Do you agree that men have a harder time finding faith than women?

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Naeb

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And why? And how can we effectively reach out to the men in our lives to help them deepen their faith/believe in general? Does evangelization typically happen in different ways for men and women? Just curious based on my personal experiences (having very faithful Catholic women in my family while the men are dragged along with their wives or not religious at all, despite having similar upbringing to my knowledge).
 
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I agree that we men have a harder time but I’m honestly clueless as to how to improve it.
 
I have never realized it before reading your thread, but from my experience it’s true.
For example, there are many pious women in my family but I’m the only religious man. All my male family members are either Christians in Name Only or agnostics.
 
Oddly enough, it’s been this way for centuries. At least in the literature I read in college, it was evident therein. But anyway, I think a lot of it is cultural. Religion is depicted as weakness and men (perhaps by nature) what to be and appear strong. Maybe too religion is watered down to think it is just about love and expressing love in a cutesy kind of way I guess? I don’t think I’m expressing that concept properly but being religious has a certain feminine quality to it I suppose. Maybe it rests in the idea that having faith assumes you are not self-reliant or “strong enough.” Men want to be heroic deep down and this depiction in our culture makes religion appear to be the opposite.

Ironically, our faith is the most heroic thing out there. Can’t be more manly than selfless love.
 
I have joked that in my area the women go to church and the men go to bars. But in all/most religions men are the priests, deacons etc. They run the show. So there’s still plenty of them involved. I don’t think that the average guy has less faith than the woman in his life; he just doesn’t want to spend a lot of time talking about it or socializing, ie, attending church.
 
I do think you have a huge point about the cultural stigma I guess you could call it. I also think that men want to be ‘in charge’ of their life and don’t like submitting to a higher power. It’s like a power struggle.
 
This is true. So maybe they still have faith, they just express it differently, maybe more quietly, but through their actions. I can totally see that for many people I know.
 
I think that generally women are more people focused based on emotion and men more non person focused based on rationality.

Of course this is a very general characteristic.

Christianity was (is) a cultural life where these two aspects of humanity come together.

What has happened though through secular education and secular media is the argument that Christianity is not rational. This argument has caused many men to leave the church.

As the number of men have left, other secular cultures have been formed which aim at being the new framework through which people will interact.

This in turn has encouraged many women to be orientated towards these new secular cultures and also leave the faith.
 
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A lot of churches really don’t seem to know what to do with men, especially the unattached.

I wonder if maintaining a faith has in some ways been seen as women’s work, ie a mother doing her best to raise her son Catholic and hoping he will marry a good Catholic wife who will keep him in church.
 
I wonder whether the early Church or the Middle Ages were like this?
 
I believe men have a harder time with sins of purity
but women have a harder time with sins of vanity
 
I’m inclined to a contemplative lifestyle, and I have a pretty healthy spiritual life, but even with all that I have a hard time being “in the community”. Part of that is definitely because neither my wife or children are Catholic, but I think it’s just part of the male make-up. We try to face problems or issues on our own, when sometimes what we really need is a good support group of devout men we can honestly say to, hey I’m struggling, I need help/prayer/advice. I can’t speak for all men, but the ones I know like to talk just as much as any women I know, and they like to work for a goal that’s challenging. Men need to be challenged in an appropriate way and in a setting that fosters brotherhood and security. Those are some of the principles myself and some other parish men agreed on when we started our men’s group. We don’t have the numbers we’d like, not like the Knights, but we have great discussions and more than a few emotional moments. There has to be a man, or a group of men, willing to take that bull by the horns within their parish and say “I want more out of my faith”, even if they aren’t sure what that looks like.
 
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