Ever since the first signs of a Christian revival across Western Europe began appearing three years ago – a phenomenon that current liberal orthodoxy insists ought not to be happening at all – the media have been frantically groping for narratives that will allow them to fathom or explain away a trend which really oughtn’t (in their eyes) to be taking place.
They soon found their angle. Clinging onto often uncertain data, it was concluded that young men were responsible (or to blame, depending on your angle). This was reported by the National Catholic Register as the reason for the uptick in church attendance in Britain. Meanwhile at The Times, the Guardian and even here at the Catholic Herald, reports echoed these sentiments for trends on sides of the Atlantic – citing findings from the Bible Society and the Barna Group respectively.
An article earlier this year by Jessica White in the Guardian put things most blatantly. Though she confessed to being a churchgoer and therefore to having mixed sentiments surrounding the news of filling pews, White directed concern to the motivations of these newcomers – ranging from the suggestions of politically extreme Instagram accounts to the chauvinism of the Tate brothers.
Similar arguments circulated amongst the commentariat and media across large parts of the political spectrum, from Left-leaning to centrist and more liberal-leaning elements on the Right. The conclusions were simple: the revival can be written off by pinning it onto disaffected young men, who are angry and just looking for an avenue to justify their reactionary, resentful views – thereby clinging to the antiquated social attitudes offered by religion.
There are a number of problems with this. But perhaps the most significant one is the commonly repeated line that young men are leading the revival – because it isn’t true.
In France, where the uptick in adult conversions has been the most sudden, proportionally extensive and accelerating, women are leading the charge.
Findings published by France’s bishops’ conference, released annually at the Easter Vigil, have repeatedly reported that women outnumber men among the sections of the nation’s previously nonobservant population who are either returning to or converting to the Catholic Faith – by a ratio of around 64 per cent women to 36 per cent men.
With women therefore constituting nearly two thirds, the trend is constant and increasing. In 2025, a record 10,384 adult baptisms marked a staggering 45 per cent increase over the prior year, which in turn resembled a 35 per cent increase on before. And females consistently outnumbered males in all demographics.
On top of this, as if to give a proverbial kiss of death to the angry-young-men narrative, French female converts outnumbered men in every age cohort save among the over-65s – making the liberal narrative almost the very opposite of the truth.
Admittedly, the Anglosphere’s male surge seems real enough. According to findings by the Bible Society, young British male church attendance more than quadrupled between 2018 and 2024. Yet France’s absolute numbers dwarf this shift. And the gender split there is inverted. Something deeper is going on.
One obvious difference is the respective religious ecosystems. Britain and America possess a different cultural and historical environment than that of France. In the Anglophone world, the Protestant-coded language and memory, alongside the conditions of its popular culture, inevitably create different perceptions of the Christian faith than compared to historically Catholic France.
And while the US and Britain offer a plethora of mainline and non-mainline Protestant churches from which to choose – and which to varying degrees have historical precedents and recognition within their lands – France offers no such marketplace. Her laïcité is a state ideology of unbelief, making conversion a full and controversial repudiation of the values of the republic.
By contrast, over in the UK one need not endorse every syllable uttered by Andrew Tate or Nick Fuentes to notice that a certain brazenly dissident, anti-feminist reading of “traditional masculinity” has found a ready audience among young Anglosphere men, and that this reading has, in some quarters, fused with a rediscovery of Christianity as historically, philosophically and morally founded – and thereby serving as the last vanguard of hierarchy and order.
Nations are under siege, it is additionally argued, and the best way to resist is to return to the roots. The Tate brothers and their noisy ilk are not the cause of the revival, but they have almost certainly piggybacked on it and have aped its tone in Britain and America, giving the religious revival a disagreeable edge to some of those unfamiliar with the broader Christian landscape.
Meanwhile, the corresponding cultural space for women remains oddly barren in the UK. Where continental women appear able to approach faith without feeling they are surrendering autonomy, many Anglosphere women encounter a pop-feminist milieu that equates religious submission with oppression and sexual manipulation as independence. Yet this doesn’t seem to have prevented conversions in France.
Two observations may explain this contrast. First, the texture of everyday life under aggressive cosmopolitan secularism. French public space has become objectively less safe: violent crime rose 11 per cent annually from 2016–2022; sexual assaults climbed another 11 per cent in 2024, and the feminist collective Nous Toutes logged 3.2 femicides or attempted femicides daily throughout the last recorded year.
The southern French city of Marseilles is recognised as one of the most dangerous cities in Europe, and parts of Paris (such as La Chapelle-Pajol where women are harassed “in all languages” and threatened by sex trafficking rings) have been labelled no-go zones for women. When the state’s protection evaporates, the Church’s counter-offer – covenantal community, moral architecture, a transcendent guarantee – stops sounding so hostile.
Second, and perhaps more telling in the long run, is the Anglosphere’s strange imaginative starvation when it comes to women – a cultural spillover of Protestantism and which is something not shared by France’s historically Catholic landscape.
Here in the UK there exists a strange asymmetry. The much-maligned “manosphere” discussed by the likes of White, for all its potential and, at times actual, vulgarity, is also stuffed with aspirational content: online celebrities like Chris Williamson preach discipline, purpose, ethical ambition, a vision of masculinity as performance and mastery. Joe Rogan discusses cosmology and meaning and overcoming addiction with the likes of Mel Gibson.
But the parallel space marketed to women is thinner gruel: women are bombarded with Taylor Swift’s carousel of romantic wreckage sold as empowerment, with the “Call Her Daddy” gospel of weaponised promiscuity (advocated by one who herself is monogamously happily married) and with the Handmaid’s Tale reduction of traditional femininity to reproductive slavery. The net effect is a moral and imaginative vacuum.
Protestant-leaning outlets like Relevant Magazine have agonised over whether Christianity has a “woman problem”; Catholicism, as exemplified by what we see in France, appears not to.
Perhaps a reason for this is that while in Anglophone culture there is a lack of positive female role models, the Catholic Faith keenly possesses the Blessed Virgin – exalted, dignified and honoured with statues and artworks of the most sublime beauty, sinless yet fully woman – alongside an adorned heavenly court of heroines and formidable daughters. There is, for example, Thérèse the Little Flower who ascended by sweetness and smallness, Catherine who corrected popes, Teresa who rebuilt an order and guided others to mystical depths, Joan the warrior-saint, Hildegard the polymath – and many more.
In a culture that has spent half a century teaching young women to regard fidelity, motherhood and spiritual authority as forms of oppression, we oughtn’t to underestimate the power that these figures may have on cultural memory in a nation that hasn’t completely yet forgotten them – and where their statues and shrines may still abound.
Moreover, French Catholicism (despite a brief problem with Jansenism) never shared the same anti-artistic iconoclastic fervour as Protestantism, and thus has a far keener sense of the aesthetic, the natural, the maternal image, the feminine.
In contrast, the cultural mindsets among young Anglophone men and women are often comically misaligned. There’s a running joke online these days about the differences when a young boyfriend and girlfriend walk into the gym together. The joke observes how the man will be counselled by “manosphere” sentiments which remind him in crude language that he is pathetic and weak, and which lash him into ruthlessly confronting his faults, asserting that he is entitled to nothing and must compete and work to achieve his goals.
The woman’s counsels are, by contrast, affirmations that reassure her that she is inherently worthy and “deserving of the best”. The man, whose workout is subsequently and by contrast far more punishing, leaves the gym disgruntled at his lack of efforts and decides to mortify himself by denying his weekly “cheat meal”. The woman, however, after a leisurely and gentle session, leaves entirely proud of her modest efforts.
This is comedy, but one recognised as possessing a grain of truth for today’s younger generation. There is an argument that men, being more prone to laziness and carnality, need such tough messaging more. While women, being more reliably devoted and organised, do not. But in the absence of an ideal, women are encouraged to be comfortable with themselves for simply existing – something which inevitably leaves them listless.
Perhaps Catholicism can radically help to provide the missing aspirational vision of female heroism that many young women seek and that contemporary culture so often forgets and fails to deliver.
Louise Perry – who recently converted to Christianity – and the latest sexually conservative feminists are beginning to notice the same wreckage on their side, documenting how in many ways it is women, far more than men, who have been the psychological casualties of hookup culture. Their critique is welcome, but it remains largely negative – a diagnosis without a positive iconography. Maybe Christianity, exemplified by its Catholic form, is the natural answer and destination for those women wrestling with the societal malaises of the day.
France’s young daughters are not marching to the font because they have been radicalised on Instagram or because they feel resentful at a world which leaves them behind. For theirs was an emboldened generation and the first to be told by an avowedly secular world to celebrate the fact that “the future is female”.
Rather, the rapidly-swelling cohort of converts simply hasn’t reacted in the manner anticipated by that propagandising secular culture. They are reacting because the secular republic has left them exposed, and because the Church – uniquely – still speaks to women without contempt.
The Anglophone commentariat may continue to fret about Tate-inspired misogynists. But perhaps it’s not the “manosphere” which is pulling young anglophone men in, rather it's the “womansphere” of the English-speaking world – adrift in a Protestantised culture not yet able to articulate a positive vision for women – that is holding them back.
While across on the other side of the English Channel, a different movement is under way – one which is being led by women who have simply run out of illusions about the world they were promised.
