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I think men are less committed to faith than women.

Jonathan Bailey

Well-Known Member
It used to be said that church is for old ladies. Since I was a little boy I stereotyped churchgoing with old women. Old women gossip a lot at church. The grandma on The Waltons seemed to be the most God-fearing Christian of that TV family. It's usually some old woman playing the organ at piano at a church. The devout Irish Catholic old lady that was my grandmother's neighbor up the street even brought a big wind-up music box which was a model of a church building with a steeple and a bell over to grandma's house. It didn't work however when she wound it up. I think my grandpa tried to tinker with it but couldn't get it to work. I had an old Southern Baptist aunt in Georgia that even had an antique brass lamp with a pair of praying hands as the base!

A guy is likely thinking about the upcoming football game, maintaining the car, calibrating the belt on his sander or the opening day of hunting season if he is even in church at all. He is not likely meditating on any mystery of any rosary.

Please see the tiny neuron of the male brain for commitment.

uRyLx5F.jpg
 
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Brickjectivity

Turned to Stone. Now I stretch daily.
Staff member
Premium Member
No, men aren't thinking about worldly matters more than women. Women aren't more spiritual.
 

9-10ths_Penguin

1/10 Subway Stalinist
Premium Member
It used to be said that church is for old ladies. Since I was a little boy I stereotyped churchgoing with old women. Old women gossip a lot at church. The grandma on The Waltons seemed to be the most God-fearing Christian of that TV family. It's usually some old woman playing the organ at piano at a church. The devout Irish Catholic old lady that was my grandmother's neighbor up the street even brought a big wind-up music box which was a model of a church building with a steeple and a bell over to grandma's house. It didn't work however when she wound it up. I think my grandpa tried to tinker with it but couldn't get it to work. I had an old Southern Baptist aunt in Georgia that even had an antique brass lamp with a pair of praying hands as the base!

A guy is likely thinking about the upcoming football game, maintaining the car, calibrating the belt on his sander or the opening day of hunting season if he is even in church at all. He is not likely meditating on any mystery of any rosary.

Please see the tiny neuron of the male brain for commitment.

uRyLx5F.jpg
Ah... casual sexism.
 

Daemon Sophic

Avatar in flux
I think old women make up over half of the flock.
It’s not necessarily a matter of faith, but rather of survival. You will see the same proportion of old men and old women in a nursing home as in the church. It’s simply that those old women are widows. Men live multiple years less than women, on average.
Plus after their husbands are dead and buried, they go to church to socialize.

If churches were visited by young people, it would be a much closer to a 50/50 ratio.
 

Revoltingest

Pragmatic Libertarian
Premium Member
I have noticed among married friends that women have a greater
tendency to believe in "angels & sh.t" (as one hubby described it).
 

Brickjectivity

Turned to Stone. Now I stretch daily.
Staff member
Premium Member
I think the men probably feel somewhat useless in church, because they are obviously irrelevant if it can just keep going without them. Its all about listening to some alpha talking and other men have no real part to play. There are minor roles. They can be a 'Deacon' whatever that means. It often amounts to wearing a name badge and showing up for events. Its all about the sermon. Whoever can deliver the sermon smoothly and with grace. In most churches its like toastmaster's but with only one speaker, kinda pathetic.
 

Jonathan Bailey

Well-Known Member
It’s not necessarily a matter of faith, but rather of survival. You will see the same proportion of old men and old women in a nursing home as in the church. It’s simply that those old women are widows. Men live multiple years less than women, on average.
Plus after their husbands are dead and buried, they go to church to socialize.

If churches were visited by young people, it would be a much closer to a 50/50 ratio.

The "old ladies" notion probably comes from the fact that there many more widows than widowers. Old widowed women use church largely as a social outlet.

Some of these stereotypes are from tracts that I have received from people. One tract showed a younger man in church who was daydreaming about a baseball game that was coming up. The tracts never show women as thinking about matters outside of religion while at church.

At one of my Methodists services years ago, a minister from China visited. He said that Chinese youth viewed church as "for old ladies" even in their culture and the people at church laughed.

Even to this day, the word "church" uttered evokes images of pews filled with old women in dresses and veils or scarves over their heads. The "church" is considered a female entity as is regarded as a "mother" of sorts.
armenia-vanadzor-three-older-women-pray-in-church-with-heads-covered-A5XED9.jpg
 
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Jonathan Bailey

Well-Known Member
The few men who get into religion will naturally rise to the top.
Women of faith like having a man to control them.

Men lead churches but women are the social glue of church communities.

Some TV shows used to show the man of the family staying
home while the wife went to church.

It is often the mother character of a family who is portrayed in film and television who is adamant about the children's dressing proper for church and getting them to church on time religiously.

Mothers back in the pioneering days of early America were concerned whether a new settlement had churches and schools for their young ones. This motherly concern about children's religious upbringing and education is evident in the TV series "Little House on the Prairie".
 
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Phaedrus

Active Member
Today, we should be most concerned whether children have adequate parents.
There's just so much anti-this, anti-that going on, it's no wonder our kids are at risk.
Seriously, though, kids should be free of religion and its nonsense.
 

Jonathan Bailey

Well-Known Member
Today, we should be most concerned whether children have adequate parents.
There's just so much anti-this, anti-that going on, it's no wonder our kids are at risk.
Seriously, though, kids should be free of religion and its nonsense.

Times change but not always for the better. America was much less polluted 50 years ago. People dressed much more lady-like and gentleman-like 50 years ago. I'm fond of the days when grocers in stores did not wear beards and tats but clean-pressed white shirts, ties, slacks, aprons and dress shoes. Women store personnel wore a fancy ladies bow tie and not a man's necktie.
 

Phaedrus

Active Member
Times change but not always for the better. America was much less polluted 50 years ago. People dressed much more lady-like and gentleman-like 50 years ago. I'm fond of the days when grocers in stores did not wear beards and tats but clean-pressed white shirts, ties, slacks, aprons and dress shoes. Women store personnel wore a fancy ladies bow tie and not a man's necktie.

The problem with hoping that things don't change is that you are always disappointed when things do change.
 

Saint Frankenstein

Wanderer From Afar
Premium Member
Probably because modern Christianity doesn't have much to offer men. It's not a religion that extols traditionally masculine ideals. Men typically want to be warriors and heroes, and a dead pacifist nailed to a cross who encourages meekness and passivity towards the world doesn't fit the bill.

For example, when Christianity was being spread to the Germanic tribes, the missionaries had to retrofit Jesus into the role of a Germanic warrior who conquered Satan in a grand battle, because the warlike Germanic peoples weren't having this meek, mild pacifist Jesus who let his enemies kill him. They would insult him by calling him "white Christ", which means "coward", basically. This was opposed to "red Thor" and you can guess what that was referring to.
 
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MikeDwight

Well-Known Member
Right at the Heart of the Protestant Reformation, al the Monks and Nuns were fervently sent home packing by Calvinists, the biggest enemy of these practices. This is a marker of Reformed. Then at that moment, the housekeeper is the Highest Role in the Church to Women! The Spiritual Church may as well be placed in the Home and the Abbey and the Nunnery. It'd be different in this culture or the other. Orthodoxy almost destroyed their society with the amount of male Monasticism and monks enclosed, and they show off their monastaries today and Byzantium. I don't know if they ever had the Catholic Nun equivalent, I just have physicaly never seen that.
 

Jonathan Bailey

Well-Known Member
Probably because modern Christianity doesn't have much to offer men. It's not a religion that extols traditionally masculine ideals. Men typically want to be warriors and heroes, and a dead pacifist nailed to a cross who encourages meekness and passivity towards the world doesn't fit the bill.

If such men were to subscribe to pagan faiths of antiquity, they would find tough and powerful male gods as Vulcan, the god of fire and metalworking. Hard-core "masculine toxicity", if you will. There were war gods and gods who drove the planets. These gods were arrogant and not humble. Real he-man supernatural personages of faith.
 
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