The relationship between different social groups and religious or spiritual organisations and movements, beliefs and practices, including by gender, ethnicity, social class and age.

What this dot point is asking

AQA wants you to explain how religious participation varies between social groups (gender, ethnicity, social class and age) and to evaluate the explanations for these patterns. Examiners reward candidates who show how the patterns interact and how they feed into the secularisation debate.

Gender and religiosity

Women generally participate more in religion than men, on most measures of attendance, belief and private devotion. Explanations include:

• Socialisation and gender roles: women are socialised to be more passive, obedient, caring and nurturing, qualities religion values (Miller and Hoffmann). The same authors argue women are more risk averse, and since not believing is a "risk" (of damnation), women hedge by believing.
• Caring roles and the body: women's roles in childbirth, childrearing and caring for the sick and dying connect them to questions of life, death and meaning (Davie); Bruce notes women's closer association with healing, nature and the body.
• Compensation for deprivation: women face more poverty, ill health and the constraints of domestic labour, and religion can compensate, offering meaning and status (Glock and Stark's theodicies of disprivilege).

The growth of female participation in many New Age and holistic movements reflects their emphasis on healing, the body and the self.

Ethnicity and religiosity

Minority-ethnic groups in the UK often show higher religiosity than the white majority. Explanations:

• Cultural defence (Bruce): religion provides a focus for identity and solidarity in the face of hostility or oppression, uniting and protecting a community under threat.
• Cultural transition (Bruce): religion eases the transition of migrants into a new society, offering community, support and continuity; it may fade once a group is established (as it did for Irish, Polish and other earlier migrants).
• Origins: many minority groups come from more religious societies and bring those beliefs and practices with them, and pass them on through tight-knit family and community structures.

Age, class and religiosity

• Age: older people are generally more religious. Three competing explanations are tested: the ageing effect (people turn to religion as they approach death and have more time), the generational (period) effect (each generation is less religious than the last, which supports secularisation rather than ageing), and the disengagement of the old from secular life. Voas and Crockett argue the data fit the generational effect best, which is why age is central to the secularisation debate.
• Social class: patterns vary by type of organisation. Sects and many Pentecostal churches appeal to the more marginal and deprived (a theodicy of disprivilege), while established churches, Quakers and the New Age tend to attract more middle-class adherents who have the time and money for "spiritual seeking".

Evaluation

These patterns feed into the secularisation debate: the generational effect on age suggests genuine decline, while women's and minority groups' continued participation suggests religion is changing and persisting rather than vanishing. The factors also interact (gender, class, ethnicity and age overlap, so a working-class older minority-ethnic woman sits at several intersections at once), which means single-factor explanations are limited and the strongest answers stress this.