For people who report that they have never been married, there is an increased likelihood of being a never/seldom attender. That’s true for both men and women. However, the relationship is much stronger for men than women. For men, being never married is about five times more predictive than the same variable for women.

Thus, there’s some real evidence here that never being married is intimately related to religion, especially for men. Among men who have never walked down the aisle, there’s data that indicates that they are more likely to be nonreligious and more likely to be never or seldom attenders. For women, it’s only the attendance that is affected.

This result seems to be building a larger case that men are just dropping out of many institutions that are key to a modern functioning society. They are significantly more likely to never get married; they are also significantly more likely to be a never/seldom attender and to identify as atheist/agnostic/nothing in particular when they have never been married.

In my mind, I see a lot of these types of institutions that were the bedrock of American society like interlocking pieces. They fit neatly into the other ones — like having a college degree is strongly linked with religious attendance. Having a middle class income is also linked to increase religious attendance.

Being religious is correlated with having more children. As I found here.

The most stunning result for me is simply this: Just 40% of atheists in their early 40s report having a child under the age of 18. It’s over 70% of Latter-day Saints.

Deciding to deviate from the “proper” path in one way seems to be strongly connected to dropping out of other parts of society. And this result seems to add some nuance — it’s men who are the ones dropping out with more regularity.

I am not one of these folks who wants to write a “woe to men” post. Those are legion on the internet. But I do think it would be wise to consider what society looks like when about half the population is refusing to engage in many aspects of a functioning democracy.

This piece was originally published in Ryan Burge’s “Graphs About Religion” Substack.