The October Atlantic’s Primary Sources feature has a bit titled “Mrs. Pascal’s Wager?”, about research into why women are consistently more religious than men; a new study contradicts the popular argument that women, being more risk-averse than men, attend church out of fear of going to hell.
Researchers studied people who believed in an afterlife and people who didn’t, and found not only that women who don’t believe in life after death are more religious than men who don’t expect an afterlife, but that the gap between the sexes was larger among those who don’t anticipate an eternal reward or punishment.
So far so good; it’s an interesting finding in itself and consistent with my impression that the gap is larger in less-traditional religious groups.
The next sentence was what made me do a double-take:
Women who don’t believe in the afterlife are nearly twice as likely as men with similar beliefs to view the Bible as the literal word of God…
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to access the full text of the paper, because I want to know, just how large is this population of Biblical literalists who don’t believe in heaven or hell? If this is a significant number, and the reporting is accurate, this is a pretty interesting finding. Maybe women are more willing to tolerate contradictions and inconsistencies, either in their own belief systems, or between what they believe and what their church dictates. Why this would be the case, I have no idea, but it could go a long way towards explaining a gender gap in religiosity.