The New Polarizations

Men and church, the Exvangelicals, faith and the city, and more in this week's roundup

Rob Henderson has another great piece about how increasing gender equality in the economy and law has actually lead to more gender differences in practice. We see that notably today in growing political polarization by gender.

I’d like to propose an idea from my home discipline of academic psychology: the gender-equality paradox. This emerged as one of the most mind-blowing findings that researchers published while I was pursuing my recent doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge.

The paradox is straightforward: Societies with higher levels of wealth, political equality, and women in the workforce show larger personal, social, and political differences between men and women. In other words, the wealthier and more egalitarian the country, the larger the gender differences.

The pattern exists not just for political ideology but also for things like academic preferences, physical aggression, self-esteem, frequency of crying, interest in casual sex, and personality traits such as extraversion. In all these categories, the differences have been largest in societies that have gone the furthest in attempting to treat women and men the same.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Prioritizing Marriage and Children

A very interesting Pew Research poll shows a large partisan skew in views on family. Only 19% of Biden voters believe society is better off if people prioritize marriage and children compared to 56% of Trump supporters.

This suggests a possible positive reinforcement cycle, where deep blue areas, which often have fewer children, explicitly deprioritize family friendly policies, which leads to even fewer families there (either through lower birth rates or relocations).

As society becomes increasingly single and childless, we will see incredible pressure to reorient government (and society) towards underwriting the lives of those people. For example, without family members to care for them in old age or in sickness, they may want more government paid care workers. Will our society be able to afford this?

Highly Educated Men Are More Likely to Attend Church Than Highly Educated Women

Religious data guru Ryan Burge has yet another very interesting piece showing that while religious attendance is positively correlated with education in general, highly educated men are more likely to attend church than highly educated women.

Here’s the money chart.

He writes:

But here’s what is fascinating - the last two sets of bar graphs. Among those with a four year college degree, there is absolutely no difference in religious attendance based on gender. About 24% of women and men attend weekly once you control for all kinds of demographic factors. The last set of bar graphs is an entirely different story. Getting a graduate degree barely boosts attendance for women - maybe a percentage point or two. But for men, the boost is huge - about five percentage points. There is no larger gender gap in attendance than between those with a graduate degree. About 29% of men are predicted to be weekly attenders compared to only 26% of women.

As always, click over to read the rest of this fascinating post.

This is yet another data point suggesting a possible emerging reversal in the polarity of religion. For a long time, more women than men attended church. But as the sexes are becoming increasingly polarized by gender (see Henderson above), and religion becomes increasingly right coded, it will be interesting to see if this ends up flipping the script and making going to church something men are more likely to do.

Reading the Exvangelicals

Hillsdale historian Miles Smith has been reading exvangelical memoirs so we don’t have to. He shares some of his thoughts about their common themes.

Fundamentally, exvangelicals seemed to have been told that a specific type of church was the true church, that true faith probably didn’t exist outside of it, and that the leaders of those churches could speak with near ex cathedra authority on any issue they deemed important.  The specifics may change from church to church–some tended to be vaguely charismatic, others strict dispensationalists, and still others a kind of independent folk Calvinist. But all shared a certain exclusivity and clericalism that defined their existence. These churches and this culture were governed ostensibly by the Bible, but ultimately it was a faith defined primarily by individual pastors.

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The idea of “Evangelical pastor as guru” is good evidence of how deep-seated this clericalism was. In Sarah McCammon’s The Exvangelicals she describes the materials she was given to address teen sexuality. It was generally written by ministers, and often by men. There is nothing wrong with a book about human sexuality by a male pastor, but McCammon can be forgiven for retroactively wincing at the graphic depictions of copulation in a book written by Tim Lahaye and his wife Beverly. The fact that evangelicals believe—and many still believe—that advice on the sex act is the prerogative of the pastoral office is evidence of a clericalist culture run amok.

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It is not coincidental that many, if not most, exvangelical memoirs are written by people who have had some background with charismatic influence, and why the specific Cold War confluence of legacy Evangelicals and charismatics created the conditions for the exvangelical movement.

Click over to read the whole thing. It’s interesting.

Faith and the City

Joel Kotkin and Anthony Lemus have an interesting essay in City Journal on faith and the city.

Throughout the long history of cities, religion has played a central, even dominant, role, providing education, charity, and moral ballast in places where social chaos often flourishes. From the days of the earliest Mesopotamian cities to the modern metropolis, religion has served as a source of inspiration—as evidenced by structures from Saint Peter’s to Saint Patrick’s—and a consolation for populations that otherwise would be left to the vicissitudes of the mean streets or the cold mercies of the state. Even in an age of rationalist skepticism, religion remains indispensable to city life.

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Today, urban Christian churches are striving again to be a spiritual and material bulwark for the poor and disenfranchised. Some religious leaders point to immigrants, particularly from Central and South America, as the hope for their own revival. Yet a Pew Research Center study found that the percentage of Catholic Latinos fell from 67 percent in 2010 to 43 percent in 2022, while the proportion of Latinos with no religious affiliation rose from 10 percent to 30 percent—the same level as that of the U.S. population as a whole.

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The decline in religious identification is an unwelcome development for urban education. Over the past decade, more than 1,000 Catholic schools have closed. Such schools have long been a place where working-class students can escape poor public schools to find a path to a better life. Overall, Catholic school students easily outperform their public school counterparts. In the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the average score among Catholic school fourth-graders is about 1.5 grade levels ahead of their public school peers. The differences are particularly marked among black and Latino students.

Thankfully, ambitious organizations like Seton Education Partners are pursuing a strategy to revive inner-city Catholic education. Founded in 2009, the group uses funds from private donors like the Simon Foundation and the Gerstner Family Foundation, notes Seton’s cofounder and managing director Stephanie Saroki de García, to develop classically oriented schools that reflect Catholic values but operate independently of the Catholic Church. (In 2017, Seton became the management organization for the Brilla schools.) So far, Seton runs 21 schools in California, New York, and Cincinnati, with another 18 planned for the next five years.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Sins of the Educated Class

David Brooks has a great column criticizing the failures of America’s educated classes.

The first is false consciousness. To be progressive is to be against privilege. But today progressives dominate elite institutions like the exclusive universities, the big foundations and the top cultural institutions. American adults who identify as very progressive skew white, well educated and urban and hail from relatively advantaged backgrounds.

This is the contradiction of the educated class. Virtue is defined by being anti-elite. But today’s educated class constitutes the elite, or at least a big part of it. Many of the curiosities of our culture flow as highly educated people try to resolve the contradiction between their identity as an enemy of privilege, and the fact that, at least educationally and culturally, and often economically, they are privileged.

Imagine you’re a social justice-oriented student or a radical sociologist, but you attend or work at a university with a $50 billion endowment, immense social power and the ability to reject about 95 percent of the people who apply. For years or decades, you worked your tail off to get into the most exclusive aeries in American life, but now you’ve got to prove, to yourself and others, that you’re on the side of the oppressed.

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This sort of cognitive dissonance often has a radicalizing effect. When your identity is based on siding with the marginalized, but you work at Horace Mann or Princeton, you have to work really hard to make yourself and others believe you are really progressive. You’re bound to drift further and further to the left to prove you are standing up to the man.

This, I think, explains the following phenomenon: Society pours hundreds of thousands of dollars into elite students, gives them the most prestigious launching pads fathomable, and they are often the ones talking most loudly about burning the system down.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Best of the Web

Richard Reeves: Six Facts on Men’s Health

Jeff Giesea: The remarkably talented and alienated late Millennial man

Mary Harrington: Normophobia

New York Times: The Women Rethinking Marriage and Family Life Because of Miranda July

Politico: Colorado’s Weed Market Is Coming Down Hard and It’s Making Other States Nervous - Businesses are shuttering or laying off workers as sales have plunged by $700 million

New Content and Media Mentions

Evangelicals Now reviewed Life in the Negative World

My podcast this week was with New York Times editorial board member Farah Stockman about her book American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears.

I also wrote an essay on Kathy Keller and the heroic feminine.