What faith does to a man

‘So you're the breadwinner and she's the tradwife?’ It's a question I've been asked more often than I'd like in recent years, usually with a half-smile, as if I've just admitted to something I should secretly be ashamed of. My wife studied. She could have built a career, just like me. Instead, she chose to take care of our children, and I chose to fully dedicate myself to growing the business – with the agreement that, no matter what happened, I could be there at the momentsthat truly matter for our children. For some, that's an old-fashioned picture from the fifties, and soon the word 'tradwife' is used, with the implication that our church must have something to do with it. For us, it's a conscious choice. And it's a choice that science has increasingly validated in recent years.

The reproach, and what is true about the reproach

Let me be honest about where the tradwife criticism comes from, because it doesn't come out of nowhere. The word refers to an online trend of women romanticizing the 1950s housewife life: apron on, baking bread, the man as the head of the family, all filmed for a growing audience. Part of this movement also includes a political surrogate: the idea that women are 'actually' happier without ambition outside the home, and that any deviation from this is a mistake. Whoever sees that aesthetic aligning with a religious traditionsees it coinciding, understandably raises eyebrows. And the concern behind it is not unfounded: there have been enough families, including religious ones, in which 'the man is the head' devolved into control instead of service, and in which women were kept economically dependent without any say in the decisions that determined their own lives. Anyone who has experienced that can rightly become suspicious of it.

But that's precisely where the shoe pinches: the reproach treats 'traditionally appearing family' as one thing, while it can be at least two very different things. One is an aesthetic and a power dynamic. The other is a theology of equal partnership. And these two are constantly confused in the public debate.

What the HLD church actually teaches

Our church's Family Proclamation does not say that the man is the boss and the woman is subordinate. It says that fathers bear the responsibility to preside, provide, and protect, and that mothers are primarily responsible for the care of their children – with, crucially, the recognition that death, disability, or other circumstances may require individual adaptation. This is not an escape clause that accidentally crept in. It is a recognition that the ideal does not take the same form for every familytakes the same form, and that the church deals with this pragmatically.

What's more, just last year a new Gospel Topics essay on women was published which explicitly stated that the church no longer teaches that women only find their worth indoors. The emphasis is on the family, not on a fixed division of roles. And in our theology, that family is presented as a 'oneness', a unity of two equal but not identical partners. Paul concisely states it in 1 Corinthians 11:11: man and woman do not exist independently of each other, they complement each other. And already at creation, in Genesis2:18, the woman is not introduced as subordinate, but as someone who is missing as long as the man is alone – an equal counterpart, not an afterthought.

So that is my position, and I'm not going to sugarcoat it: equal but not the same is not a euphemism for oppression. It's a different claim than what the tradwife aesthetic sells. And increasingly, social-scientific research from recent years supports that claim.

What the figures on women say

Let us start with the most uncomfortable fact for those who consider religion by definition to be oppressive to women. A recent survey by the Institute for Family Studies and the Wheatley Institution among three thousand American women (2025) found that married mothers are almost twice as likely to say they are 'very happy' as unmarried and childless women – even after adjusting for age, income, and education. The same researchers found that international research in eleven countries shows that religiously active womensignificantly more often report a strong marital relationship, a sense of purpose, and overall happiness than their non-religious peers.

But the most interesting result from that international research is more nuanced than 'religion makes women happier,' and I think that's precisely why it's more convincing. Researchers from those same institutes found a J-curve: women at both ends of the ideological spectrum – the explicitly progressive feminist women and the explicitly traditional-religious women – reported the highest relationship quality. The women in between, with a vague, nominal commitment to any conviction whatsoever, scored the lowest.That relativizes my own statement a bit, and rightly so: it's apparently not so much about tradition in itself, but about conviction that you live consistently, as opposed to a half-hearted middle ground that doesn't really choose anything. Whoever concludes from this that 'tradition itself' is the key draws the conclusion a bit too quickly. What does remain standing: the narrative that religious commitment is by definition harmful to women does not hold up against these figures.

What faith does to men

Here, in my opinion, it only gets really interesting, because it refutes a cliché image that I myself also long held to be true. The sociologist Brad Wilcox of the University of Virginia studied in his book Soft Patriarchs, New Men religious fathers and husbands, taking as a starting point the common image: the strictly religious man as dominant, distant, cold. His findings overturned that image. Active, church-going fathers turned out to be the most involved with their children of all measured groups – reading aloud, supervising sports, spending time – and their wives reported the highest satisfaction with love and affection of all surveyed groups. This while these men on average did less housework than their secular counterparts. Wilcox calls thisa 'soft patriarchy': men who certainly see themselves as responsible for the family, but whose authority is softened by a great degree of emotional involvement and devotion.

The explanation behind this is, in my opinion, the core of the matter. Faith, marriage, and fatherhood 'domesticate' men: they give a responsibility and a purpose beyond the self, something for which they are willing to sacrifice themselves. In a time when many men, partly due to shifts in the labor market, struggle with the question of what they are still needed for, a faith community offers one of the few remaining places where that question receives a clear answer.

Fathers are not back-up mothers

Then the part that personally touched me the most, from research by Jenet Erickson (BYU) in her much-discussed article 'It Takes Two'. Mother and father do not contribute interchangeably the same to a child; they complement each other. Mothers build attachment and emotional regulation in the first year of life, which a child builds upon for the rest of their life. Fathers bring something different: a more stimulating, playful interaction, and a form of authority that sets and maintains boundaries. An involved father is the strongest predictor of university degreesthat researchers know, and strong protection against criminal behavior later in life. Figures from Pew Research also confirm the material picture: eight percent of married parents in America live in poverty, compared to twenty-seven percent of single parents.

I want to be honest about this: around this theme, all sorts of extreme figures about fatherlessness and crime circulate online – 'nine times more likely to be detained' and the like – which are often methodologically shaky because they confuse two different things: the percentage of prisoners who grew up without a father, and the percentage of children without a father who ultimately end up in prison. These are not interchangeable numbers, and I don't want to adopt a figure that I cannot justify myself. What remains, based onmore solid research, is the direction: father involvement and marital stability demonstrably protect children against poverty and against going astray. How large that effect precisely is, you may remain critical about.

Also on the following point, I would like to correct myself before I exaggerate. A much-cited Swiss study from 1994 found that when the father is actively religious, the chance that children will continue the faith as adults is significantly higher than when only the mother is active. This research is often simply summarized as 'fathers determine the faith of the children, mothers do not'. Later researchers, including American sociologist Vern Bengston, added an important nuance: it is not fatherhood itself that provesdecisive, but the warmth of the bond a father has with his child. A distant father with punctual church attendance passes on his faith much less effectively than a warm father who truly knows his children. So it's not 'fathers are more important than mothers', but: children look at who touches them most deeply, and genuine conviction is evidently less automatically expected from a father, which makes it count all the more when he does show it.

Is this just a placebo?

I myself have sometimes heard the obvious objection: perhaps religious women do not feel happier *because* they are religious, but because faith is a comfortable lie with which they can escape reality – religion as the opium of the people, in the words of Marx. Tyler VanderWeele, who leads the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard, has been publishing longitudinal research for years showing that religious involvement robustly correlates with mental health, resilience, and life satisfaction – even when youcorrect for income, education, and social support. Even Jonathan Haidt, who explicitly calls himself non-religious, now acknowledges that religious community is one of the few remaining forces that truly protects people from loneliness and meaninglessness.

This does not fully answer the placebo question – correlation remains correlation, and people who are already happier, more stable, or more socially inclined may find it easier to choose a religious community than vice versa. This caveat deserves to be said out loud, not brushed aside. But the magnitude and consistency of the effects, across dozens of countries and decades of research, makes ‘it’s all imagination’ an intellectually too cheap way out.

Equivalent, not equal

So no, we are not a tradwife family. A tradwife family is an aesthetic and, for some of that movement, a romanticization of female subordination. What we have is something else: a division of tasks voluntarily chosen by two people who see themselves as equals, and which – that is the point of this whole piece – is meanwhile increasingly emphatically supported by research that does not have to have anything to do with our church to come to the same conclusion.

What I want to leave you with is this: don't judge a partnership based on how it looks from the outside. The question that matters is not who brings in the money and who does the laundry. The question is whether there is mutual service, whether both voices carry weight in decisions, and whether at the end of the day the child has two parents who have both seen it grow up in their own way. Perhaps your family resembles ours more in terms of division of labor, perhaps not at all. That's not what it's about. What it's about iswhether – in the words of Paul – you are each other's complement, instead of each other's competitor or superior.

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Sources:

• Institute for Family Studies & Wheatley Institution, ‘In Pursuit: Marriage, Motherhood, and Women’s Well-Being’ (2025)
• Institute for Family Studies & Wheatley Institution, ‘The Ties That Bind: Is Faith a Global Force for Good or Ill in the Family?’ (2019)
• W. Bradford Wilcox, ‘Soft Patriarchs, New Men’ (University of Chicago Press, 2004)
• Jenet Jacob Erickson, ‘It Takes Two’, BYU Studies Quarterly 62:1 (2023)
• Pew Research Center, ‘Facts on Unmarried Parents in the U.S.’ (2018)
• Werner Haug & Philippe Warner, Swiss demographic research (1994), and the later refinement by Vern Bengston
• Tyler VanderWeele, Human Flourishing Program, Harvard University