “The Religion of America's Young Adults — And how the gender gap could be the story going forward.”  Some of the points are listed below:

    … For the first time in modern American history, young men are now more religious than their female peers. They attend services more often and are more likely to identify as religious. 

    “We’ve never seen it before,” Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, said of the flip.

    Among Generation Z Christians, this dynamic is playing out in a stark way: The men are staying in church, while the women are leaving at a remarkable clip.

    Church membership has been dropping in the United States for years. But within Gen Z, almost 40 percent of women now describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, compared with 34 percent of men, according to a survey last year of more than 5,000 Americans by the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute.

    In every other age group, men were more likely to be unaffiliated. That tracks with research that has shown that women have been consistently more religious than men, a finding so reliable that some scholars have characterized it as something like a universal human truth.

   They place a higher value on traditional family life. Childless young men are likelier than childless young women to say they want to become parents someday, by a margin of 12 percentage points, according to a survey last year by Pew.

    The men and women of Gen Z are also on divergent trajectories in almost every facet of their lives, including education, sexuality and spirituality.

It does seem clear that these young men are searching for the very things society has largely rejected or marginalized -- traditional gender roles, marriage, children, transcendence, meaning, and purpose that goes beyond the sanctioned political and cultural values of the moment.  They are hungry for the very things that modern culture has deemed unnecessary or irrelevant to life and happiness.  Also significant is that they want to be men.  

Before we rush to celebrate the good news, we would do well to consider this carefully.  This is not about being conservative but about living out the values inherent in Scripture.  This is about authority posited in the Word of God that endures forever.  This is about order and the shame of society, rooted in marriage and expressed in family and children.  This is about leadership and not dominion, leadership shaped by the Scriptures and our Lord's own words and model of serving and loving.  This is about not simply holding onto the values of the past but expressing them positively and effectively in the present.  This is about a Scriptural identity rooted in baptism and not an ideology.  This is about the life of those whom God has mercifully called His own and gathered unto Himself as His Church.  If this is true, we dare not offer them something less than the catholic and apostolic faith, rooted in the Scripture, reflected in tradition, and manifest where God gathers His people in His name around His Word and Sacraments.  By the way, this is an observable truth in my own parish.  Here every week more single young fellows are in the congregation than single young women.  They are enamored by the call and challenge of what it means to live as Christ's own in the difficult world in which we find ourselves.  They are looking for a challenge and this is what we give them and all of God's people -- take up your cross, deny yourself, and follow Jesus!