Conservative Men Are Happier, Healthier, and More Religious Than Liberal Men

By Bethany Miller

Something shifted in American churches around 2023, and the data are only now catching up to what pastors had already begun to notice: young men were coming back.

The latest Gallup release, drawn from telephone surveys conducted across 2024 and 2025, published April 2026, puts numbers to it. For the first time in the 25-year history of the question, men ages 18-29 are more likely than women the same age to describe religion as “very important” in their lives. Forty-two percent of young men say so, against 30 percent of young women. A 14-point swing upward for men since 2022-2023. A historic low for women. 

To understand what the numbers mean, it helps to remember what the 2024 election looked like from the ground. Exit polls showed men 18-29 backing Donald Trump over Kamala Harris by roughly 14 points (56 percent to 42 percent). Four years earlier, the same cohort had favored Biden by a similar margin. Young women backed Harris by 17 points. The gender gap in American political life, which researchers had spent decades treating as a fixed star, turned out to be a weather vane.

Gallup’s religiosity data clarifies the cultural architecture underneath that political shift. Monthly religious attendance among young men has reached 40 percent, its highest point in more than a decade. Affiliation stands at 63 percent, the strongest reading since 2012-2013. Young women, at 39 percent attendance and 60 percent affiliation, have become, for the first time in the survey’s history, the less religious half of their generation.

Gallup is careful about causation, as it should be. But the report notes plainly that the surge is concentrated almost entirely among young Republican men. Monthly attendance in that group rose seven points since 2022-2023 and has been climbing steadily since 2018-2019. Young Democratic men showed a three-point uptick in the same period, and a longer-term decline. “Political dynamics,” the report states, “may be playing a role in religious changes among the nation’s young adults.”

The hedge is appropriate, but the pattern is not subtle.

Political scientist Ryan Burge has been watching this longer than most. He describes the gender reversal as “a seismic change in society and the future of the church,” language he doesn’t use loosely. His argument is structural: religious institutions remain among the few spaces in American public life where traditional masculine identity isn’t treated as a problem to be managed. That’s not an endorsement. It’s an observation about supply and demand.

The broader well-being data point in the same direction, though they require careful handling. Nate Silver’s 2025 analysis of the 2022 Cooperative Election Study with over 60,000 respondents found conservatives averaging 68 out of 100 on a mental health self-rating scale; liberals averaged 53. Among those reporting excellent mental health, conservatives outnumbered liberals 51 percent to 20 percent. A 2025 PLOS ONE study by Brian Schaffner and colleagues ran the same basic finding through controls for demographics, religiosity, marital status, income, and media consumption. Ideology held as a statistically significant predictor even after all of it. Moving from very liberal to very conservative was associated with an 11-point mental health advantage on a normalized scale.

Self-reported data have limits. People construct their self-assessments inside cultural frameworks that tell them what flourishing is supposed to look like, and conservatives and liberals operate inside different ones. A conservative man who grounds identity in stoicism may report fewer mental health struggles for reasons that have nothing to do with actually having fewer. That caveat matters, and the literature acknowledges it.

What the data can speak to more cleanly is behavior. Institute for Family Studies analysis of General Social Survey data shows 57 percent of conservative men ages 25-35 have married, against 35 percent of liberal men–a 22-point gap. Gallup’s long-term tracking puts Republicans 18 points ahead of Democrats on marriage rates among adults 30-50, a difference that persists after adjusting for age, gender, education, and race. Married adults, across essentially every large longitudinal dataset, report better health, greater life satisfaction, and stronger social support. The mechanism isn’t mysterious.

The older pattern here is worth naming directly. Conservatives have reported higher subjective well-being than liberals in General Social Survey data going back to 1972. Pew’s tracking shows the same. What’s new isn’t the gap, it’s where it’s opening up, and among whom.

Young men, 18-29, are now converging with older men on religiosity. Young women are diverging from older women, sitting 18 points below women 30-49 on Gallup’s importance-of-religion measure, the lowest female reading in the survey’s history. The broader American religiosity decline continues; the young-male exception stands out precisely because the surrounding trend runs the other way.

What draws young men to institutions their peers are leaving is, at this point, genuinely contested. The data support several non-exclusive explanations: a search for structure, a response to perceived cultural hostility toward male identity, the social and psychological benefits of community and ritual, the particular pull of institutions that ask something of you. Probably all of these, in proportions that vary by person and place.

What the numbers don’t support is the assumption, comfortable on both sides of this debate, that the shift is either purely political theater or purely spiritual awakening. It’s both, tangled together in ways that surveys can detect but not fully untangle.

The young men showing up in pews on Sunday mornings are looking for something. The data suggest they’re finding it. Whether that something is what the churches think they’re offering is a different question entirely—one that will take another decade of surveys, and a great deal of honest reporting, to begin to answer.

Bethany Miller is the Director of Communications at NRB, Managing Editor of The Conservateur, and a Fellow at Concerned Women for America.