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Gendered Religiosity Landon Schnabel* Indiana University Gendered Religiosity Landon Schnabel* Indiana University, Bloomington Abstract This study uses measures of cognitive and expressive aspects of gender as a social identity from the General Social Survey to examine whether and how they relate to religiosity. I find that religiosity is clearly gendered, but in different ways for women and men. Consistent with the feminine-typing of religion in the Christian-majority context of the United States, gender expression is linked with more religiousness among women but not men. Consistent with religion being a sometimes patriarchal institution, those with more pride in being men are more religious. I conclude that religiosity is gendered, that degendering and secularization processes could go hand-in-hand, and that future research on gender differences in religiosity should further examine variation among women and among men. Keywords: Gender; Religion Last Revised: 6-27-2017 Running Head: Gendered Religiosity Word Count: 3,073 Tables: 2 This paper is published as: Schnabel, Landon. “Gendered Religiosity.” Review of Religious Research. Forthcoming. * I am grateful to the four anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback. Direct correspondence to Landon Schnabel, Department of Sociology, Indiana University, 744 Ballantine Hall, 1020 E. Kirkwood Ave., Bloomington, IN 47405. Email: [email protected]. Gendered Religiosity 2 Women tend to be more religious than men in the United States and many other Christian- majority countries (Freese 2004; Hackett, Murphy, and McClendon 2016; Lummis 2004; Sullins 2006). Research on this gender difference has focused primarily on how dichotomous gender categories predict religiosity, and much of the literature even argues that women are “universally” more religious than men (e.g., Miller and Stark 2002). Rather than an essential characteristic that can only be measured as dichotomous categories, gender is a dynamic, multidimensional, and context-specific structure, status, and performance (Avishai, Jafar, and Rinaldo 2015; Charlton 2015; Cornwall 2009; Schnabel 2016c; West and Zimmerman 1987). Past research has suggested gendered personality characteristics help explain across-gender differences and more recent studies have begun to explore within-gender differences (e.g., Collett and Lizardo 2009; Schnabel 2016c), but we do not yet know whether and how cognitive and expressive aspects of gender as a social identity relate to religiosity. This study, therefore, uses new measures from the 2014 General Social Survey to examine whether and how cognitive and expressive aspects of gender as a social identity1 relate to religiosity within gender categories. The gender gaps in religiousness literature focuses largely on dichotomous differences between women and men, but a few studies are now exploring within-gender-category variation across factors such as upbringing (Collett and Lizardo 2009), social status (Schnabel 2016c), sexual orientation (Sherkat 2002, 2017; Sumerau 2012), and even transgender/cisgender identity categories (Sumerau, Cragun, and Mathers 2016). This research suggests that religiosity gaps across categories may be as much or more a result of gender expression and issues of 1 In this study I talk about “gender as a social identity” instead of “gender identity” because I am referring not to whether someone identifies as a man, woman, or non-binary, but instead aspects of gender as a social identity (e.g., the strength of their in-group identity with men or women) (Tajfel 1981). Gendered Religiosity 3 femininity/masculinity than of dichotomous sex differences. But we still know relatively little about how gradational gender processes relate to religiosity within gender categories apart from a few convenience-sample studies by Thompson (1991; Thompson and Remmes 2002) and Francis and Wilcox (1996, 1998). In the first of these studies, Thompson (1991) found that feminine personality traits—measured with the Bem Sex Role Inventory (Bem 1974)—were positively linked to religiosity in a sample of 358 undergraduates (masculine traits were not significantly linked to religiosity). Additional convenience samples later confirmed this relationship between feminine personality traits and religiosity, and found a similar relationship between femininity and positive views of Christianity (Francis and Wilcox 1996, 1998; Thompson and Remmes 2002). Rather than examine feminine- and masculine-typed personality characteristics, the present study focuses on within-gender-category variation in religiosity by cognitive and expressive aspects of gender as a social identity. More specifically, I examine whether and how gender in-group pride (pride in and identity primacy of one’s gender) and gender expression (sociobehavioral expression of one’s gender, or how one “does” gender) relate to religiosity, and whether the relationships vary for women and men. Because religion is arguably a gender- polarized and often patriarchal institution (Avishai et al. 2015; Hoffmann and Bartkowski 2008; Schnabel 2016b), I expect that gender in-group pride will be associated with greater religiosity among men. Gender expression, however, will likely be associated with more religiosity among women but not among men in light of the possible feminine-typing of Christian religion (Levitt 1995; Schnabel 2015) and the link between feminine-typed personality characteristics and religiosity (Thompson 1991). Gendered Religiosity 4 Methods This study uses nationally-representative data from the General Social Survey (GSS) to consider within-gender-category variation in religiosity by cognitive and expressive aspects of gender as a social identity (N=1,216 with 679 women and 537 men).2 The 2014 GSS included measures of gender in-group pride and gender expression suited to this study’s examination of within-gender- category variation.3 Religiosity is the dependent variable and gender in-group pride and gender expression are the key independent variables. Religiosity is measured with a standardized summative scale (a = .87) of the following measures: strength of religious affiliation, strength of description of self as a religious person, strength of description of self as a spiritual person, religious attendance frequency, and prayer frequency.4 Gender in-group pride and gender expression are measured with the following items, which were fielded on a scale from 0 (not at all) to 10 (completely): Gender In-Group Pride: How proud are you to be a [respondent's gender]? How much is being a [respondent's gender] an important part of how you see yourself? Gender Expression: In general, how much do you find that being a [respondent's gender] influences or guides how you behave? Think about how you see yourself as a [respondent's gender]. How much do you think friends see you this way? 2 Data for this study were downloaded from http://www.thearda.com/Archive/Files/Downloads/GSS2014_DL.asp. I focus on cases with complete information on gender pride and expression—which were fielded to a subsample of GSS respondents—religiosity, and covariates. Only 14 cases, or 1% of cases, were excluded for missing data on covariates. A more substantial amount of data were missing on sexual orientation and religious affiliation, so I created additional categories of “missing” for the sexual orientation and religious affiliation measures. Additional analyses using multiple-imputation indicate that missing data do not bias the results. 3 Although typically described as a measure of sex (i.e., female/ male), the binary “sex” measure in the GSS is interviewer-coded. Therefore, it may be more of a measure of gender (i.e., woman/man), and related gender expression, than is often assumed. 4 I originally conducted a factor analysis and found support for one religiosity factor. Analyses with that factor yield equivalent results to the summative scale analyses presented here. Gendered Religiosity 5 I first conducted factor analyses that confirmed the expected distinction between these two concepts related to gender as a social identity. I then created standardized summative scales for gender in-group pride (a = .80) and gender expression (a = .72), which are correlated with one another at .66. These gender in-group pride and gender expression questions were asked in reference to the respondent’s gender category, and the results are presented separately for women and for men. For ease of interpretation the key independent variables and the dependent variable are standardized with means of 0 and standard deviations of 1. The models also include the following standard covariates selected based on theoretical expectations, past research on gender differences in religion, and fit statistics: sexual orientation (heterosexual, LGB, or missing), race/ethnicity (non-Latino white, non-Latino Black, non-Latino other race, and Latino), age (in years), marital status (married=1), parental status (parent=1), education (highest degree attained), workforce status (working full-time=1), region (South=1), and religious affiliation (seven categories using the Steensland et al. 2000 schema).5 Results Table 1 presents OLS regression results for gender in-group pride and gender expression predicting religiosity among women and men. These variables are standardized, so the coefficients represent the proportion of a standard deviation change in religiosity for each standard deviation change in gender in-group pride or gender expression. I first present the pattern without sociodemographic controls, then with sociodemographic controls, and
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