Men Leave Religion for a Disenchanted World; Women Don’t: The Materialist Gap in Global Perspective

• In Event: Sociology of Religion Section Open Call Paper Session

Abstract

How people understand the fundamental nature of reality — whether the natural world is all there is, or whether something beyond it exists — is arguably one of the most consequential questions in the sociology of beliefs and worldviews. Yet the field has studied religious affiliation and practice far more than beliefs about ontology, studying religiosity more often than worldview. This paper shifts the aperture. Using the forced-choice ontology item in Pew Research Center’s Spring 2024 Global Attitudes Survey (33 countries, N ≈ 37,500), I document what I call the Materialist Gap: a consistent gender divide in strict naturalism, the view that the natural world is all there is. Men are 7.2 percentage points more likely than women to endorse naturalism across the full sample; among the religiously unaffiliated, the gap nearly triples to 16.7 points (61.6% of men versus 44.9% of women). Logistic regression with country fixed effects confirms the pattern (OR = 1.40, full sample; OR = 1.79, nones), and the gap widens significantly rather than narrowing among those who have already left organized religion (OR = 1.60, male × unaffiliated interaction). The cross-national pattern holds in 29 of 33 countries. These findings reframe what the sociology of religion has studied as a gender gap in religious participation: beneath it lies a gender gap in worldview that predates institutional exit and becomes most visible when institutional religion no longer provides a shared non-naturalist frame. I also highlight a theoretically striking counterpart: nearly three in ten religiously affiliated respondents endorse strict naturalism, suggesting that institutional belonging and ontological naturalism are more separable than standard measures assume. Leaving religion, I argue, is not a uniform story of disenchantment but a gendered recomposition of how people understand what is real.

Author

• Landon Schnabel, Cornell University