For the first time, young men are more religious than young women

I noticed an article in the Financial Times about a growing divide between young women and young men. Young women are  increasingly leftist, and young men are increasingly conservative. Surveys of young men and young women have found that young men are more conservative on abortion and LGBT than young women. And now young men are more religious than young women.

Now, I want to be clear in this post that I am not criticizing all women. I am criticizing the majority of YOUNG WOMEN. Older women don’t usually have these problems, especially married older women.

First, let’s take a look at the previous article, from the far-left UK Independent:

An analysis of survey data from across the developing world had found that “a new global gender divide” is emerging. The analysis, conducted by the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch, showed that the developed world’s young women have rapidly become more liberal. Young men, however, have either become more conservative (as in the US) or been much slower to become more progressive (as in the UK). Gen Z, Burn-Murdoch concluded, is “two generations, not one.”

[…]Quoting similar figures to those in the FT, and noting that political views have become more tightly bound to personal identity, a Washington Post editorial warned that members of Gen Z will struggle to pair off romantically.

Young men, statistically speaking, are more likely to side with the weak against the strong. Since abortion harms unborn children, and divorce and same-sex marriage harm born children, men typically oppose these behaviors. But statistically speaking, young women more often side with the selfish adults against the children.

Naturally there are exceptions, but the statistics show that young men are more conservative on moral issues than young women. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the issue of abortion, which is really just about whether selfish adults can resort to murdering their own children in order to escape the consequences of no-commitment sex.

In September 2024, Gallup explained how young men and young women view abortion:

For this, Gallup reviewed 24 questions from its trends archive that measure Americans’ beliefs or positions on widely debated policy-related issues, and that Gallup has asked frequently enough to produce sufficient sample sizes of young men and women across the three periods… On five of these, the percentage of young women holding the liberal position has increased by more than 15 points. These have to do with the environment, abortion and gun laws.

  • Young women have become 18 points more likely to support broad abortion rights, saying abortion should be legal under any or most circumstances (rather than in only a few or no circumstances). Their preference for this position rose from 42% to 60% between 2008-2016 and 2017-2024.

The number for young men is much lower than 60% at only 48%!

So, what happens to young men when they take these traditional MALE positions on issues, and society disapproves of them? Well, they turn to God for vindication of their good moral views. If society won’t approve of young men for protecting the unborn from abortion, and protecting children from divorce and same-sex marriage, then young men will have to find their vindication somewhere else. And that somewhere else is God.

Here’s the latest from the far-left New York Times: (archived)

For the first time in modern American history, young men are now more religious than their female peers. They attend services more often and are more likely to identify as religious.

[…]Among Generation Z Christians, this dynamic is playing out in a stark way: The men are staying in church, while the women are leaving at a remarkable clip.

Church membership has been dropping in the United States for years. But within Gen Z, almost 40 percent of women now describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, compared with 34 percent of men, according to a survey last year of more than 5,000 Americans by the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute.

To be accurate, I don’t think that young women have been more religious than men. If you look at the kinds of books that young women tend to read, it’s more about comfort and life enhancement. They are not looking to get their orders from God. They are looking to get their desires met by God. And you can see that coming out in the new trends of “manifesting” that is so popular with young women.

By contrast, young men are more likely to turn to apologetics, science, history and theology. Young women were only “spiritual”, they were not looking to sacrifice themselves in order to serve God. You can see this by looking at what books young women and men read. Young women tend to read people like Rachel Hollis,  Rachel Held Evans, and Sarah Young. Young men see religion as being about their duties to others. They read people like J. Warner Wallace, Frank Turek and Sean McDowell. They want to learn how to tell people the truth, and tell people right and wrong. They want to lead in moral and spiritual areas. They want to make the world a better place for the weakest people.

How did this happen? Well, we have had generation after generation of pietistic Christian parents and pietistic Christian pastors who thought that it was the height of chivalry to only apply the Bible to young men, and never to young women. Young men need to be “challenged”, but never young women. People acted as if women had some sort of hotline to God through their emotions, and could never be judged for any of their questionable policy preferences and choices.

My question for you is this: do you think that these pietistic parents and pietistic pastors will finally stop asking the question “Where are all the good men?” and start asking a much better question “Where are all the good women?” Because I can tell you right now, conservative religious men are not going to be interested in dating or marrying these secular leftist young women.

Marriage is a huge risk for young men, in a world of no-fault divorce, biased divorce courts and feminized public schools. Good young men are not going to take those risks just to give secular leftist young women their “happily ever after” once they tire of “having fun” with hot bad boys, and want to settle down. And no amount of shaming and blaming is going to force good men to take those risks.

By the way, I’ve noticed that a lot of good young men are now seeking out friendships with more traditional older women. They are looking for sanity, and validation for their good moral and religious views. That’s not surprising. They’ll go where they are respected.

Why are teachers and other talkers paid less than engineers and other doers?

The meme below makes fun of unionized public school teachers, who feel entitled to the same salary and benefits as doctors, software engineers, etc. in the private sector. So, the point of this meme is simple, it’s to point out that the teachers who belong to teacher unions are ignorant of basic economics, specifically, the law of supply and demand.

Basic Economics: Prices are set by supply and demand
Basic Economics: In a free market, prices are set by supply and demand

When there is more demand for a product or service than there is a supply for it, then prices go up. When there is more supply for a product or service than there is a demand for it, prices go down.

A good place to see this explained is in a book by famous black economist Thomas Sowell. Thomas Sowell has written many books, but he wrote one book in particular for people who have no knowledge of basic economics. It’s called “Basic Economics: A Citizen’s Guide to the Economy“. And the first few chapters explain how prices are set by supply and demand:

  1. What is Economics?
  2. The Role of Prices
  3. Price Controls
  4. An Overview of Prices

It turns out that there are two views of how wages are set in an economy:

The labor theory of value (LTV) is a theory of value that argues that the economic value of a good or service is determined by the total amount of “socially necessary labor” required to produce it.

LTV is usually associated with Marxian economics… The LTV is central to Marxist theory, which holds that the working class is exploited under capitalism, and dissociates price and value. Marx did not refer to his own theory of value as a “labour theory of value”.

Mainstream neoclassical economics tends to reject the need for a LTV, concentrating instead on a theory of price determined by supply and demand.

Marxists economists believe that the value of a good or service is determined by the “social utility” of the work produced. But classical (“free market”) economists believe that value is determined by the scarcity of the good or service relative to the demand from consumers.

So, a Marxist economist might say “teaching English to 5 year olds is valuable because it is relevant and meaningful”. But, a classical economist would say “conducting a security audit on distributed point-of-sale system is valuable, because very few people can do it, but many people want it”.

I’ve noticed that school teachers and non-STEM university students and professors are very likely  to hold to the labor theory of prices and wages. Robert Nozick wrote a paper about why this happens. It turns out that “wordsmiths” (his word) are conditioned by their performance in the classroom to expect success in the free market economy. But when they find that their “brilliance” in English poetry, Medieval history, or lesbian dance theory has no value to anyone else, they complain that the economy is being manipulated by powerful people. Marxism is a coping mechanism for people who value academic acclaim more than doing something useful for their neighbors. The Marxists study easy things that no one cares about, and then they can’t get paid because millions of people can do them. The free market people focus on the customer, so they study hard things like computer science and petroleum engineering that are in demand from customers. And they get paid more.

Starting and Mid-Career salaries by profession (click for larger image)
Starting and Mid-Career salaries by profession (click for larger image)

Consider this article from College Pulse about a survey of 10,590 undergraduate students:

Students with certain majors are far more likely than their peers to approve of socialism. Philosophy majors, in particular, have a positive view of socialism. Nearly 8 in 10 (78%) say they view the economic system favorably, followed by 64% of anthropology majors, and 58% of both English and international relations majors. Accounting and finance majors are least likely to view socialism positively (20% and 22% respectively).

Do you know what accounting and finance students have to study? Basic economics.

As soon as I got my first job as a software engineer, and finished my study of Christian apologetics, the very next thing I studied was economics. It was Dr. Jay Richards who got me interested in it, when I heard him speaking about economics in an apologetics lecture for Stand to Reason. I contacted him, and he recommended the works of two famous economists, F. A. Hayek and Thomas Sowell. And that’s what I want to recommend to you, too. Our continued liberty and prosperity depends on ordinary Americans taking the time to educate themselves about basic economics.

Did Amber Thurman die from pro-life laws or from abortion pill complications?

A lot of people are arguing against pro-life laws in red states. Basically, they are saying that laws that protect unborn children must all be repealed, because here is one woman who stopped being alive while un-aliving her unborn children. In particular, people are citing an article in Pro Publica, written by Kavitha Surana. She has degrees in European History and European Studies. Is she right?

Here is what The Federalist article, which is written by an OB/GYN says:

The latest is ProPublica’s story of a Georgia woman who died after a North Carolina abortionist gave her chemical abortion pills — which, contrary to Democrat narratives, are unsafe. The article, however, pretends the death was caused by Georgia’s pro-life laws. The author of the story repeatedly attempts to conflate a procedure used to treat miscarriages, dilation and curettage (D&C), with elective abortion.

In ProPublica’s telling, 28-year-old Amber Nicole Thurman had ingested the chemical abortion pill regimen, which consists of the drugs mifepristone and misoprostol. Mifepristone ends the life of the developing human being; misoprostol helps achieve complete expulsion of the embryo.

It’s worth noting that the FDA’s 2000 approval of mifepristone acknowledged its risks and enacted safety requirements, including a seven-week gestational limit, requiring women to see a physician in person, and a mandatory one-time post-abortion appointment to confirm that the uterus was empty and that bleeding had subsided.

[…]But thanks to Democrat efforts to relax safety requirements for abortion pills, important safeguards no longer apply. When Thurman experienced “complications” from the abortion, which ProPublica wrongly asserts are “rare,” she went to the hospital for a D&C.

[…]Here Kavitha Surana, the story’s author, fails to note the difference between elective abortion and non-abortive D&Cs. She writes: “But just that summer, [Thurman’s state of Georgia] had made performing [D&Cs] a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.”

So, are D&Cs a felony, like Kavitha says? Nope.

This is a gross mischaracterization of the Georgia law. Performing a D&C is not a felony in Georgia (or anywhere else in the nation), nor has it been criminalized. It remains a standard medical procedure — and an indispensable one in cases like Thurman’s. It is always legal in every state because, unlike abortion, it is not intentional feticide.

So that article is by an OB/GYN. Here’s an article from the Daily Signal which is written by a lawyer. The author says that Amber Thurman was also supposed to get an ultrasound, but that requirement was also removed by the Democrats:

Amber Nicole Thurman died after she took the abortion pill, deregulated by the FDA (with multiple safety restrictions eliminated), which caused complications and left parts of her twin unborn babies inside her.

And note – Amber died before she could get the perfectly legal D&C procedure. It’s not illegal, and it’s not a felony because of pro-life laws:

Doctors monitored her condition and hospitalized her, but Thurman died before they could do a D&C (dilation and curettage) to remove the remaining parts of her unborn twins after the incomplete abortion.

Now, Pro Publica’s version of the events was picked up by lots of left-wing news outlets, despite the fact that the AUTHOR of that article has no earned degrees (medicine / law) in the topics that she is writing about, and no private sector work experience in the topics that she is writing about. I chose the articles from The Federalist and Daily Signal because the authors had the right degrees, and the right experience.

Map of States with Pro-Life Laws 2024
Map of States with Pro-Life Laws 2024

I think people need to be a lot more skeptical about articles on medical topics that are written by people with degrees in “European Studies”. This is a question to be decided by doctors and lawyers.