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Who are more important to the success of a church, men or women?

The Role of Men in the Religiosity of Children (June 1, 2023)

This question begs the question of whether men and women have different religious traits. Surveys indicates that they do, but it is not as polarizing as some might suspect. For example, men generally give more money to the church, but that is likely due to having higher incomes on average and more often than not take care of the finances in the home. Women and men claim to embrace religion at about the same rate but, for those who don’t, men tend to reject religion more often while women stay in the middle ground1. Women claim to be ‘spiritual but not religious’ more often than men2.

However, it has been postulated that men are critical to the very ongoing existence of the church. This is because men usually are or become fathers, and a landmark study into the role of fathers in the spirituality of children resulted in some startling conclusions about the importance of the paternal role.

First, the boring part. The following is based on a comprehensive study by the Swiss government conducted in 1994 and reported in 20003. It examined the effect of parent religiosity on their children’s long term religiosity. The study has been commented upon by various church groups, some suggesting that the Swiss study is consistent with the results of other less rigorous reviews in England and the US.

The overarching conclusion is that children take their spiritual direction from their fathers rather than their mothers. When placed in table format, the statistics are both informative and startling. (Note that there should be nine father-mother combinations, but for some reason only seven combinations were reported upon. The data for the other categories might have been inconclusive.)

You can see that children’s long term attendance tracks with the father’s attendance rather than with the mother’s. One commentary suggested that children’s habits of all kinds track more closely with the mother for domestic matters (i.e., in the home) and with the father’s for external matters, including religious practices. However, I have no idea if there is data to make such a sweeping conclusion.

There is one other somewhat disturbing trend apparent from this data. That is, children’s attendance increases when the mother's attendance decreases. Check out the top three rows above. The same trend is apparent from the two groupings that follow. I cannot even begin to understand this result.

So, are men generally more or less likely to attend church than women? A study of religiosity in Canada reported by Statistics Canada in 2021 includes data on this subject.4 In response to whether a respondent participates in group religious activities at least once per week or once per month, 21% of men and 26% of women said yes. Despite their relative importance to the long term health of the Church, men do lag women in attendance.

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1. Bibby, Reginald W, Resilient Gods: being pro-religious, low religious or no religious in Canada,

UBC Press, 2017, page 149

2. Bibby, page 152

3. Council of Europe, European Population Committee (CDPO) The demographic characteristics of national minorities in certain European States The demographic of linguistic and religious group in Switzerland, page 38, https://search.coe.int/cm/Pages/result_details.aspx?ObjectID=09000016804fb7b1

4. Statistics Canada, Religiosity in Canada and its evolution from 1985 to 2019, https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2021001/article/00010-eng.htm