Hey, How Come Young Men Are Getting Religion All Of A Sudden? Oh, I Think We Know!

Young men are desperate to bring the patriarchy back and women ... are not.

Four Monks by Claudio Rinaldi

There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about the growing Gen Z gender divide. Women are becoming more liberal and less religious, while men are becoming more conservative and more religious. Last week, Vox ran an article about this, suggesting that the increased religiosity among young men is a driving factor in their rightward turn.

It’s a theory. I guess. But I’d argue it’s the opposite. Men are becoming more conservative because they’re mad at feminism, and subsequently becoming more religious as a result. Conservatism, for the most part, requires religion and makes very little sense without it. Social conservatism in particular.

The fact is, young men are currently in thrall to a variety of hyper-religious influencers who promise them that religion can make the patriarchy great again. Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, and Nick Fuentes are trad Caths (Catholics who like to pretend Vatican II never happened), Charlie Kirk and Joel Webbon are Evangelicals, Andrew Tate is Muslim. I’m not sure what flavor of religious Tim Pool is, but he’s previously tweeted that “It should be illegal not to believe in God,” so …

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These influencers are not just making young men more misogynistic or more racist — although they are, Blanche, they are! — they’re also making them more religious.

It’s a thing that’s been going on for years. Many of the men who had initially made a name for themselves as debauched “pick-up artists” started becoming devout religious fundamentalists right around the time women started pushing back against rape culture and feminism started another wave. The more angry men have become about women, the more they’ve turned to men who tell them that God wants them to be in charge of everything and for women to get back in the kitchen.

It’s not rocket science. Nothing makes people more conservative (and thus religious) than having a group of people to hate based on their immutable characteristics.

On the other side of the coin, women — save for those who want to become tradwives themselves — are going to be less interested in a belief system that wants to subjugate them. I’m not saying all religions seek to subjugate women, though it does seem like a fairly common denominator, especially right now.

It’s what I say all of the time: People love you for the way you make them feel about themselves, and they gravitate towards things and people that tell them the story they want to hear about themselves. If you’re a man and you’re feeling bad, and you think things would have been better for you at a time when women were expected to be barefoot and pregnant — which, fair, eliminating competition from half the population would give most people an edge in life — then you’re going to gravitate towards a belief system that tells you it’s the “natural order” for your wife to be subservient to you.

Because it’s really not just that men are becoming more religious in general — they’re not out here becoming Methodists or Episcopalians — they’re specifically gravitating towards fundamentalist churches that espouse a patriarchal view of the world. It’s a view that now allows them to proudly and openly say that they do not think men and women are equal, that they don’t think women should be in the workplace, that they think we should stay home and have babies instead. It’s a lot easier to say abhorrent things if you think God is standing behind you, giving you a big thumbs up.

This is not without precedent. In the 1940s, you had women going to work because of WWII. In the 1950s, you had the rise of evangelicalism and a nationwide cultural push to get them out of there and back to the kitchen.

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In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, you had the women’s rights movement and the Civil Rights Movement. One minute later, you had born-again Christians realizing that it was God, actually, who needed to ban interracial relationships at Bob Jones University. It’s also when Protestants decided they were anti-abortion, too, whereas it had previously just been “a Catholic” thing. In the 1990s, there was increased acceptance of LGBTQ+ people, Rodney King, a new Black Power movement, and third wave feminism. Then, in the 2000s, you got purity rings and purity balls and people demanding Creationism be taught in schools.

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It’s been a while since I read Susan Faludi’s Backlash, but it’s the same idea. It’s just hitting particularly hard this time, due to social media and our lack of a shared popular culture. Part of the reason the fundamentalist nonsense calmed down after a while was because people made fun of it. After all, who wanted to be the Church Lady? But now there’s nothing that everyone watches or listens to, and the Right has been working hard at trying to make its own culture. It has not gone well, obviously, but they’re certainly trying.

How long will this last? Hard to say. Longer than before, probably. I will say that, homophobic as they are, I think the lack of women going along with them might be a problem at some point.

It’s pretty hard to be a patriarch all on your own.