Is he the messiah? Or just a very naughty boy? Since Russell Brand found Jesus he hasn’t stopped talking about it, whether on TikTok, or Tucker Carlson’s live show, or while baptising other men in a lake while clad only in his tighty-whiteys. Then, over the weekend, he and Jordan Peterson led a crowd of 25,000 outside the Washington Monument in the Lord’s Prayer as part of the Rescue the Republic gathering.
Perhaps it’s all showbiz. Or perhaps all these putative messiahs are signs of the End Times. Certainly the idea that the American needs rescuing at all — let alone with prayer — suggests there’s an apocalyptic mood afoot. Last Sunday, even Donald Trump — not renowned for his piety — got in on the game, posting the Catholic prayer to St Michael on X.
Beneath all the internet showboating, a deeper vibe shift is under way in the relation between men and religion. For a long time, this relation has been shaky, with the “feminisation of Christianity” a longstanding complaint and amid a deluge of books on why men are quitting church. Now, if St Michael is triggering controversy on Trump’s X account, this is part of a larger picture: the return of Christianity in a masculine key. And it isn’t just celebs and politicians: last week, The New York Times reported that young men are turning to the Christian faith in markedly greater numbers than young women, who are more likely to embrace the fluffier doctrines of progressivism.
What is happening? Is this just another aspect of the more widespread politicised sex war? Perhaps this contributes, but I think it goes deeper. Two interlocking patterns are contributing to the new macho Christianity: firstly, that the world in general is growing more disorienting, extreme, and uncanny. This is spurring a widespread sense of existential spiritual conflict, in which post-war Christianity simply doesn’t cut it any more. And, secondly, young men conditioned by video gaming to pour all their energy into dematerialised battles have responded to this new disorientation, by extending their interest in ideational war beyond gaming to the fabric of reality itself.
It was Friedrich Nietzsche who kick-started the modern backlash against Christianity, claiming in Beyond Good and Evil (1886) that it was a creed of slaves which exerted a stifling, feminising downward pressure on individuality, energy, and self-confidence. Three decades later, the First World War drove many ex-soldiers to agree with him that “God is dead”. But it wasn’t until 1945 that this germ of mass unbelief flowered in earnest, in the mushroom-clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki: world-shattering events that, as the Catholic writer Ronald Knox described at the time, felt for many like the decisive triumph of secular science and a Godless universe over the divine and loving order of Christian tradition.
If the atom bomb seemed, to Knox, an existential threat to faith, it also seemed for many to represent the end of war. How could war even start, between industrialised nations, when its conclusion might be another Hiroshima? Under the shadow of mutually assured destruction, then, both Christian belief and the value of “manly” courage and martial vigour came to seem as though they no longer had anything to offer the world. Amid the smoking civilisational rubble this left us, it seemed to many as though the only safe place for Christians to stand was not for anything that might raise an enemy against you, but on the side only of peace, welcome and safety, and the deification of “the vulnerable” and “the marginalised”.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeI think the answer is simple. You can not defeat something with nothing. The West faces existential threats to its foundational values both from the Islamists and the neo-Marxist Woke. Both want to destroy our traditions of liberty and Christian values.
Weak chested “enlightenment values” are utterly insufficient to stop them. Christianity though, in its traditional guise is perfectly suited. It stopped the Islamists at Tours and Lepanto, and it defeated the Marxists in the Cold War. John Paul II, Reagan, and Thatcher were not products of feminized Christianity.
A lot of people are realizing that if we want to put up a fight for Western values we need a real faith to unite us. Not mewling platitudes that will be twisted against. Christianity is our only option as a civilization. Even formerly committed atheists like Hirsi Ali and Dawkins have realized it.
Mary, I think more than “young men conditioned by video gaming” is afoot, but I understand your confusion.
Perhaps it’s all showbiz.
That’s all Brand is, Mary. He doesn’t have a sincere bone in his body.
This is a very US-focussed article. In the rest of the Western world, people have largely moved on from religion. That is not to say there aren’t still religious people, but religion itself isn’t really the focus of public consciousness.
As Christianity recedes, the West returns to worship of the fertility gods. For example, Keir Starmer.
Starmer is a Fertility God? Who knew?