We Never Lost the Men. Churches Just Said We Did.

Brothers & Friends —

Let me take a story away from you first, because most of us in church were taught it, and it isn't true.

The story goes like this: The American church used to be full of men, something happened, and now we have to win them back. It's a good story. It has a fall in it and a road home. Trouble is, the record doesn't support it.

The historian Ann Braude showed years ago that American congregations have been roughly 60 percent women since the Second Great Awakening, two centuries now (ref1). You can check her against the General Social Survey, which has asked Americans how often they attend services since 1972. In every one of those 35 survey years a bigger share of women than men went weekly, by anywhere from 3 to 15 points. Women made up somewhere between 55 and 66 percent of the weekly crowd every single year (ref2).

Churches never had them. Men were always the smaller part of the room.

A word on the gap in that chart. The survey skipped 2020 because of COVID, and when it came back in 2021, most people answered online instead of sitting with an interviewer. That matters. People tend to report more churchgoing to a person across the table than to a screen, and the survey's own staff found web respondents reporting "much lower religious activity and beliefs across multiple religious measures," church attendance included (ref2). So part of the drop you see after the break is the method, not the pews, and that's why I didn't join the lines. What didn't change is the order. Women out-attended men on both sides of the break, by 3 to 6 points since 2021.

So the count isn't what changed. What changed is what gets said to the men who stayed, and I think you can put a date on it. In 1997, Promise Keepers filled the National Mall with hundreds of thousands of men (ref3). (I was there and I remember!) Then a lot of that movement came apart, Mars Hill most publicly, and maybe it deserved to (ref4). I'm not going to defend it. But after it fell, the pulpit turned. By the time Kristin Du Mez's Jesus and John Wayne made the critique of that movement a bestseller in 2020 (ref5), a good deal of what came from the front had stopped telling the difference between the movement and the men sitting in the pews.

You can hear it every spring. In May, the Mother’s Day appreciation sermon says thank you. In June, the Father’s Day challenge sermon says step up. Same building, same preacher, five or six weeks apart.

That isn't a study, and I won't dress it up as one. It's an observation I’ve had as a pastor and father for over three decades. And many other men have had, too. David Murrow repeated one writer's version of it back in 2014: on Mother's Day, sermons "gush over moms," while on Father's Day "they tell dads to shape up" (ref6). Most of us who preach know it's true, because we've done it.

Several mainline denominations have gone further and formally confessed patriarchy as sin. The ELCA did it in 2019, by a vote of 863 to 26 (ref7). I'm not objecting to everything. Some of what they name is real, the church did it, and confession is the correct posture. My concern is narrower than that. There's a word for what men are asked to confess. There's no word yet for what's been said about them, so there's nothing to look at, and nothing to repair.

This pains me to write. I was following in the steps of Bill Cosby (yes, I know mentioning him comes with a lot of baggage), and then Barack Obama, both telling men to pull their pants up and step up. Cosby did it in May 2004, in his "Pound Cake" speech at the NAACP's gala for the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, mocking "people with their hat on backwards, pants down around the crack" (ref8). Obama did it on Father's Day 2008, from the pulpit of a Chicago church, saying too many fathers were "acting like boys instead of men" (ref9), and again that November on MTV: "Brothers should pull up their pants" (ref10).

I followed suit, thinking it was what I was supposed to do. And I was especially tough on men who looked like me: Black men. I repeated their words and commended them for risking the hard words. Men needed to step up. I didn’t preach it from a pulpit, but I thought it, and I talked it. And I was wrong.

Something didn't feel right when I spoke, but I didn't quite know what it was. In 2019, while researching my Chicago Reporter article, "Breaking myths about black fatherhood this Father's Day" (ref11), I found my answer, and it brought me to my knees. I'd been propagating the very problem I was exposing, the one I hated when it was pushed on me: men have to step up and step out. It hurt me to my core.

Now, the open door. Last year, Barna reported men attending church weekly at 45 percent and women at 36 percent (ref12). If that holds, something remarkable is going on. But Ryan Burge looked at three other large surveys and found no real difference between young men and young women, and a narrowing gap, mostly because women are now leaving, not because men are coming back (ref13). Barna's 2025 numbers come from an online panel, and Burge leans on the long-running national surveys. Serious people read this differently, however, and it isn't settled. I'd rather tell you that than tell you a revival is here because I want one.

But suppose they are coming. Then the question isn't whether we can get them through the door. It's what they'll hear once they sit down. During Father’s Day sermons, during the annual marriage sermon series, or whenever the pastor feels the need to “be hard on the men” and the men only.

So here's my charge, and I'm preaching to myself first. Next June, speak to the fathers in your room the way you spoke to the mothers in May. Thank them by name. Call them higher, sure, but call them brothers first. Tell them they were wanted here before they did a single thing, because that's what we say we believe about every person God made. The men who stayed have been waiting a long time to hear it.

Masculinity is not a sin. The men who stayed were never the problem. Let's start preaching like we know it.

Walking with you,
Rev. Saī