Amid news of the wave of young adults coming into the Church this past year, I asked a friend, a young father and recent Catholic convert, what it was that drew him into the Church. He told me that he had initially turned to various non-denominational churches. He met wonderful people and learned a lot; however, he felt something was missing. He thought briefly and then said, “You know, it felt like the dads there wanted to be young and cool, and it feels like the dads in the Catholic community are striving to be men.”
His observation, though anecdotal, captures something essential about our moment: young men want to be challenged. Much has been written about the wave of young adults rediscovering Christianity, fleeing the nihilism of hookup culture, yearning for beauty and transcendence, and responding to the disintegration of social and moral structures. Yet beneath these explanations lies something more fundamental: a desire for authority, something outside and above the self, demanding yet benevolent, calling him to a life of consequence.
For decades, Western culture has steadily undermined the concept of authority, conflating it with authoritarianism and stripping it of its true generative and benevolent aspects. This erosion has unfolded across multiple fronts, but perhaps most destructively in the sustained demonisation and disorientation of men. Progressive ideology insisted to an increasingly fatherless culture that men serve no unique purpose, and that what we need is less masculinity. At the same time, the sexual revolution made vicious behaviour easy, and recast virtue as repressive, effectively weakening men, hardening women, and stoking the antagonism of the sexes.
This same suspicion of authority and tradition unfolded within Christianity, shaped in part by lingering Boomer-era sensibilities that questioned authority and romanticised youth. In both liturgical and moral teaching, the Christian inheritance was often diluted into something thin, therapeutic, and inoffensive. To retain and attract young people, many sought to make the Christian life as easy and anodyne as possible. The message was sent and received: nothing much is expected of you, or, to coin a modern phrase, you are enough.
But a purely comfortable life is eventually perceived as a meaningless one. The generation that lionised youth grew old. The logic that celebrated transgressive behaviour as courage left too high a body count of conquests and corpses. In the end, rebellion against authority even became its own cardinal sin: boring.
Young adults sense the fraud. Its perpetration is not limited to masculinity, morality, or poor liturgical music; it extends to our institutions. During Covid, authorities imposed coercive policies that were often unnecessary, isolating, developmentally harmful, and borne disproportionately by the young. The same authorities pursued the manifest falsehoods of gender ideology with equal zeal. Meanwhile, the media, instead of scrutinising these claims, amplified them.
The civic virtue of patriotism, an extension of filial loyalty rooted in gratitude and stewardship of a civic inheritance, was recoded as an embarrassing naivety. To love one’s country came to signify ignorance of its failures, or worse, to be a sign of fascism. Instead of this natural piety, sophisticates promoted globalism, opening borders while ignoring the various vicious pathologies that erupted against citizens, especially women and children.
At home, therapeutic philosophies such as “gentle parenting” further undermined the first and most primal experience of authority, recasting parents as over-accommodating managers of their children’s emotions. In doing so, they replaced formation with low expectations that subtly conveyed the message to a generation that they are incapable of triumphing over their struggles.
What we are witnessing is the collapse of counterfeit authority figures. The absence of real authority left a sterile legacy of degeneracy. The appeal of initiatives like Exodus 90, with its emphasis on sacrifice and asceticism, helps explain emerging data showing increased engagement among young men in church life. They have seen too much chaos and corruption to desire the condescension of a faith that merely affirms them. The Church, especially in her more reverent expressions, offers a counterworld and speaks the strange, yet strangely resonant, language of mystery, sacrifice, and transformation.
The task now is to deepen and direct this momentum. New converts need fellowship, and young men need strong, virtuous, and holy embodiments of masculinity. Such mentorship can take place formally or through the natural communication of wisdom that flows through friendship. New fervour can easily be misdirected, and there will always be examples of excess or missteps that some may seize upon to dismiss the whole movement. We ought not. They want what their Father wants to pass on to them: the richness of the Church and the call to steward and pass along this inheritance. It is an inheritance that was never ours to squander, nor anyone else’s to take.
Noelle Mering is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the author of the books Awake, Not Woke, Theology of Home, and a forthcoming book, No Contact, on the politics of estrangement. She is a wife and mother of six in California.
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