WOMEN are in general more likely to believe in and practice a
religion than men are. The difference is not vast if you aggregate
all creeds and countries (83.4% of women identify with a faith
versus 79.9% of men) but for certain countries and faiths the gap
is striking. In America, for example, 60% of women see religion as
very significant in their lives versus 47% of men, according to Pew
Research, a think-tank in Washington, DC. Across the world,
female Muslims are only fractionally more devout than their male
co-religionists, but Christian women far outstrip men in their
levels of piety. What’s going on here?
One factor is that in the practice of long-established religions,
women have more staying power, including in times of
repression. Under regimes which aim to abolish all external signs
of religion, women can discreetly transmit the faith to their
progeny. Ask any devout person raised under communism how he
or she retained a faith, and a grandmother is usually part of the
answer. And whatever the political regime, among religious
practices that revolve around the home (say, keeping a shrine or
prayer corner with incense and sacred pictures), the job of
keeping the flame alight, literally and metaphorically, generally
falls to women.
But there’s another consideration. Among certain new forms of
faith, women often lead the way in making the religious switch,
hoping their families will follow. That is particularly true of the
Pentecostal churches which have gained ground in Latin America
at the expense of Catholicism. Right from its beginnings in Los
Angeles in the early 20th century, Pentecostalism has presented a
paradox. Its bureaucratic administration has been a male
preserve, at least as much as other faiths. But Pentecostalism
also honours spontaneous ecstatic experiences and what it
describes as direct revelations from God or prophecy. And women
seem at least as likely to have those as men.
In a poor community in El Salvador or Brazil, enduring all the
stresses of transition from the countryside to the city, more
practical motives may be at work. For a hard-pressed female
home-maker, the discipline and strong grass-roots organisation of
a Pentecostal church can seem like a way of stabilising the family
and steering the menfolk away from narcotics or violence. In
Colombia, where female Protestants outnumber male ones by
62% to 38%, women convert to evangelicalism, and urge their
husbands to follow, in the hope that less of the family budget will
go on intoxicants and other mainly male forms of misbehaviour,
writes anthropologist Elizabeth Brusco. One could sum up the
situation like this: in situations of stress, ranging from persecution
to economic transition to breakdown, religion can be a form of
resilience and social capital, and women are the main guardians
and transmitters of that capital.


www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2016/04/economist-explains-7?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/whywomenaremorereligiousthanmen

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