Evangelical moms are finding it easier to balance their religious, office and home lives.

Just a couple of generations removed from widespread pressure to stay at home, evangelical working moms are now being welcomed into congregations, new research indicates.

One recent study found evangelical mothers who work full-time outside the home are now just as likely as mothers who work at home or have part-time jobs to be active in their churches.

In a separate study, conservative Protestant women, a category mostly made up of evangelicals, also were less likely to face work-family conflicts than women from other traditions.

The findings may in part reflect changing attitudes among male church leaders who have increasingly accepted working women as an economic necessity in families, researchers said.

But what also should not be overlooked, scholars suggest, is the role of evangelical women, often dismissed by many academics and the media as submissive victims of male patriarchy.

It was these women, determined to integrate work and family into their lives, who challenged traditional thinking and helped create change.

Changing times

A great deal of older research found that conservative Protestant mothers faced significant pressure not to enter the workforce.

But is that still true today?

Researcher Linda Kawentel of the University of Notre Dame analyzed General Social Survey data from 1975 to 2016, comparing the religious involvement of Catholic and evangelical working women, two groups that place a high value on motherhood.

Among Catholics, she found no significant difference in service attendance across the time period between mothers who worked full-time outside the home and mothers who worked no more than part-time in outside employment.

But in the 1970s, evangelical mothers working full-time outside the home were nearly 20 percent less likely to be regular attenders. In the 1980s, the gap fell to 14 percent.

By the 1990s, however, the odds that an evangelical woman who was employed full-time would exhibit lower religious involvement were no longer statistically significant.

In the current decade, the odds are actually slightly higher that evangelical mothers with full-time jobs would be regular attenders, although the difference is still not statistically significant.

Kawentel reported the results at the recent annual meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion in Philadelphia.

In a separate study, researchers using data from the 2002, 2006, 2010 and 2014 waves of the General Social Survey found conservative Protestant women were the least likely to experience tensions between home and office.

In fact, they were the only group to be less likely to report both that the demands of their job interfered with their family life or that the demands of their family interfered with their work on the job.

“We find that conservative Protestant women, but not men, report less work-to-family conflict and less family-to-work conflict than their peers in other religious groups,” Matthew May of Oakland University and Jeremy Reynolds of Purdue University reported in the Journal of Family Issues.

Strong women

“Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.” — Colossians 3:23-24

The studies could not determine causal effects from the findings. More research on work and faith needs to be done on this generation of evangelical women, scholars say.

Both Kawentel and May noted that one likely reason for the change is that many evangelical leaders have become more accepting of the economic need for mothers to work outside the home.

“The theology has changed, too,” Kawentel said. Urging mothers to stay home “is not a central focus of a lot of evangelical denominations. That rhetoric isn’t there.”

But the reasons go beyond the lessening of opposition from male church leaders, the research indicates.

In a 2016 special issue on “Motherhood, Religions and Spirituality” in the journal Religion & Gender, scholars from Coventry University and the University of London indicated there can be a “blind spot” in some scholarship that relegates religious women to being victims of male patriarchy.

For example, “In their criticisms of religion, feminist thinkers have alienated many religious and spiritual women who feel empowered by their beliefs and who draw authority and agency from them,” said Sariya Cheruvallil-Contractor and Gill Rye.

And while patriarchy continues to be a feature in much institutional religion, the scholars said, women “are transforming religion, often reclaiming it for themselves.”

In her 2010 book, “Chasing Superwoman,” Susan DiMickele described how her “heart sank” as a third-year-law student in the mid-90s when a pastor described working mothers as a sign of the end times. “I wanted to be a top-notch lawyer and a devoted mother. ‘Would the church still accept me?’”

DiMickele became a full-time attorney and the mother of three children.

The lesson she learned: “Only by God’s grace do each of us have the freedom to run her own course, and a loving and gracious God will be paving the way—even holding us at time—every step of the journey.”

It is not as if evangelical women have it any easier than other moms in finding ways to balance the demands of motherhood and the workplace. They still may be more likely to face pressures from traditional teaching to be limited in their choices, researchers indicate.

But the studies suggest many evangelical moms who work full-time outside the home have come a long way by faith.

Image by Department of Labor, via Wikimedia Commons [CC BY 2.0]
Image by Luke23waltz, via Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 4.0]