Twenty years ago, my husband and I were at a party of grad students in Claremont, California, discussing the differences between Old Testament law and the New Covenant written on the hearts of man as described in the New Testament. At one point a male classmate jumped up, eyes wide with shock, saying “wait. WAIT…you guys actually believe this stuff? Like not ironically, not for the sake of the noble lie…. For real—you actually believe this?”
I remember nodding, and then laughing at the whole scene. His shock was genuine, and his comment carried no malice. He was an upper-class kid who had attended elite schools, and he had simply never met a young, devout intellectual before. The idea that a thinking person would openly, unabashedly believe in Christianity was shocking to him.
It’s difficult to remember now, but in the early 2000s young intellectuals on the Right did not dabble in religion. The dawn of a new millennium offered only two alternatives to the milquetoast, Clintonesque liberalism that had dominated the 1990s: libertarianism or George W. Bush’s evangelical “compassionate conservatism.” Tech bros or values voters.
Evangelicalism was about as far away from the academy as possible, at least as far as GOP elites were concerned. The Reagan Revolution had been orchestrated by mostly atheist supply-side libertarians and war-hawk neocons, after all. Values voters were a large and important faction, but outside of a few departments in a handful of universities, they had scant representation among the party’s intellectual elite.
Twenty years ago, libertarianism offered young right-wingers all the sexual freedom and selfishness of the reigning Boomer culture, but none of the bozo sentimentalism that went along with it. Young people sensed that the bill for the Boomers’ multi-decade bender would soon come due; therefore, a firm “socially liberal but fiscally conservative” stance afforded them a math-friendly ticket to the post-1960s sexual revolution party.
As Millennials were brought up in the most permissive and sex-positive culture imaginable, the options for genuine rebellion were slim. A few of us actually did embrace orthodoxy and converted to serious religion. But far more Millennial intellectuals simply rejected our social duty to pay the bill for our parents’ party, and embraced license, libertarianism, and the siren song of New Atheism.
Surveying the crime, homelessness, drug addiction, and general misery of 2020s America, it seems ridiculous now to remember that thoughtful people on the Right once proposed that our social ills could be solved by simply legalizing all the drugs. People actually argued—and believed—that our greatest problems in the early 2000s were caused by the remaining adults in society who wanted to continue saying NO to the precious few perversions and social catastrophes we had yet to unleash.
Well, that and religion. Early tech libertarian bro values and atheism were ascendant. New Atheism had firmly defined religion as the refuge of irrational dimwits, sentimentalists, and cowards. The idea that a thinking person would be religious—like actually believe any of it—was laughable. Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins: public intellectuals like these represented smart, witty men of science. After 9/11, the New Atheists lumped Christians together with fanatical Muslims and declared war on religious sentiment, which they associated inextricably with religious violence and intolerance of all kinds.
New Atheism continued to dominate the libertarian wing of the Right until the Great Recession in 2008, when the smart set drove the country off a financial cliff. They made sure to pull all their friends out and rewrite the nation’s bankruptcy laws before fleeing the scene, however—leaving the rest of the American economy and its taxpayers inside the burning car.
The Bush Administration’s participation in the bank bailouts, together with its total focus on the War on Terror, encouraged a large portion of the GOP’s libertarian wing to embrace Obamanomics. The bipartisan support of banks “too big to fail” rendered the parties all but indistinguishable from each other on financial policy, anyway.
The Obama Administration was the first to actively persecute and punish American religion for its supposedly disruptive and harmful effects on American life.
The Catholic Church in particular became a target for Obama’s regulatory ire because of its refusal to play along with the Democratic Party’s universal healthcare policy mandating that Catholic employers cover abortion, contraceptives, and gay marriage benefits for their employees. Major Catholic employers in California and other blue states braced themselves for massive lawsuits. Catholic schools, universities, hospitals, and charities scrambled to write health care and spousal benefits policies that could somehow straddle the Obama Administration’s mandates and the Church’s stance on life and marriage issues.
Twenty years ago, it was possible for thinking people to suspect that the world would be better if religion and faith were kept out of politics, and far from public life. Events have rendered that impossible now. Contrary to Boomer and libertarian social theory, society’s ills aren’t exclusively caused by the few remaining partisans of self-control and sexual boundaries.
As a result, where my libertarian peers were once looking to snuff out the small remnant of religious scolds for the betterment of society, young people on the Right today are frantically turning over rocks and searching under piles of social debris in the hopes of seeing one or two devout adults scurry out.
In the post-COVID era, young men, serious religion, and the Republican Party elite are converging.
Heal Thyself
Increased religious participation among young men in general is observable if you know where to look: in certain Catholic parishes, particularly those that offer the Latin Mass, and in Orthodox and Reformed Presbyterian communities. But the widespread conversion to traditional Christianity is unmistakable among the elite in right-wing universities and political institutions. Where a generation ago it was unusual to observe strict religious adherence among intellectuals and politicos, today it is unusual to find anyone in these circles who has not recently converted to Catholicism. High-profile figures like J.D. Vance—who left the casual evangelical church of his youth and converted to Catholicism in search of a more demanding faith—are emblematic of a larger shift. Recent threads on X detailing an increase in conversions to Catholicism at places like Hillsdale underline the trend.
The legal and financial persecutions of the long Obama decade, coupled with the nightmarish COVID harassment on display during the Biden Administration, may have crystallized the choice between the atheists’ rationalist state and the open society invented and fostered by Christianity. A prescient Columbia Law School professor, Philip Hamburger, argued for the interdependence of liberty and religion on precisely those terms in 2008: “Religion is fundamental to the very liberty that we think we sometimes need to protect from religion.”
Early 2000s libertarians imagined that the heavy boot of organized religion would come down on the neck of free expression and ruin our good time. But the heel of the state during the COVID era came down so fast Americans hardly had time to realize what was happening, much less consent to it.
The American Left has undergone a metamorphosis of its own in the last three decades, turning Bill Clinton’s chill triangulation into frenzied strangulation. Progressives filled our skate parks with sand, arrested solo surfers and sunbathers on the beach, quarantined grocery store lines and preschoolers with at least six feet of separation, and looked longingly at Chinese state officials’ power to literally weld their unruly subjects into their apartments, placing entire populations under house arrest.
The early 2000s bleached-tipped libertarian bros’ warnings of religious killjoys harshing the country’s mellow were a distant memory as we watched state-mandated trial vaccinations, grandparents dying alone and imprisoned in nursing homes and hospitals, and widespread First Amendment violations in the name of public safety.
“Recent events” have changed the young Right’s understanding of totalitarian government unburdened by religion. Perhaps the turn to traditional Christianity among young right-wingers coincides with a heightened appreciation for the Christian tradition that developed our unique laws and political institutions. This uniquely Christian legal structure was all that remained to protect Americans from the fate others suffered at the hands of totalitarian officials in the Far East and even the Commonwealth nations.
Our media, our universities and social organizations, our medical system, and even our American popular culture were unequal to the task of preserving individual freedom and human rights amidst the global insanity of 2020. Our legal structure, our county system (including our sheriffs), and our decentralized system of state and local government alone made the difference. If progressives could have enforced nationwide house quarantines and social credit systems in 2020, they would have. They were unable to do so because of our legal system.
Our understanding of religion has also changed. A generation ago, religion was considered a relic of a different time. Perhaps, it was thought, some religious nostalgia could be tolerated by a sophisticated modern society, but not serious devotion. Serious religious devotion was viewed as an old callus on the human race, perhaps understandably developed over hard times with low-tech, superstitious centuries of struggle towards enlightenment. But at the dawn of the new millennium, we had progressed beyond all of this. This callus—this religious sentiment—was considered useless in modern life; worse, it was detrimental to the freedom and flexible morality that modernity had to offer. It was in the way: clumsy, rigid, and best discarded.
But to American young people, the past two decades have not been soft. The sharp discomfort of modern life, particularly the pain of our disconnected social reality in the 21st century, does not invoke the same sentiment in them as it did in young men a generation before. Where young men once looked out upon society to find the source of their discontent, and blamed religious zealots for their pain, today’s young men on the Right look inward.
Popular personalities like Jordan Peterson and Catholic intellectuals like Bishop Robert Barron have successfully reintroduced American men to a religion that is relevant for our current time. A key facet of this new approach is to look inside for both the cause and the solution to pain. Where Boomer liberalism and bro libertarianism once directed political action toward defeating cultural limitations on personal liberty, young devout right-wingers are more likely to see serious religion as a tool to prepare and train themselves to meet the twin horrors of post-sexual revolution social hellscape and the cruel totalitarian bent of progressive governance.
Peterson’s admonition to young men to clean their rooms, get a job, and essentially raise themselves into the men they long to be coincides nicely with traditional Christianity’s focus on virtue ethics, interior excellence, and spiritual armor. Today’s young men on the Right are more likely to espouse an internalized locus of control, and an internalized source of both pain and happiness. Virtue ethics, as found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and grafted into the Catholic intellectual tradition by Thomas Aquinas, offers a rare roadmap in the world of religion to better oneself with works of habituated effort, in a systematic and organized way.
American culture and our political system in the 21st century have devolved into a childish, morally bankrupt series of unfortunate events. But into this chaos, American society has also produced a new generation of serious men of faith to spur our political and cultural revitalization. Among this burgeoning right-wing elite, religion is no longer seen as the refuge of weak-minded people too afraid to face reality.
Young politicos and intellectuals on the Right have recently experienced a strong dose of reality, actually; and now they seek the tools, traditions, social scaffolding, and moral fortitude previous generations of self-governing Christians carried with them into battle. They seek religion for themselves, to counter the pain and destruction that decades of moral indulgence and political tomfoolery have bequeathed. They seek it in order to build families and social bonds strong enough to endure the challenges they face. They seek religion to equip themselves to rebuild; to meet their fate, and be equal to it.