Top Religions in the US by adult members/adherents
Female senior clergy
Churches in America run on women, yet women are not in the pulpit.
The US Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, and we are indeed a nation of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, and agnostics and atheists. Yet the freedom from a state religion hardly means that religion is in the background of American life. According to the Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study, a majority of Americans – 76.5% – identify closely or loosely with a particular religion and denomination, and just 23.4% are classified as “nones” (without a religious affiliation; this group includes atheists, agnostics, “nothing in particular” and “don’t know”).
More adults attend religious services in America than vote –
69% attend services (36% reporting ‘at least once a week’ plus 33 reporting ‘once or twice a month or a few times a year’)
37% voted in 2014, 60% in 2016, 49% in 2018 2 , and the highest-ever turnout of 67% in 2020 .
The majority of Americans – 70.6% -- identify as Christian, with 25.4% Evangelical Protestant, followed by 20.8% Catholic, 14.7% Mainline Protestant, 6.5% Historically Black Protestant and 3.3% other denominations (such as Mormon, Jehovah’s Witness and Orthodox Christian). The other Abrahamic faiths include Jewish (1.9%) and Muslim (.9%). Dharmic religions, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, and other world religions account for 3.2% of all Americans. (Gallup reports similar survey results in 2016, with 74% identifying with either Protestant/Christian or Catholic, 5% identifying with a non-Christian religion, and 21% in the “nones” or no response category.)
Ministers, Priests, Pastors, Rabbis, Imams and other clergy are in key leadership roles across American public life. The landscape for women clergy is quite diverse, from denominations that refuse the ordination and recognition of female clergy, to those whose female leaders receive death threats for leading prayer sessions, to those with 45% of female senior clergy in their congregations.
Overall, the most recent National Congregations study (2018-2019) by the Assn of Religion Data Archives, reveals that women are 13.5% of congregational leaders, while men are 86.5%
13.5% female senior clergy
One surprising aspect of the Pew Research Center’s findings about religious engagement in the US is the gender breakdown – specifically, the high percentage of women adherents in the largest churches in America. Catholics are 54% female, Evangelicals 55%, Mainline Protestants 55% and Historically Black Protestants are 59% female. Men only outnumber women in American Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism,
In short, churches in America run on women, yet women are not in the pulpit.
Yet despite American women being the larger group of religious observers, further Pew research delves into what the Pew researchers’ term “The divide over ordaining women.” The Pew study identifies the denominations that do and do allow the ordination of women:
The Hartford Institute for Religion Research report that 12% of all US congregations have a “female as their senior or sole ordained leader.” Today, around 20% of Protestant seminarians are women, and Hartford also reports that 10% of all Protestant congregations, and upwards of 20% of “mainline” or “oldline” Protestant congregations had women senior ministers.
Catholicism, of course, has a global hierarchy, and a clear hierarchy of 196 geographical dioceses and archdioceses, headed by 36 Archbishops. Six of these men are Cardinals of large Catholic territories and wield a great deal of power in their local communities, and in the US as a whole. Currently, they are Cardinal Blasé Joseph Cupich of Chicago, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley of Boston and Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, NJ. In November of 2020, Pope Francis elevated Wilton Daniel Gregory from archbishop to the post of cardinal of Washington, joining the five long-standing US cardinals. Cardinal Gregory is the first African American Catholic cardinal.
Unlike Catholicism, which has a global hierarchy, other faith traditions operate with a more decentralized system of authority. Therefore, it is usually not possible to identify one – or even a few – people who could be said “to speak for” Christianity or Judaism or Islam in the same way that the Pontiff – or Cardinals or Archbishops – can be said to speak for (not only to) Roman Catholics. Many denominations have a President or faith leader, but he head of a large US denomination such as the Southern Baptist Convention or the Episcopal or Presbyterian Church would not get as much press coverage as Billy Graham (who was non-denominational) or a best-selling pastor such as Joel Osteen or faith leader such as Marianne Williamson (who is running for president in 2020).
Overall, in a religiously diverse and decentralized democracy such as the US, it can be difficult to determine the group of religious leaders who could be said to occupy the Power Positions, and then to ask what it will take for women to get into the Power Percentage of this group.
Of course, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Southern Baptist Convention (the largest US Protestant denomination) do not ordain women, and together they serve 51 million adult Catholics in 17,000 parishes and the SBC claims nearly 16 million members in upwards of 46,000 churches in the United States – a total of 67 million churchgoers with no women in hierarchical leadership.
A 2015 Pew Research Study found that 60% of US Catholics believe the Church “should allow women to become priests,” despite rulings by the Roman Curia in 1976, 1988 and 1994 firmly denying ordination to women. In 2000, the Baptist Faith and Message was officially amended to define the pastorate as male-only, despite some high-profile female “teachers” in the Baptist Church.
Other, smaller, denominations in the US that also will not ordain women include: Orthodox Jewish synagogues, Mormons, Missouri Synod Lutherans, and the Orthodox Church in America. A few Muslim women are proclaiming themselves imams, and are founding women’s mosques, or even leading co-ed prayer in “all-inclusive” mosques, despite threats from conservatives. Though rare, Hindu priestesses or officiants are performing marriages and Upanayanas (coming of age ceremonies).
In a groundbreaking 2017 study, Yale Professor Eitan Hersh and Harvard doctoral candidate Gabrielle Malina compiled a sweeping database comparing and overlapping the denominations and the political affiliations of more than 130,000 American clergy from 40 religious denominations. Hersh and Malina identify why this matters:
“Pastors are religious elites who represent specific denominations and their associated theological worldviews. In weekly sermons, pastors translate the connection between theological teachings and real world social and political issues for their congregants. From such a position of spiritual and moral leadership, pastors can shape the political agendas of congregants, as well as advocate specific issue positions that likely hold greater weight than positions taken by other political or social elites. In sum, a pastor’s moral position is a powerful one, shaped by her theological orientation, and tightly linked to her ideological orientation.
Thus, even if congregants are not sorting into denominations for reasons closely tied to politics, the messages and agenda that they are hearing in church are nevertheless likely to be informed by their pastor’s political worldview. That worldview, we posit, is tightly linked to the pastor’s denomination.
Our interest in the politics of pastors rests on the assumption that pastors have influence over a substantial share of the American public. Prior work supports this assumption, demonstrating that pastors are aware of their power as moral, spiritual, and political leaders and that this power has real consequences both for congregants’ political attitudes as well as their connections with local government officials.
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Further, denominations that don’t ordain women – notably the Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention – are rife with sex-abuse scandals, lawsuits, growing cultural irrelevance … and rapidly declining membership. According to an Atlantic article about the crisis within the Southern Baptist Convention (June 10, 2019), “the SBC … has shed a stunning 1 million members since 2003 and is on pace to lose nearly 100,000 a year. … Only half of children raised Southern Baptist choose to remain Southern Baptist.” The Atlantic compares this to the Catholic church in America, which has shed more than 3 million members since 2007 alone.”
While there are myriad reasons for these declines, the status of women in these huge, hierarchical and patriarchal churches is certainly a central issue. The Atlantic asks,
“And what about the dignity and equality of women? The SBC has bombed in that department as well. Recordings of [SBC leader Paige Patterson] revealed Patterson body shaming a young woman and downplaying domestic abuse. … A petition calling for his resignation [was] signed by thousands of Southern Baptist Women. Finally, evidence emerged that Patterson had mishandled an abuse allegation at a seminary he led and he was terminated.
Recently, the wildly popular Bible teacher Beth Moore was bullied online by prominent Baptist leaders and bloggers for teaching men in a Sunday church service.
Given that half of Southern Baptists are women, the denomination must find ways to elevate women, affirm women’s gifts, and oppose gender-based violence and discrimination .
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