Gender Differences in Religious Practice and Significance

For reasons which merit separate analysis, the Sociology of Religion has lagged behind many other fields in taking gender seriously. Whilst small-scale, ethnographic studies have been most likely to recognise the significance of gender, dominant theoretical frameworks within the Sociology of Religion often remain gender-blind. Although there has been some debate about why women, in the West at least, are more religious than men, 1 this has largely taken place in isolation from what are still considered to be the „big‟ issues in the sociological analysis of religion, most notably issues concerning the growth and decline of religion in modern societies.