Young People Have a Major Religion Gender Gap

In recent years the gender gap has also increasingly become a political and cultural gap. Now it’s also a religious gap.

Gallup’s latest data, from 2024-2025, show 42% of young men saying religion is very important to them, up sharply from 28% in 2022-2023. By contrast, during this period, young women’s attachment to religion has held steady at about 30%.

With the recent surge in their attachment to religion, young men have returned to the high point of their expressed religiosity of the past 25 years, roughly tying the 43% found in 2000-2001. By contrast, women of all age groups and older men are at or near their historical lows.

Now normally when I look at aberrant polling among the younger generation, I think diversity is often a major overlooked factor, but the case here may not be that simple. It is a reflection of a larger phenomenon and one that runs counter to the usual trend of lower levels of religiosity in the West.

Young women were significantly more attached to religion than young men were at the start of the millennium, leading by nine percentage points (52% vs. 43%) in calling religion “very important” in their lives. That gap widened to as much as 16 points in the early to mid-2000s before steadily narrowing over the next decade.

The bad news there is that ‘political spirituality’ largely took the role of religion for a lot of young women, but is proving to be quite unsatisfying for young men. Modern woke politics has little to offer young men.

The religious gender gap also has serious political implications.

Since 2022-2023, attendance has risen seven points among young Republican men, eight points among young Republican women and three points among young Democratic men. Only young Democratic women show little change.

Which is also why we see growing shifts among young men politically even as young women continue moving leftwards.