As a Nicaraguan-born girl growing up in Miami, Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez remembers going to church five times a week. Her father was a pastor, and their fundamentalist evangelical faith taught that a woman’s role was to serve her husband.
At the same time, Mojica Rodríguez saw how essential women were in keeping the pews filled and the church running. Ultimately, dismayed by the subservient role of women and the church’s harsh restrictions on girls, she would leave her faith – and her husband – in her late 20s.
“Women are less inclined to be involved with churches that don’t want us speaking up, that don’t want us to be smart,” said Mojica Rodríguez, who went on to earn a master’s degree in divinity. “We’re like the mules of the church – that’s what it feels like.”
Though the Nashville-based author and activist is now 39, her experience reflects a growing and, for churches, a potentially worrisome trend of young women eschewing religion. Their pace of departure has overtaken men, recent studies show, reversing patterns of previous generations.
Childhood indoctrination is a very powerful thing to be able to break away from. When you’re told every day to do exactly what the pastor says Jesus wants you to do from the point that you are able to understand the “do this or else” concept, it’s hard to shake that off even if you feel it’s wrong.
Yup, and in my experience, it’s strongest in Catholics. Like my wife hasn’t been to church or practiced anything in probably 20 years, but a lot of the tenets are deeply rooted in her, most notably guilt (and guilting other people, especially her family)
Probably why Catholic girls are some of the most wacko and most fun in a particular regard. All that repressed emotion.
Also family and peer pressure in many instances.