Despite their varying theologies, evangelicalism, mainline Protestantism, Mormonism and Catholicism all have about a 55-45 female-male split in religious identification; for black churches, it’s 60-40.
.. American men twice as likely as women to call themselves atheists — something that will surprise exactly nobody who has sojourned among Richard Dawkins fans.
.. The fact that the gender gap is less apparent or reversed in the Islamic world and Israel is a suggestive indicator that something specific to Christianity is at work.
.. Peterson is “a believer in the New Religion, the one where God is the force for good inside each of us, and all religions are paths to wisdom, and the Bible stories are just guides on how to live our lives.”
.. When you think about the New Religion’s various cultural and (in the case of yoga) liturgical expressions, they generally skew female. Oprah’s roadshow of spiritual gurus includes men as well as women, but the intended audience for her revivals, as for the “The Secret” or “Eat Pray Love” or the collected works of Paulo Coelho, is very obviously feminine.
.. Meanwhile, men looking for post-Christian enlightenment seem to gravitate toward secular-rationalist cults like the New Atheism, or more recently toward toxic forms of alt-right politics.
.. But can a Peterson man and an Oprah woman be happy together?