Thirty years ago my Baptist boyfriend told me I should avoid the charismatic movement.  The reason: charismatic churches were comprised of 60 percent women, a statistic he’d been given by the director of our campus evangelical group.   

Ultimately, I ignored this advice, and a couple years later, I watched a movie at my charismatic church that was exercised about the fact that 60 percent of world missionaries were women.

More recently, the minister in this video, Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church in Seattle is concerned that 60 percent of Christians are “chicks.”  Keep in mind that Mars Hill is a charismatic church, the sort of church my Baptist boyfriend warned me to avoid as its emotionalism appealed primarily to women.

I don’t know what it is about “60 percent female” that gets Christian men’s briefs in a bunch and makes them think there’s a crisis in their religion and maybe they need to reinvent it with more war metaphors. If a man were to walk into a bar and see 60 percent female customers, he might even think he’d died and gone to heaven.

It’s clear after three decades the 60 percent statistic is not a new phenomenon, and not a particularly alarming statistic when you consider that women outnumber men, tend to outlive men and have throughout American history traditionally assumed the role of the moral upbringing of children.

The unchangeableness of the 60 percent female anecdote, without even a variation in the percentage over 30 years, makes it appear like an urban legend, which does little to enhance the credibility of any of its sources.   Indeed, both men and women might well question a religion whose “timeless truths” seem to be self-serving myths.