Gender and Religiosity in the United States

Abstract

Religiosity is a combination of public and private religious practices, beliefs, and experiences. While diversity exists in how religiosity is measured, three central components are consistent across the scholarship: organizational religious engagement, non-organizational religious activities, and subjective religiosity. To measure organizational religious engagement, scholars frequently look at church attendance and participation in congregational activities. Non-organizational religious activities include frequency of prayer, reading the Bible or other religious materials, or requesting others to pray for you. Subjective or intrinsic religiosity includes self-assessed religiousness (where respondents are asked, “How religious would you consider yourself?”) or strength of affiliation, as well as specific beliefs, such as views of the afterlife, hell, and whether the Bible is the literal word of God. Various groups express different levels of religiosity. One of the most well-documented and consistent group-based differences in religiosity is that women, including white women and women of color, are more religious than are men across religions, time, and countries. Women report higher rates of church attendance, engagement in religious practices (including prayer and reading the Bible), and more consistent and higher levels of religious interest, commitment, and engagement. Many explanations for these gaps in religiosity exist including differences in personality and risk aversion, gendered socialization patterns, and patriarchal structures within churches. Scholars have engaged in robust debates around the degree to which explanations like risk assessment or gender role theory can account for differences in religious behavior between men and women. Yet unresolved, these discussions provide opportunities to bring together scholarship and theories from religious studies, sociology, gender studies, psychology, and political science. Religiosity shapes a variety of important political and social attitudes and behaviors, including political ideology and participation. The effects of religiosity on political attitudes are heterogeneous across men and women—for example, highly religious women and men are not equally conservative, nor do they equally oppose gay rights. The process by which religiosity shapes attitudes is also gendered; for example, the effects of women’s religiosity on political attitudes and participation are mediated by gendered attitudes. And while religiosity increases political participation, the effects are not even for men and women, nor across all groups of women. Future research might examine the differing effects of religiosity on subgroups of men and women, including evaluations of how intersecting social categories like race, gender, and class shape both levels of religious engagement and the degree to which religiosity influences other political and social behavior.

Straying from the Flock? A Look at How Americans’ Gender and Religious Identities Cross-Pressure Partisanship

“…Women are more religious than men on virtually every indicator—ranging from denominational affiliation, to religious intensity, to religious practices (Holman and Podrazik 2018; Mahalik and Lagan 2001). Religiosity—particularly Christianity—is an important cross-pressure for women in terms of their average tendency toward liberalism (Ondercin 2017).…”

representação da religiosidade para católicos no contexto do HIV

“…Fonte: Dados da pesquisa (2022). A religiosidade abordada neste estudo pautase nas definições avaliadas através da escala de religiosidade de DUKE 24 e que definem três dimensões com focos diferentes na experiência com o sagrado: a) a dimensão organizacional mede o engajamento na frequência e atuação em atividades congregacionais, muito relacionada ao espaço religioso, a instituição; b) a dimensão não organizacional expressam atividades de oração, leitura da Bíblia ou outros materiais religiosos, ou mesmo pedir a outras pessoas que orem por você; e c) a dimensão subjetiva ou intrínseca expressa uma autoavaliação de religiosidade acerca de crenças sobre sua afiliação religiosa 25 .…”

Racial Limitations on the Gender, Risk, Religion, and Politics Model

“…Whether it be to ease the anxiety of and hedge against eternal damnation or to seek social support for general worries, social scientists contend women seek religious communities and belief in an omnipotent god for their comfort (Miller and Stark 2002;Collett and Lizardo 2009). That is, rejecting belief or faith carries existential and social risks that women are more likely than men to avoid, whether it be due to socialization or biologically instantiated risk aversion (for a helpful discussion on the findings and challenges to this literature, see Holman and Podrazik 2018). Looking at beliefs in heaven and/or hell (e.g., the afterlife risk theory) do not consistently explain gender differences in religious behavior like service attendance or the importance of God in one's life, across samples in more than 70 countries (Freese and Montgomery 2007).…”

“…Religiosity in the United States is highly gendered; women are more likely to say that religion is important to them, to attend church services, and to practice religion privately (Trzebiatowska and Bruce 2012;Holman and Podrazik 2018). In fact, among U.S. Christians, women are more likely than men to have read the Bible in the past year and to have read it significantly more days when asked about their reading habits from the past month (Friesen 2017).…”