WOMEN’S ORDINATION, first as priests and now as bishops, has been one of the most debated developments in recent church history. In looking at women in the chancel, however, as Hugh Rayment-Pickard did with reference to increasingly feminised patterns of ministry (Comment, 15 August), we have taken our eyes off the pews, where a shift is under way with more fundamental consequences for the Church’s survival: women are no longer coming to church.
Women have predominated in churches for so long that we assume they always will. Historical research suggests a female majority membership of 60-65 per cent throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
Yet findings from the 2005 English Church Census suggest that things are changing. Between 1989 and 1998, more than 65,000 women were lost from church each year, 57 per cent of all those leaving church. From 1998 to 2005, the figure was slightly lower — 51,000 per year — but this time women were two-thirds of those missing from church.
The percentage loss of women was greatest in the 15-44 age range, years when women are especially busy, juggling education, employment, relationships, and family life. Since 1989, the female majority in church has declined from 58 per cent to 57 per cent. This is a small decline, but among younger people, young men equal young women; in the 15-19 age group, they outnumber them.
Young women, research suggests, tend to express egalitarian values, and dislike the traditionalism and hierarchies that they imagine are integral to the Church. As an A-level student interviewed by a Ph.D. researcher, Jeannine Heynes, remarked: “Nowadays women have the same opportunities as men, but it’s only really in religion where they’re still being stopped from doing things.”
Partly as a result of its perceived focus on female empowerment, young women are attracted by New Age phenomena such as Wicca. The loss of younger women from Church is less about women deciding to leave, and more about their never having attended in the first place.
THERE ARE further reasons for the decline in women’s church commitment — notably fertility levels, feminist values, paid employment, family diversity, and sexuality.
The fertility rate is crucial to church decline. Women are having fewer children. David Voas from the University of Manchester has found that only 50 per cent of children born to church-attending parents become churchgoers themselves. Women are not having enough children to replace the older generation lost from the Church.
Feminist values began influencing women from the 1960s. The 1950s was the last decade in which the gender roles promoted by the Church matched those of society. As the historian Callum Brown explains in his book The Death of Christian Britain (Routledge, 2000), from the 1960s, feminism began to offer women alternative frameworks through which to see their lives.
Living costs rose along with aspirations, pulling women into the labour market. At the beginning of the 20th century, one third of women did paid work; by the end of the century, two-thirds did. Juggling employment with housework and childcare causes time pressures for women (especially since few male partners have taken up the slack).
Something has to give, and often this is Church. Surveys suggest that, compared with non-employed or part-time working women, those in full-time employment are the least likely to go to church; if they do attend, it is not every week.
Family diversity also affects the likelihood that women will be in church. Compared with wider society, churches include fewer non-traditional families. The problem is that the family forms that are growing — singleness, lone-parent families, cohabitation, blended families — are precisely those that are under-provided-for, and even discouraged, by churches. As my research (gathered for a Ph.D. into gender) suggests, single women, once willing to stay as “wives in waiting”, are quitting the Church.
Additionally, the Church’s silence about sexuality (apart from condemning non-marital sex) is driving women away. As the Canadian researcher Sonya Sharma suggests: “Leaving the Church cannot be seen to result from the women no longer having a faith. . . Rather, the reason lies in what Churches do not offer.”
One of her interviewees, a 28-year-old who left her Baptist church because she felt it required her to deny her sexual desire, remarked: “I began to feel more comfortable in my own body after leaving the Church.”
VARIOUS PIECES of research suggest a pattern in women’s Christian journeys. “Home-centred women” tend to stay committed to the Church, as the activities churches offer women (mother-and-toddler groups, for instance) fit around their lives, and provide them with social support. “Career women” (in full-time employment) are least likely to be (or to stay) committed church members, primarily because they do not have time.
A third group, the “jugglers” (women combining part-time work with family life), may stay involved with churches, but are increasingly taking up alternative forms of spirituality, such as yoga, reiki, or healing groups, especially in middle age.
Linda Woodhead, Professor of Sociology of Religion at Lancaster University, believes that women embrace alternative spiritualities because they are more holistic than Christianity. Instead of preaching deference and self-sacrifice, they promote well-being, and help women nourish their overstretched selves.
Women are crucial to what happens to the Church. In the past, they were vital to its health. But, if the trends described above continue — and they show every sign of doing so — they may also be the key to its decline.
Dr Kristin Aune is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Derby, and co-editor of Women and Religion in the West (Ashgate, 2008).