Young adult women are leaving churches in droves, as recent studies show. If you’re part of the evangelical world, as I was for more than a decade, you can see and feel it happening. If you aren’t, recent articles like Ruth Graham’s New York Times piece and Marc Ramirez’s USA Today piece flesh out the issue.
Liz Cooledge Jenkins
In Ramirez’s interviews, pastors and other analysts wring their hands and wonder: Is this an “emerging area of concern,” like a “check engine” light that appears intermittently and “you don’t know whether it will fix itself or get worse” (as political science professor Ryan Burge puts it)? Or is it a full-on “four-alarm fire” (as pastor and church consultant Tod Bolsinger says)?
To me, as a Millennial woman who left evangelicalism for reasons I wrote about in Nice Churchy Patriarchy: Reclaiming Women’s Humanity from Evangelicalism, the whole question of “how bad is this problem?” emerges from a perspective I do not quite share. I do not see through the eyes of male church leaders who view women’s departure from religious institutions as a problem. I see through the eyes of women who have left — and of women who are in the process of leaving, or who have not yet left but have plenty of reasons to consider it.
Leaving a religious community is often an intensely difficult journey. Grief and loss accompany it. But also, usually, courage and strength. When women leave church, they’re often making a stunningly brave choice. Their reasons for leaving are well thought-out. They’re following their conscience, listening to their own reason and intuition that says all is not well here.
“I do not see through the eyes of male church leaders who view women’s departure from religious institutions as a problem.”
Do the male religious leaders analyzing these trends see this? Can they listen to what these women are saying and not only hear other male institutional leaders’ opinions about it? Perhaps if they did, they would be less alarmed — or at least differently alarmed.
They might ask some new questions: What do the people who are leaving need, and how can we support them on their journey? What needs to be fixed in our churches — that is, what can we do about our own problems of hypocrisy, inequality, abuse and lack of opportunity, rather than blaming those who leave? The question of whether the problem of women leaving will “fix itself or get worse” implies the women who have left are the problem, and all that is required for repair is that they come back.
Institutional leaders wonder whether young women’s increasingly common choice to disaffiliate from church constitutes a check engine light or a four-alarm fire, but maybe it’s neither. Maybe, instead, it’s an encouraging sign. Maybe it’s a signal that young women are embracing their agency, choosing not to invest time and energy into systems and institutions that are not serving them well.
Women are voting with their feet to say, I’m worth more than how I’ve been treated here. Or, I’m not sure I see God here anymore, so I’m going to look elsewhere and see what I might find. Or, What we’re doing by refusing to deal with our racism or by excluding LGBTQ people or by curtailing reproductive rights is not good, and I don’t want to be a part of it.
When the reasons for leaving are good, the act of leaving is something to celebrate, not to prevent or try to “fix.” If this is a fire, perhaps it’s a cleansing fire.
Drawing on Indigenous land management practices, perhaps it’s the kind of fire that clears some plants and makes room for others, releasing pine trees’ seeds from their cones and promoting abundance and flourishing for the whole ecosystem.
Institutions want to preserve themselves. But the Christian concept of church is not, at its core, that of an institution. It’s a people. A community. Through 2,000 years of Christian history, buildings and systems and denominations come and go, but people seeking faith remain. Many women who have left organized churches are still very much part of this people. We still hold spirituality in a central place in our lives; we still wonder if there are other ways of approaching faith that will work better than the ones we’ve left behind.
Yes, women fleeing church is a four-alarm fire for powerful institutions staring at the prospect of losing their power. But if the leaders of these institutions listened with open minds to the women who are leaving, they might feel less alarmed and more curious, less invested in getting women back in the pews and more interested in supporting them on their faith journeys, less fearful and more excited about what the future might hold.
Liz Cooledge Jenkins is a Seattle-based writer, preacher, former college campus minister and author of Nice Churchy Patriarchy. She writes regularly on Substack at Growing into Kinship.