Walk into a typical American church on a Sunday morning and you are likely to find more women than men. There is nothing particularly new or even surprising about this trend, but if you compare the gender composition of evangelical and liberal churches you just might notice an interesting - and perhaps puzzling - reversal of the usual pattern. Unlike more socially conservative, and even moderate or “Mainline” churches, liberal congregations actually have more men than women in the pews. In fact, according to data from the Pew Forum’s 2008 Religious Landscape Survey, evangelical Protestant churches are 53% female while liberal churches are 54% male.

Recent polls conducted by the Gallup Organization (2006) as well as the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey" (2008; hereafter “Pew Survey”) have shown that women and older Americans are more likely to self identify with, and belong to, an organized religious tradition. According to the Pew Survey, all Christian traditions have a higher percentage of female membership and all other traditions have a higher percentage of male members than the national survey total. A majority of Americans self report as belonging to a Christian tradition. Many religious groups are disproportionately older than the total sample. For example, according to the Pew Survey, approximately half of all mainline Protestants and Jews are over 50 years old.

Most people know that Christians (especially conservative Christians) typically oppose a host of sexual behaviors, including premarital sex. However, all too often what most people know tends to come from their immediate context and not from careful empirical study. To see if there really does exist a correlation between Christianity and opposition to premarital sex, sociologist Stephen Gyimah (Queen’s University, Canada) and colleagues investigated the sexual attitudes of Christians in Kenya, finding that Pentecostals were most opposed to premarital sex.

For many in the West, religion seems to oppress women. Conservative Christians not uncommonly reject the idea of female clergy, educators, and leaders. While this may (all too) roughly characterize Christianity, the question remains as to whether other religions fare any better. Drawing upon world-wide data, covering most of the world’s religions, Stephanie Seguino (University of Vermont) indeed found a correlation between how one views the importance of religion (whichever religion that may be) and one’s attitudes about gender inequality.