For some time now, going back to the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, if not earlier, I’ve been hearing anecdotes about young men showing up at churches in unexpected numbers. Unexpected because a gender gap in religion, where women are more likely to identify with and practice Christianity, has been a consistent feature of the American religious landscape going back generations.

But maybe not any longer, or at least not for America’s younger generations. My newsroom colleague Ruth Graham has a report this week that cites data from the American Enterprise Institute showing that more Gen Z women than Gen Z men describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated — a reversal of the pattern for every older age group. And she gives life to that data point with vignettes from the religious culture of Waco, Texas, where both church and campus life (at the Baptist-founded Baylor University) offer examples of greater male investment paired with female disaffection.

Since this is a newish trend, it’s amenable to all manner of speculative interpretations, but two competing ones stand out. A masculinization of American Christianity could be seen as yet another force driving the polarization of the sexes — the diverging ideological and educational paths of men and women that are probably linked to the declining rate at which they’re pairing off. Or it could be seen as a potential answer to that polarization, a positive sign for male-female relations in the long run.

The first and more pessimistic interpretation would argue that younger men are becoming more religious in the same spirit that they’re embracing various masculinist influencers, from Joe Rogan to Jordan Peterson, along with toxic figures like Andrew Tate. They’re seeking male-friendly refuges from what they perceive as an increasingly feminized and even misandrist liberal culture.

But the aspects of organized religion that they find attractive, the support for traditional gender roles above all, are simultaneously alienating many young women from the churches of their upbringing. And the more male the conservative churches become, the less likely they are to take this female alienation seriously, and the more they’ll lose women to either more liberal churches or just to secular progressivism, which in its awokened form has some aspects of a rival faith.

These trends might then feed one another. 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. Imagine more gender-egalitarian churches with notably female-skewing sex ratios and an atmosphere that younger men find uncongenial finding themselves pulled completely into the orbit of a similarly feminized progressivism. In the long run, imagine conservative Christianity as a male-coded realm of religious edgelords and reactionaries in chronic conflict with a female-coded liberal establishment — a war between the sexes that’s also a religious war.