Women are fleeing the church, and it’s not hard to understand why

[applegrove]

Women are fleeing the church, and it’s not hard to understand why

by Patricia Miller, Religion Dispatches, at Salon

http://www.salon.com/2016/06/02/women_are_fleeing_the_church_partner/

"SNIP................


What McClendon overlooks is that the years that women’s church attendance began to decline are the very years when religious leaders in the Catholic Church and the evangelical movement fused religion with the culture wars, with overall attendance for women taking it’s first steep drop in the 1980s.

............


This drop in church attendance for women coincided with the period when the Catholic bishops began making abortion a litmus test for Catholic politicians, as in the 1984 election when Vice Presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro was attacked for being pro-choice.

And Pew’s own numbers appear to back this up. According to Pew, women are slightly more likely than men to say that churches should keep out of politics (55 percent vs. 53 percent), and overall 60 percent of Catholics say church should keep out of politics.

Women’s church attendance did recover somewhat in the early 1990s, but then began a long slide in the mid-1990s that continued to 2012, when the GSS data end. While the GSS numbers don’t break out attendance by religion, church attendance for both men and women appears to have bottomed out around the time the sex scandals broke in the Catholic Church in 2001. Other studies have a found “a significant decline in religious participation as a result of the scandals,” and it’s possible this decline was large enough to affect overall church attendance.



................SNIP"

[RussBLib]

1. religion is a yoke around women's necks

even in Christianity; it's light-years worse in Islam, but it has to be so much harder to break free under the yoke of Islam.

Millions of women veritably in chains.

[applegrove]

2. Use to be women worked through Christianity to make the world a better place. It empowered them when

they had no power.

[SharonAnn]

3. Raised Catholic, I began to drift during the "birth control issue" and left over the "abortion issue

Unchurched for many years, I found an interdenominational, Community Church, and was an active member for 6 years. After the new pastor was brought in and he started taking it in a "fundamentalist" and "conservative" direction, with patriotic songs/hymns every Sunday and glorification of the military every Sunday, anti-muslim and anti-homosexual, I left it this year.

Yes, these beliefs and practices will absolutely drive women away.

[Quantess]

4. Someone better force those immoral sluts to obey the church!

Those godless, rebellious, temptresses of Satan are going to lead everyone into Hell with their immoral pied piping!

I'm sure their plans are to continue blaming everything on women, as these patriarchal religions have always done.

[smirkymonkey]

5. Good! It's about time!

[KamaAina]

6. Time for another Quiet Revolution?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_Revolution

The Quiet Revolution (French: Révolution tranquille) was a period of intense socio-political and socio-cultural change in the Canadian Province of Québec, characterized by the effective secularization of society, the creation of a welfare state (état-providence), and realignment of politics into federalist and sovereignist factions and the eventual election of a pro-sovereignty provincial government in the 1976 election. The Quiet Revolution typically refers to the efforts made by the Liberal governments of Jean Lesage (elected in 1960) and Robert Bourassa (elected in 1970), though given the profound effect of the changes, most provincial governments since the early 1960s have maintained an orientation based on core concepts developed and implemented in that era.

A primary change was an effort by the provincial government to take more direct control over the fields of health care and education, which had previously been in the hands of the Roman Catholic Church. It created ministries of Health and Education, expanded the public service, and made massive investments in the public education system and provincial infrastructure. The government further allowed unionization of the civil service. It took measures to increase Québécois control over the province's economy and nationalized electricity production and distribution and worked to establish the Canada/Quebec Pension Plan.

The Quiet Revolution was a period of unbridled economic and social development in Quebec and Canada and paralleled similar developments in the West in general. It was a byproduct of Canada's 20-year post-war expansion and Quebec's position as the leading province for more than a century before and after Confederation. It witnessed particular changes to the built environment and social structures of Montreal, Quebec's leading city. The Quiet Revolution also extended beyond Quebec's borders by virtue of its influence on contemporary Canadian politics. During the same era of renewed Quebecois nationalism,[1] French Canadians made great inroads into both the structure and direction of the federal government and national policy. Moreover, certain facets of the welfare state, as they developed in Quebec in the 1960s, became nationalized by virtue of Quebec's acceptance and promotion. This would include rural electrification and healthcare initiatives undertaken by Tommy Douglas in Saskatchewan twenty years earlier.