Seminary President Explains Why More Young Men Are Religious

For the first time in recorded history, statistics indicate that more young men are attending religious services than young women, according to Dr. R. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. 

The Heritage Foundation hosted Mohler on May 26 to deliver a talk titled “Young Men Turning to Religion.” Mohler discussed the cultural and theological reasons behind the rising numbers of young men who go to church and want to get married and have a family.

While “mainline Protestantism” has embraced woke and liberal movements and consequently has received less attention and lower church attendance, Mohler noted that denominations that uphold “thick Christianity” and orthodox beliefs are seeing an increase in the attendance of young men aged 18 to 29. 

“Young men are going in three primary directions, which I think are understandable,” Mohler argued. “Those primary directions are Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Confessional Protestantism. So, I want to make the argument that even as young men are showing up in larger numbers, they’re not just showing up in churches. They’re showing up in churches that are predictable in terms of the fact that they have substantial, historical, doctrinal engagement, that they are representing very solid beliefs.”

What sets these three branches apart is their ontology, or their understanding of “creation order” and human morality as intrinsically bound into human nature, according to Mohler. The fact that young women not only have become less religious but are also less eager to have children indicates that women have rejected ontology and the proper order of nature.

“In the beginning of the 20th century, Pitirim Sorokin, the Russian, made the observation that every society has faced a crisis in turning boys into men, but basically no society had faced a crisis of turning girls into women in terms of functionality,” Mohler said. “I think Pitirim Sorokin would have to revise that understanding, not to say that we’re in a time in which civilization does not face a crisis of turning boys into men. But we now face a crisis, I think unique to Western civilization, in terms of convincing young women to move ahead, in terms of the hallmarks of what it means to embrace the female role, and in particular in terms of marriage and the bearing of children.”

For young men, their inclination to raise families might stem from a desire to give what they never had.

“I think a father hunger is producing in a lot of young men a wonderful fulfillment of the role of a father,” Mohler said.

It doesn’t seem that men are just acting out of “tribalism” or a need to be accepted, according to Mohler, because they’re making hard decisions and changing how they live.

“I just don’t think ’tribal’ gets you that far,” Mohler said. “I think tribal gets you to the interesting event and the food that follows. I don’t think tribal gets you to, ’I’m going to commit my life to this, I’m going to restructure my entire value system to this.’”