Why are men less religious? It may be form of risk-taking, impulsivity just as criminal behavior is.
For decades researchers have pondered a mysterious gender disparity in religious commitment. It turns out they may have been asking the wrong question, according to a University of Washington religious scholar.
Instead of asking why women are more religious than men, they should have been asking why men are less religious than women, said Rodney Stark, a UW professor of sociology and comparative religion.
"When you turn the question around it starts to get us somewhere and the evidence pretty strongly points to physiology, not socialization," said Stark, author of two papers exploring what seems to be a universal trend in religious rates around the world.
Stark said lower rates of male religiousness is a form of risk-taking behavior just as criminality is, and men are far more likely to commit crimes than women.
"Any phenomenon that occurs in many and very different social and cultural settings necessitates explanations that are equally general, which tends to rule out most social and cultural factors," he wrote in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.
"Recent studies of biochemistry imply that both male irreligiousness and male lawlessness are rooted in the fact that far more males than females have an underdeveloped ability to inhibit their impulses, especially those involving immediate gratification and thrills."
The upshot is that some men are shortsighted and don't think ahead, and so "going to prison or going to hell just doesn't matter to these men," Stark said.