The Stalled Revolution versus Secularization: The Dynamic Relationship between Gender Attitudes and Religiosity

Scholars have theorized that as societies move toward gender equity, they move away from religious institutions. Research has relied on cohort turnover and unidirectional models to test these societal transformations; however, these approaches fail to recognize within-person change and mutually reinforcing dynamics between these two social processes. Religiosity may delay a person’s adoption of egalitarian gender attitudes, but gender egalitarianism may also accelerate their religious disengagement. To test these competing hypotheses, the authors use two nationally representative panel datasets (the National Study of Youth and Religion and the General Social Survey panels) and latent outcome cross-lagged panel models to compare the influence of gender attitudes and religiosity as individuals change over time. The authors find that a person’s gender attitudes strongly shape changes to later religiosity across all age groups, whereas religiosity is a far less reliable predictor of later gender attitudes. The key exception is among young women, for whom religiosity counteracts the trend toward gender egalitarian attitudes.