Why are women more religious than men?

Bryan Caplan points to a fascinating survey by Rodney Stark and Alan Miller on the difference between men and women in their religious beliefs. Two striking facts emerge : (1) across all cultures, women are more religious than men, (2) in the least traditional cultures (i.e. those who approve of single motherhood, have with a high abortion rate, low fertility, and high female labor force participation) the gap between men and women is wider. How can this be explained?

One can think of three approaches to religion. Sociologists focus on the role played by religion in society. For Durkheim, religion is what binds a moral society together, while for Marx, it is the opium of the mass. For Weber, on the other hand, there is no universal law that govern society in the way there are laws that govern nature. Hence, religion stems from the individuals who comprise society and the importance they attach to things such as magic, charismatic individuals and ideas, spirits, ecstatic feelings, symbolism, the soul and supernatural powers in their lives.

Psychologists focus on the psychological needs for human to believe. Freud identifies three such needs, while tracking the development of an individual. (1) A baby is born ‘incomplete’ (as opposed to chicks, say, who can walk and start pecking early enough) and, as such, undergoes a dependence phase upon others, namely parents. While awaiting the attention of the latter, the baby develops a state of “blissful hallucination,” which is perpetuated later in life through religious beliefs. (2) As a child leaves childhood, he leaves a world of affection and fairy tales to fall in the cruel, real world. Religious beliefs is an attempt to recreate this fair, yet magical world. (3) The adult also needs to create an utopic world where there is a sense and order to things.

Given their stance, sociologists (apart from Durkheim, perhaps) and psychologists generally tend to view religion as a receding force in the face of scientific advancement and mass education. There is evidence that support this: apart from a few outliers (the US being the most obvious one), as countries advance (technologically and in terms of educational attainment), their citizens tend to lose in religiosity. But, paradoxically, Robert Barro and Rachel McClearly have found that religiosity is a important contributor to economic growth.

I’m not quite sure though how sociologists and psychologists would view Stark and Miller’s gender gap in religiosity. There is indeed a gender gap in educational attainment which may be a factor. But then why are women much more religious than men in modern societies where this education gap is narrower?

Economics, as ever, cuts across much of the complications of other social sciences, and assumes that “people approach religion in the same way they approach other objects of choice.” They evaluate costs and benefits and act accordingly. Here’s an example of how a typical economist from the growing branch of the Economics of Religion would approach the subject:

Producers of religion - churches, synagogues and mosques - compete for “customers” by seeking converts, drawing members from other congregations, or combating the pull of secular society. Some strains are “cheap” in the sense that they place modest demands on adherents, while others are costly but presumably offer bigger rewards.

The first hurdle for economists is not why people believe, but why some do not believe. In what is known as Pascal’s Wager, French philosopher Blaise Pascal shows that it is rational to believe in God. The logic is simple: if one believes  in God and God does exist, then one enjoys infinite pleasure (of going to Heaven). Even if the probability of this being true is remote, the expected pleasure is still infinite (so long the probability is non-zero). On the other hand, believing and then being proved wrong implies some finite pain (of being mistaken), but not believing and being proved wrong implies infinite pain (of going to Hell), even if this is unlikely to happen. Hence, it always pays to believe.

Are men less rational than women to ignore Pascal’s Wager? May be, or may be not. May be, the decision to believe is not a binary one, of whether to believe or not, but rather to what extent to believe. Suppose one can choose a value of belief between 0 and 1 ( 0 being no belief, 1 being total belief). Now, things are different: person A may think that a value of 0.5 is enough to be rational in the sense of Pascal’s Wager, person B may think that 0.8 is the right value. Person A differs from person B in the attitude towards risk: A is more of a risk-taker than B.

This is the explanation chosen by Stark and Miller in explaining their gender gap: men have a greater taste for risk than women, which is why they choose to be less religious, in general. Why is the gap bigger in less traditional societies? Because in these societies, the social punishment for skepticism is less, so the risk-lovers are encouraged.

Bryan Caplan advances another argument, borrowed from Timur Kuran, professor of Economics and Islamic Thought and Culture at the University of Southern California. The argument is two-fold: (1) social pressure can lead to preference falsification, i.e. one may pretend to believe because every one else around does, (2) women are more genuine than men in their religious preferences. Thus, in societies where social pressure is high, men are faking their beliefs, but in more ‘modern’ ones, they reveal their true selves.

I find both arguments persuasive, to which I would add a simpler one, based on cost-benefit analysis. Different societies follow different religions, or different strands of the same religion. The benefits they offer differ, and are not distributed between men and women in the same way. In some traditional countries, the benefits are skewed in favour of men (hijacked by men, religion helps enforce the masculine domination of societal affairs), which is why the advantages for men to believe are greater. On the other hand, the cost of believing for women in modern societies is lower as they do not perceive religion as a form of repression, while the benefit of believing for men in those societies are also less.

Oh, and here’s another…for fans of “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus“: men are more ‘thinking’, and women are more ‘feeling’, it is claimed. Why else are there horoscopes in virtually every women’s magazine and never in men’s magazine?

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