What did God tell Moses from the burning bush?

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Last updated on: March 3, 2009 at 7:39 pm by Cathleen Falsani

2009-03-03T19:39:00-07:00 Cathleen Falsani

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

GODSTUFF

THEY’RE JUST NOT THAT INTO ‘HIM’

“The difference between men and women,” the humorist Dave Barry says, “is that, if given the choice between saving the life of an infant or catching a fly ball, a woman will automatically choose to save the infant, without even considering if there’s a man on base.”

We are, men and women, essentially different.

In 2003, scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Washington University in St. Louis boiled down the genetic difference between human males and human females to 78 genes on the single Y chromosome.

The following year, Dean Hamer, a molecular biologist at the National Institutes of Health, published The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes, which proposed a genetic explanation for human spirituality — that people are, essentially, hardwired to seek a “higher power” or believe in God.

A single gene — the vesicular monoamine transporter No. 2 (or VMAT2) — affects brain chemicals, that in turn, affect people’s spirituality, Hamer theorized, and that prayer, meditation or sitting quietly can actually change the brain and our sense of spiritual experience.

While reading through some of the results of the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey from the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life — an extensive study based on interviews with more than 30,000 adult Americans — I couldn’t help but wonder about the connection between gender, genetics and spirituality.

According to the Pew survey, there is a significant statistical difference between how men and women think about God and relate to religion. For instance, when asked if they believe in God or a “universal spirit,” 77 percent of women said they did, whereas only 65 percent of men answered “yes” to the same question.

• • 66 percent of women said they pray at least daily, compared with only 49 percent of men

• • 86 percent of women and 79 percent of men said they are affiliated with a religion

• • 63 percent of women say religion is very important in their lives, compared with just 49 percent of men

• • 58 percent of women and 45 percent of men said they have an “absolutely certain belief” in a personal God

• • 44 percent of women said they attend worship services at least weekly, whereas just 34 percent of men said they do

Anyone who’s spent much time around any house of worship can tell you that these statistics ring true. They may be governed largely by men, but many religious institutions are populated (and, practically speaking, kept going) by women.

These sociological phenomena beg the question: If men and women are so different when it comes to spirituality, why are they so different?

“It’s a long-standing pattern,” said John C. Green, senior fellow in religion and American politics at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. “For as long as people have done surveys of religion, they have found that women have a different approach to religiosity than men do.

“No doubt it has something to do with gender. Whether that’s something innate with being female or male, or has to do with the socialization of men and women, is a matter of some dispute,” Green said.

Socialization could very well explain the differences in religious practice between the genders. While there surely is huge variation among individuals, generally speaking, women tend to be more social and more engaged in social organizations — whether it’s a house of worship or a book club — than men.

“That greater sociability with regard to churches and religious organizations results from the fact that women are more intimately involved in families,” Green said. “Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, whatever — religions do have an awful lot to do with family. Marriage. The rearing of children. Death. The major aspects of human life. It’s not that men aren’t involved . . . women just seem to play a larger role.”

But that still doesn’t explain why women are more likely to believe in God than men.

“One idea is that it’s a byproduct of this greater social connectedness,” Green continued. “Women may be more likely to pick up on the things that those organizations believe. Religious doctrine. A belief in the divine.”

Which leads to another question: What came first, the belief in God or the religiosity?

Are women more involved in religious organizations because they innately (or genetically, perhaps) are predisposed to believe in God, or are women more likely to believe in God because they are more socially attracted to religious organizations where they are indoctrinated about God?

“Some scholars believe that . . . what religion conveys on people — comfort, understanding, answers to existential questions — are the things that women are more interested in,” Green said.

“Women report praying more than men. My mother would have a perfect explanation for that. She had to deal with her husband and her sons. That was a great call for prayer,” Green joked.

Whether there is something innate about female biology that makes us more spiritually oriented than our male counterparts remains a mystery.

“The evidence for that is not too strong,” he said.

For now, God only knows.

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