He is obviously a controversial figure. For some, the mere mention of Nick Fuentes’s name is enough to end the conversation: he is dismissed as hateful, dangerous, unserious, toxic and beyond the pale. Frankly, I do not agree. Or rather, I do not agree that his movement, or what he represents, ought to be dismissed with such haste.

The pure fact of the matter is that Fuentes is incredibly popular among young men. After every episode of his show, which runs for two hours or so every weekday, clips of him make their rounds on Instagram and X/Twitter, often garnering millions of views. He is frequently inflammatory, sometimes needlessly so. There are turns of phrase, jokes, provocations and rhetorical habits that many Catholics dislike, and some of those criticisms are reasonable. But the usual critique of Fuentes is lazy. If the purpose of denouncing him is to make him disappear, it clearly has not worked.

Fuentes has become influential because he speaks to young men in a language they recognise. He is direct, funny, combative, politically serious and completely uninterested in sounding like a diocesan press release. He does not approach the Faith as a lifestyle choice, a therapeutic resource, or a vague aesthetic for people who like candles and old buildings. He speaks as though Catholicism is true, and as though, if it is true, it has consequences for politics, family life, sex, civilisation, authority and the destiny of nations. That alone makes him unusual.

A great deal of Catholic public commentary, even when notionally conservative, feels too restrained. It wants to defend the Faith, but only after sanding off anything that might offend the modern world. It speaks of evangelisation, but often in a tone that suggests the chief danger is not sin, cowardice or unbelief, but sounding a little too certain. It talks to young men as though masculinity is a pastoral problem to be managed. They notice this. They can tell when Catholicism is being made acceptable to liberal opinion before it has even been explained.

The style is distinctly American: the volume, the theatricality, the sense that politics is unfolding somewhere between a revival meeting and a gaming stream. For some English audiences, that can take a little getting used to. But Fuentes’s audience, medium and political context are American, and what may sound excessive elsewhere is often part of what makes him effective in that environment. And he is effective. That is what his critics cannot bear to admit.

It is not enough to say that his audience is angry, or simply attracted to extremism. Those explanations are too convenient. They let everyone else off the hook. The more uncomfortable truth is that many young men have been offered very little by the respectable Catholic world. They have been given a Christianity of niceness, empathy, dialogue and managed decline. They have been told endlessly what not to be: not harsh, not judgemental, not too political, not too traditional, not too interested in authority, sex roles, punishment, strength or victory. Very well. But what are they meant to be?

A young man does not become virtuous by being told to be harmless. He needs to be summoned, disciplined and given something worth fighting for. Catholicism can do this better than any ideology on earth, but one would not always know it from the way the Faith is presented.

The comparison with Jordan Peterson is useful. A few years ago, many Catholics were happy to praise Peterson as a gateway to the Faith. In many ways, he was. He helped young men think about responsibility, sacrifice, fatherhood and the moral structure of life. But Peterson is not Catholic, and his treatment of Christianity was always symbolic. He could speak movingly about Scripture, but he stopped short of the Church’s concrete claims.

Fuentes is different. He is rougher, less respectable and far less palatable to polite conservative opinion. But in certain respects he is closer to the actual battle lines. He is not trying to make Christianity respectable to liberalism, nor to translate Catholicism into some kind of self-help thing. He sees that liberalism is not merely a set of mistaken policies. It is a rival moral order.

That does not make him without fault, of course, far from it. But Catholics should be more careful before dismissing the whole phenomenon as hatred. His appeal lies not chiefly in hatred, but in refusal: of liberal pieties, feminist assumptions, sexual nihilism, demographic fatalism and a Christianity reduced to being agreeable.

Of course there are limits: we cannot simply baptise whatever arrives wearing a rosary and attacking liberalism. There is a pagan version of the Right, and Catholics should want no part of it. There is also a temptation online to confuse cruelty with strength and mockery with truth. But the answer to distorted masculinity is not less masculinity. It is better masculinity. The answer to rashness is prudence, not cowardice.

This is why I am broadly sympathetic to Fuentes. Not because every provocation is wise, nor because anyone should outsource his political or religious judgement to an online commentator. But he has grasped something many respectable Catholic voices have not. Young men are not looking for a faith that has been pre-apologised to make it acceptable to people who hate it. They are looking for something with weight.

If Fuentes has become a gateway for some young men into a more serious Catholic life, that should not surprise us. The question is not really whether Nick Fuentes is the ideal spokesman for Catholic young men. Plainly, he is not. The question is why so many young men find him more convincing than the people who insist they know better.

And here the respectable Catholic world might have to consider an uncomfortable possibility: perhaps the problem is not simply that Fuentes is too harsh, too online, too American, too willing to offend. Perhaps the problem is that so many of his critics have nothing comparable to offer.

They have outrage, of course. They have concern. They have all the usual language about tone and responsibility. But outrage does not form men. Concern does not give them a reason to get out of bed. And tone-policing is a poor substitute for courage.

Fuentes is far from perfect. No serious person should pretend otherwise. But he understands that young men do not want a Catholicism that nervously asks permission to exist. They want to know whether the Church still believes her own claims. They want to know whether the battle is real, whether their sacrifices matter, and whether they are being called to something more demanding than being harmless.

Until respectable Catholics can answer those questions without sounding embarrassed, they should not be shocked when young men listen to someone who can.