The Return of the Religious Male

It has been 75 years since a young Yale graduate, William F. Buckley, indicted his alma mater in his masterful God and Man at Yale, arguing that Yale showed contempt for the traditional religious values inculcated in most new graduates during their formative youth. In the three generations since, Americans more generally have become far less religious, evidenced by a sharp drop in church attendance. But a few years ago, something happened in this march towards an agnostic, if not an atheistic society: young men started going back to church in impressive numbers.

A new Gallup poll says 42 percent of men in their 20s say religion is “very important” to them, up very sharply from only 28 percent in a poll conducted just three years earlier. By contrast, there is no similar spiritual upsurge among women, so now a far higher proportion of young men say that they are religious than women, a startling result since historically women have shown a stronger affinity for religion, and that still holds for older age groups. Speaking anecdotally from the vantage point of living in a college town, I have seen a marked upsurge in church attendance at my rather typical state university, concentrated among men, to be sure, with some occasionally bringing along their girlfriends. (Read “Catholic Converts and the Limits of the Trend” and “Why Are So Many Protestant Students Converting to Catholicism?“)

Why is this happening? I think it is because college-aged American males feel like they are part of an oppressed minority group, and that American collegiate society shows hostility and contempt for them. The secular world of the present has replaced a historic role of venerating men for their leadership in the evolution of Western civilization with a new one where males are portrayed for having caused most of the evil inflicted in modern society.

In the last decade, the federal government, namely the U.S. Department of Education, declared that male campus sexual molestation was a huge problem, beginning a period of Star Chamber justice directed against collegiate males and their alleged propensity for sexual violence. “Diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) initiatives were explicitly anti-male as well. Even TV commercials have sharply reduced the use of male actors, especially white ones. History was refashioned, with figures like Thomas Jefferson portrayed increasingly as wealthy, randy white guys who raped slaves when they were not otherwise mistreating them, as opposed to their earlier veneration for such things as authoring the Declaration of Independence or founding the University of Virginia.