How A Male-Dominant Church Could Save Faith-Based Films
(ANALYSIS) Things seem really good for faith-based films right now. Kingdom Story Company’s “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” opened to box office success and rave reviews. The team behind “The Chosen” just announced a universe of spin-offs and an animated TV show. During the weekend of Sept. 13-15, four out of the top 10 movies at the U.S box office were films for the faith-based market (“Am I Racist?,” “Reagan,” “The Forge” and “God’s Not Dead: In God We Trust”).
And yet, the genre faces a demographic cliff. The market for faith-based films has always been driven by Christian moms. And as I wrote last year, with fewer women getting married and having kids (and single women increasingly leaving Christianity), that market is inevitably going to shrink.
A big shift may actually save the long-term future of faith-based films: The rise of a more masculine American church. The most important demographic change in the American church this year has been making headlines.
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For the first time in memory, a generation of men were going to church more than women, according to The New York Times: “We’ve never seen it before,” Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, said of the flip. … In every other age group, men were more likely to be unaffiliated. That tracks with research that has shown that women have been consistently more religious than men, a finding so reliable that some scholars have characterized it as something like a universal human truth.”
According to the Survey Center on American Life, 39 percent of Generation Z women identify as religiously unaffiliated compared to 34 percent of Gen Z men.
A big part of this is the mass exodus of women from church. Fifty-four percent of Gen Z adults who left their formative religion are women; 46 percent are men. A major component of this is single women giving up on a church they perceive as inflexibly sexist and homophobic. Yet, that’s not the full story. Burge points out evidence that Gen Z men are more likely to be religious than Millennial men. So there is an actual increase in male enthusiasm — not just a bigger decrease in female enthusiasm.
Some argue the very thing that women say is driving them away is what’s attracting men. Campus ministry leaders like Derek Rishmawy say one of the reasons men are going back to church is they perceive it as “right-coded” and “more traditional.”
“For some young men he counsels, Christianity is perceived as ‘one institution that isn’t initially and formally skeptical of them as a class,’ especially in the campus setting” Rishmawy said. ‘We’re telling them, ‘you are meant to live a meaningful life.’”
Thinkers, such as Dr. Jordan Peterson, have helped shape young men’s understanding of Christianity in a way that is appealing to them (I discuss this more in my review of his new book here).
Many were quick to point out potential downsides to this. Most credit their mother with their religious formation. What happens with fewer women committed to the church?
Rous Douthat, columnist for The New York Times, has argued that these trends might double down on male-female polarization in society: “Imagine masculine-inflected conservative churches getting steadily more patriarchal and also featuring skewed sex ratios that make it impossible for many would-be patriarchs to actually find a spouse, encouraging increased young male hostility to nontraditionalist women.”
What nobody is talking about is that male-skewing pews are likely to reverse church decline. It may even contribute to the Western Christian revival many Christians have prayed for.
First, there’s evidence that kids tend to adopt the religious enthusiasm of their fathers more than their mothers (as written in the book “Handing Down the Faith” by Christian Smith and Amy Adamczyk). While the oft-quoted statistic, “When dad comes to Christ first, 93% of families will follow,” is probably false, there’s still decent agreement that dads have some form of disproportionate impact on their children’s faith.
It may be the reason that Christians tend to credit their mothers for their faith is not because women are better at transmitting it, but because men are less likely to have religious enthusiasm in general. Which in turn could be a driver in intergenerational abandonment of faith in general.
But, as culture critic Aaron Renn points out, with more men than women in the pews, churches will likely begin tailoring their presentation of Christianity to a more male sensibility. This may, in turn, increase male enthusiasm for Christianity, which they may then pass down to their children.
Second, organizations that are majority male tend to attract men and women, while organizations that are majority female tend to repel men, and then lose the women, too. Per Block, professor of sociology at the University of Zurich, crafted a study that found that men were more likely to leave an occupation when it reached a certain critical mass of women, all other things equal.
Likewise, Dr. Richard Reeves, in his book “Of Boys and Men,” notes that many universities are secretly prioritizing male students with soft affirmative action because they see whenever too many women enroll, men don’t. And when not enough men enroll, women stop enrolling. Likewise, despite the claims that women are leaving the church because of sexism, it's the mainline churches that liberalized and allowed female pastors whose membership collapsed first and fastest.
This trend has worked on a macro level in America and across the West over the past 100-plus years as well. As apologist Nancy Pearcey notes in “The Toxic War on Masculinity,” when men left the home for the workforce during the Industrial Revolution, there was deep anxiety at what that would do to society, and a big social push by preachers and women to bring men back to the home.
That push failed. Instead, women followed men into the workforce and copied their jump to hookup culture and workaholism. Likewise, Leon Podle’s “The Church Impotent” points out that many revivals in the 19th century attracted both men and women to the faith — but ultimately failed to create a sustained revival (losing men first, followed by women).
But won’t the sexism and right-wing politics of these increasingly male-centric churches turn off women? Not necessarily. The workforce was sexist when women entered it, and many consider it sexist now. Sydney Sweeney recently said that Hollywood, even post-#MeToo wasn’t really feminist.”
“This entire industry, all people say, is ‘Women empowering other women.’ None of it’s happening. All of it is fake and a front for all the others–t that they say behind everyone’s back,” Sweeney said.
But she isn’t responding by leaving Hollywood. She and other women still fight to be part of Hollywood and other “sexist industries.” Why? Because these male-dominated institutions are still creating environments women want to be part of.
We see this play out in franchises as well. Marvel and Star Wars franchises were gigantic hits. But male fans started turning against them once they felt like they were shifting toward elevating female characters and sidelining or denigrating the male ones. This change drove away male fans, but didn’t attract new female ones (hence why Marvel has shifted gears toward movies like “Deadpool & Wolverine”).
Meanwhile, female-centric films of the past two years (specifically “Barbie,” “Inside Out 2” and “Wicked”) that have blown up have been the ones that are unapologetically feminine in the ways that successful Marvel and Star Wars movies are unapologetically masculine. And they still exist in an industry that is largely male-dominated.
Those who want a growing church and faith-based industry (let alone a society at large) that is more egalitarian, and where female-led institutions don’t create spirals of degrowth, need to ask: Why does this keep happening? Are there ways to make female-centric environments more male-friendly so they want to stay?
Murrow gives an example of a male-friendly female-led church at the end of his book. If the answer is we need to do better at raising men to be feminists, why has that not worked so far? What can be done differently?
Meanwhile, those who embrace — or at least are willing to work with — this correlation between masculine institutions and growth presents both exciting opportunities and potential dangers.
A church that is growing with both men and women will mean more lost souls saved. It will also mean fewer Christian women who can’t find an “equally yoked” husband. It will mean that the kids of these marriages will be more likely to retain their faith as they get older. And it might mean less toxic masculinity, as Pearcey notes, that men who go to church regularly are the least toxic male demographic in the United States. Globally as well, when men convert to Christianity, society becomes less exploitative of women.
As Douthat argues: “Churches that seem like home to young men are particularly well positioned to do that kind of work — stabilizing and elevating men who are currently adrift and making them more appealing as potential spouses than any currently available force in either ‘normie’ or very online culture.”
For the faith-based film industry, this means a sustainable long-term market. More Christian marriages mean more moms continuing to support family-friendly dramas like “The Chosen” and “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.” It also means the opportunity to create different kinds of films that haven’t had a market before: Christian action movies and horror movies, for example, will have an audience for them now.
Movies like “Nefarious” will have a bigger market, as will male-skewing Christian platforms like LOOR. Daily Wire’s upcoming fantasy adventure show “The Pendragon Cycle” will likely perform gangbuster numbers. As faith-based films appeal more to men, you will also more likely see more men enter the industry to make movies. Which, in turn, will attract women into making faith-based films. And as faith-based films start to “brand’ Christianity as more male-friendly, this will likely draw more men to the walls of the church.
Both the church and the faith-based film industry will have to figure out how to avoid the kind of female exclusion and exploitation that leads to backlash and exodus from the church without becoming the female-majority culture that causes mass male exodus. If they don’t, the cycle will just continue. Conservatives often fantasize about turning back the clock. But the problem with turning back the clock is that history repeats itself.
American Christianity changing to a male-skewing faith for maybe the first time — if it continues — will change the face of the country in a myriad of ways, from politics, to family to culture. And given the influence of American TV on the faith-based film industry is not the least significant. Whether that’s for good or ill will depend partly, as always, on the Christians who engage with them.
Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York City. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at his website josephholmesstudios.com.