Why Do More Women Than Men Still Believe in God?

Last week, a new study confirmed something essential about women, something that refuses to budge, even though many say it’s long past time. Professors at Trinity College in Connecticut analyzed the numbers of Americans unaffiliated to any religion [2]. While the number of male nonbelievers was rocketing, the overall totals were slowed by women hitching themselves to the anchor of faith: “Gender difference is a brake on the growth of the No Religion population,” says the study, which found that 19 percent of men were no longer denizens of a religious America, while only 12 percent of women live outside the faithful fold. In the past, one could say that women tended the hearth, and men participated in the marketplace. But today?

These statistics are consistent with a recent Pew Forum summary of religion in America [3]. In fact, a researcher at Pew told me that studies going back as far as he can remember have shown this discrepancy, and reaching back into history, even prehistory, we find the same story. And yet, major religions—put down your crystals and pocket those pentagrams, ladies—have always favored men. Not a single major faith is led by members of its female flock, and the more deeply adherent a religious group becomes, the less freedom it offers its women, not to mention power. It's hard not to compare women sticking with faith to wives confined to bad marriages: They’re so committed to the institution that they'll willingly shrink under mistreatment just to maintain their own status quo.

Researchers have offered many theories about why women are religious in greater numbers than men. Most are inconclusive; all are fascinating. Some investigators locate the engine of belief in our very brain chemistry, and find the female brain far more apt to sense the divine. Canadian cognitive neuroscientist Michael Persinger, the reigning cleric of the neurology of belief, has asserted that the “experience” of God, or feeling the presence of the divine, is literally built into the brain, specifically in the limbic system or the temporal lobe. When Persinger applied magnetic fields over the temporal lobe to mimic the reaction he found in electromagnetic studies, the gender difference was “quite impressive”—that women sensed the presence of a “sentient being” in greater numbers than men.

“Belief,” Persinger told me, “relates more to how the person relates, interprets, and reconstructs the experience.” In other words, even when men and women had the same response in the brain, women were more apt to attribute it to something divine, “out of body.” Other scientists have found these limbic tendencies particularly pronounced in adolescent girls, concurrent with the final stages of brain development. As Barry Kosmin, a coauthor of the new Trinity College study says, “That's why when anybody sees the Virgin Mary, it's a couple of young girls on a mountainside in Southern Europe.” (Nota bene: This week, Sam Harris—who gained fame by authoring The End of Faith but is by training a neuroscientist—released his new findings on the neural correlates of belief [4]. He told me in this case he found no difference between the workings of the female and male brain.)

Some researchers hypothesize that women are hardwired to believe because of evolutionary imperatives. Belief in God—or the Mount Olympus ensemble cast, or a phalanx of wood spirits, and so on—has long been connected with tribal ritual, and formed the center of communities. Women relied on these communities for the survival of their children, while men were off spearing buffalo, pillaging neighboring settlements—or whatever the caveman business trip furnished. The relationship between belonging and belief is an ancient one. It may have resulted in the development of certain alleles connected to a sense of God, or at least a commitment to religion.

Or, instead of changing our very biology, it may have simply yielded a deeply ingrained psychology. One of the more interesting essays I found on this topic was published, interestingly enough, on the indie-porn site Suicide Girls [5], occasioned by the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth— likely the only time that site will be featured on Richard Dawkins' homepage. Elisabeth Cornwell, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Colorado, wrote about how disbelief has always represented rebellion and nonconformity, which meant exclusion from the group—in other words, social suicide for a girl. Furthermore, as Cornwell says, “religion creates the illusion of kinship, and kinship is crucial to a woman's reproductive success.”

About a decade ago, Michael Shermer, the author of How We Believe and a columnist at Scientific American, conducted a study [6] in which he found that women explain their belief in “emotional” terms (“emotional comfort, a desire for meaning and purpose in life”), while men express “rational” bases for belief (citing intelligent design and the notion that “without God there is no basis for morality, existence of evil, pain, and suffering”). He says that he chalks up the greater number of male nonbelievers to the fact that “it's a guy thing to obsess about the empirical nature of the world.” In other words, atheism is from Mars, Wicca is from Venus. In any case, he sees religiosity as synonymous with conventionality, which women have long been under the yoke to preserve. Women's association of conformity with survival traverses the disciplines when researchers agonize about our greater piety.

Whatever the explanation, social scientists are baffled by women sticking to faith in such great numbers. It used to be understood that men working in the marketplace were exposed to ideas and alternatives that homebound women would never know, and thus women hewed to the church (convention), while men rejected it. This is partially how we understand the far greater numbers of nonreligious women in Europe: When things changed, they changed with it. Here, religion has become more feminized—at least in many circles—or, as Barry Kosmin says, “church is like going to the Oprah Winfrey Show.” One reason religion caters to women is its need to control their behavior “around sex, procreation, that kind of stuff,” adds Kosmin. Still, half a century since the world-inverting advent of the Pill, here we still are. Furthermore, says his coauthor Ariela Keysar, women are the ones who usually inculcate their own daughters in religion, despite what little power it offers them. “It's this chain of assigning roles—men don't have it in the same way,” she says.

Certainly, not all strands of religion—even within the Big Three of monotheism—overtly preach wifely submission, or wrap us in hijabs, or make us stand in the back of the temple, if we get to go at all. But, as Ophelia Benson, author of Does God Hate Women? [7] pointed out to me, “People tend to exaggerate how much liberal religion there is.” Certainly it’s the illiberal pews that are increasingly packed with new followers. She writes,“Religion doesn't originate ideas about female subordination and male authority, but it does justify them.” And yet, we keep showing up for more.

If this were a different type of personal relationship we were talking about, instead of the one most women say they feel with God, maybe we'd be weeping about it on Oprah's actual couch, debating whether we are hardwired for this, whether we perpetuate it, why men would never stand for it. But instead, though women's greater belief is an age-old truism, and though we show no indication that we will evolve our own psychology, should our brain chemistry permit it, we don't talk about it at all.

Photograph of a cross necklace on the homepage by Jack Hollingsworth/Getty.