BOYS TO MEN
 

Among younger Americans, men are more religious than women for the first time in modern history. In a 2024 survey of Americans aged 18 to 29 - 64% of men and 60% of women said they were religiously affiliated. A decade ago, 65% of men and 71% of women said the same.

On a cool Sunday morning on the lawn of Life Tabernacle Church, a group of 35 teenage boys gathered around a weed whacker. They had just listened to a sermon on Ecclesiastes 9:10, “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.” Now, youth pastor B.J. Holt, still in his blue button-down shirt and khakis, was connecting this passage on working hard and taking pride in that work to a lesson on landscaping.

“How much can I make cutting grass with one of these?” asked a boy in a beanie and baggy black sweatshirt. “Can I try?” inquired another.

Holt is 35, bald, barrel-chested and the father of three children. He works as a construction manager when he’s not volunteering at church. As Holt demonstrated how to rethread the spool line and mix oil for fuel, he talked about how the message of Ecclesiastes goes hand in hand with taking care of your property—or earning money by mowing a neighbor’s yard. Men need to provide for themselves and their families, he explained, as the boys passed around the machine.

Holt sees his mission as teaching these boys to be men of faith. But first, he says, he must teach them to be men. He shows them how to change a tire, shave and start a savings account. He also helps them become, as he says, leaders of their households.

“God designed men with an innate desire to be a provider, even if that’s just providing for themselves and being productive,” said Holt. “So when they’re not fulfilling that, they do feel lost.”

Young American men are struggling. They are falling behind in school, floundering in the workforce and often simply failing to launch. Many are in need of a sense of purpose, or simply a good reason to get up in the morning.

Holt has noticed an uptick in young men coming to the church in search of purpose: ‘We’re trying to impart guidance on a generation that’s hungry for that.’

Churches like Life Tabernacle have stepped into the void with new messaging and programming to appeal directly to young men. They are part of a wider movement to restore traditional gender roles in America’s political and cultural life. This nostalgia for a time when men were heads of households, women were homemakers and everyone supposedly knew their place is in part a backlash against the liberal social mores that brought women’s rights, gay rights and transgender rights to the fore.

“Many young men feel like their lives are lacking in structure, purpose and connection,” said Richard Reeves, president of the nonpartisan research organization the American Institute for Boys and Men. “It turns out that churches have 2,000 years of experience at providing these things.”

These efforts appear to be paying off. Women in the U.S. have long been more religious than men, but lately the gender gap in religious affiliation has narrowed. Surveys show that women are leaving the pews, partly in response to the church’s handling of sexual-abuse scandals but also because they are increasingly suspicious of institutions that reinforce traditional gender roles. Men, meanwhile, are staying in the fold.

Among younger Americans, men are more religious than women for the first time in modern history. In a 2024 survey of Americans aged 18 to 29 by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), 64% of men and 60% of women said they were religiously affiliated. A decade ago, 65% of men and 71% of women said the same.

Holt has noticed an uptick in young men coming to the church with more questions than answers about how to live a meaningful life—or just get through the day. “We’re trying to impart guidance on a generation that’s hungry for that,” Holt said.

Life Tabernacle grew during the pandemic and now has as many young men attending regularly as young women.

Life Tabernacle’s 41-acre campus includes a pond, four baseball diamonds, a workshop and a cafe that provides job training to young congregants. A 20,000-square-foot brick and stucco sanctuary hall hosts three weekly sermons for adults. Smaller buildings hold separate services for younger kids and teens.

Head pastor Tony Spell, 47, lives with his wife Shaye and 19-year-old son in a house on campus (they also have a 25-year-old son and a 28-year-old daughter, both of whom are married and out of the house). He grew up in the church, which his grandfather founded in 1959, and took over in 2009. On church Sundays, he’s immaculately dressed in a tailored suit and tie, his graying hair slicked back with visible comb marks. He’s tall, his singing voice is powerful, and he regularly punctuates his sentences with an assertive “mhm,” a solo call and response.

Tony has only praise for his own two sons; one is a certified welder, the other is in chemical plant operations. But he says he sees every day how far young men have fallen behind their female peers.

“There are so many good women with a home and a car, and you have all these worthless men who are just bums,” he said. “It’s time to cut grass. It’s time to learn how to change a battery on a car.” He preaches against idleness and spends his downtime fixing broken cars and lawn equipment.

Shaye, 47, says the church began doubling down on its efforts to recruit and retain young men in 2020 in response to what she calls a countrywide crisis of masculinity. “We are losing the strength and the power of the man in the household,” she said. She noticed that many boys in the area were growing up with few life skills or role models, and often without a father at home: “This is why we targeted teen boys,” she said.

Head pastor Tony Spell says he sees every day how far young men have fallen behind their female peers: ‘There are so many good women with a home and a car, and you have all these worthless men who are just bums.’

The pandemic reinforced the church’s sense of urgency, as the congregation lost quite a few local boys to suicide and violence. The Spells also saw that teen boys were having the most trouble bouncing back after quarantine.

“When they’re used to being reclusive, it’s hard to get them to look you in the eye and connect,” Shaye said. Tony felt so strongly about the toll of quarantine on young people that he broke state law by continuing to hold services during Covid lockdowns. He rose to national attention, and the state charged him with several crimes, including allegedly backing up toward a protester with a bus. These charges were dismissed in 2022, and the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that the state’s pandemic restrictions had violated his religious rights.

Life Tabernacle, which grew during the pandemic, now has as many young men attending regularly as it does young women, a marked change from just a few years ago when young congregants were around 65% female. Tony says other church leaders are now coming to him to learn how to replicate this success.

“We gave them something they couldn’t find anywhere else,” Shaye said. “Hope.”

A team of church leaders drive 50 school buses every Sunday morning to pick up around 1,250 worshipers from their homes in the area, including many teenagers who attend church without their parents. Because many congregants don’t have cars of their own, Tony began busing them to the campus in 2009.

Baton Rouge has long struggled with high rates of poverty and violent crime, and many teenage congregants are being raised by single mothers.

Carnail Williams found the church when the Spells knocked on his door 13 years ago. Now 28, he says most of the boys he grew up with in his low-income housing project are in jail, struggling with addiction or dead.

Though Williams wasn’t interested in religion, the promise of a hot meal and some new clothes to replace his single pair of too-small jeans got him on a church bus that first Sunday morning. Sermons on how men should be the leader of the household, lessons in practical skills and connections to job opportunities kept him coming back each week.

Worried about the toll of pandemic lockdowns on young people, Pastor Spell, above, broke state law by holding in-person services.

“Nobody is really taking the time to encourage young men to work and do things that a man should do,” said Williams. One of Life Tabernacle’s members hired him as an electrical apprentice out of high school, teaching him skills he now uses as a construction site supervisor on an oil rig. He’s saved nearly enough for a down payment on his first house, in the hopes of following Tony Spell’s advice to own rather than rent.

Williams now sees himself in the teen boys who come looking for guidance at Life Tabernacle, where he volunteers as a Sunday school teacher.

“Men that don’t find a purpose in life, it leads to suicide and severe depression,” he said. “I witnessed it. I lived it. It was me that was in those shoes until I came here and God started making a change.”

Researchers say that churches like Life Tabernacle are getting more effective at appealing to disaffected young men. They’re offering “a vision of society that restores their lost status, where men are occupying their ‘rightful’ role as leaders in society, business and family,” said Paul Djupe, a religion and politics professor at Denison University.

Djupe notes that the #MeToo movement and the sudden rise in concerns about “toxic masculinity” gave churches an opening as a place where men could be men. Many religious institutions also ramped up more practical programming, honing the life and work skills necessary for boys and men to operate in the world.

As a result, young men are now attending religious services more often than their older and female peers, according to surveys from Denison and PRRI. They are also involved in 50% more church groups and activities, including Bible studies and sports leagues.

Yet much of the recent flip-flop in religious affiliation is driven by young women leaving, says PRRI’s chief executive Melissa Deckman. Young women are far more likely than young men to identify as liberal—a gap that has widened in recent years—and many say they feel alienated by church messaging that blames the woes of men on the rights and advances of women.

Students in the teenage girls Sunday school class, who study separately from boys. A young girl practices writing thank-you cards.

“That approach, frankly, is going to be less and less appealing to young women because we’ve raised a generation of young women who are more self-confident, who have seen a world that is very different from the one that was available to their mothers or grandmothers,” said Deckman.

At Life Tabernacle, Shaye says its mission to help boys become better men is meant to serve women, too, as many complain about a lack of viable suitors. She adds that many girls and young women crave a defined role as well. To complement lessons on landscaping and car mechanics for the boys, the church teaches girls lessons in etiquette and homemaking, culminating in an annual tea party.

The church’s leaders are explicit in what they expect from their young male congregants: to graduate high school, either go to college or find a job, buy a house, find a wife and have kids.

“It is a straightforward message,” said Tony Spell, who sees himself as a father figure to these young men. “A teacher will teach you, a father will correct you until you get what I’m instilling in you,” he added. “That’s what our young men crave.” Spell also provides dating advice. His list of qualities to look for in a woman includes faithfulness to church, modesty, loyalty and the ability to cook a meal.

Donte Fields, 21, who started coming to Life Tabernacle with his mother and six siblings when he was 13, credits the church with teaching him how to be a man. That has meant finding a full-time job at an Amazon fulfillment center, buying his own car and saving up for an apartment of his own. He’s also been taking more of his friends to church “to show them that God is the answer to any problem that might occur during their lifetime.”

Donte’s mom, 40-year-old Latrelle Fields, says she was worried about her children, and particularly her four sons, growing up without a father. “Boys want to look to their dad for direction,” she said. She now praises Pastor Spell for filling that role. “He taught them how to be a man. To get a job, be respectful, not drink or smoke, to get up in the morning even if they’re worn out and go to church.”  

Keenan Holloway, 23, decided to join a college friend for a sermon at Life Tabernacle three years ago and is now a church regular. Society is “teaching men that masculinity is toxic,” he said. “When you come here, you learn your masculinity is not toxic.”

At Life Tabernacle, Holloway has met many of his friends and his girlfriend, whom he hopes to marry. He works as an adviser at a community college and acknowledges that both he and his future wife might need to work to get by. But he said that’s OK as long as everyone knows “their roles,” with him “providing and protecting,” his wife “nurturing, teaching” and their future kids following and obeying.

“Being a man is knowing your place in society, your place in the world,” Holloway said. “You’re the head in the family, the leader on the job. That’s a man’s role, and that should be a man’s nature.”

Rachel Wolfe, Wall Street Journal

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