The Return to Demanding Christianity: Why Young Souls Flee Modernism for Tradition
The recent reporting in The New York Times on the surge of young Americans entering Orthodox Christianity is an unintended confession: modern Christianity is collapsing where it refuses to be Christian. Something profound is happening beneath the noise of cultural decline. Young men — and increasingly young families — are gravitating toward forms of Christianity that demand sacrifice, reverence, obedience, and the pursuit of holiness. They are turning to the ancient liturgies, strict fasting rules, hierarchy, and sacred aesthetics of the East. And in the West, that same instinct is drawing them toward the Traditional Latin Mass and the apostolates that have faithfully preserved it, such as the Old Roman Apostolate (ORA) and the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX).
This movement is not accidental. It is the result of decades of doctrinal confusion, moral compromise, and aesthetic self-destruction in many parts of the Catholic Church — a crisis described with prophetic clarity by Joseph Ratzinger, who warned in 1985 that the crisis of the Church after the Council consisted not in the Council itself but in the “avalanche of banalities” and “self-destruction” that followed its misinterpretation¹. What the Times calls a “quiet corner of Christianity,” Orthodoxy itself identifies as the fruit of fidelity to tradition. Catholics who seek the same are increasingly finding that fidelity not in bureaucratised diocesan structures but in traditional apostolates that have preserved doctrine, beauty, and discipline when others surrendered them.
A Hunger for What the Church Herself Once Offered
The Times candidly admits:
“Protestant and Catholic churches have a very feminine atmosphere,” said Josh Elkins… “Orthodoxy asks practitioners to make sacrifices like fasting, rather than offering them emotional contemporary music and therapeutic sermons.”²
This is nothing more than an outsider’s secular description of what the Catholic Church has always called asceticism, reverence, and worship directed to God rather than man. These are the very elements the Roman Rite possessed organically and abundantly before the liturgical reforms of the late twentieth century. That same article also acknowledges that within Catholicism, *“a significant minority of young people prefer the pre-Vatican II Traditional Latin Mass.”*³ It is not a minority in decline; it is the only sector of the Western Church that is growing in devotion, vocations, and families.
Sociologists of religion have long observed that religions that demand sacrifice grow; religions that demand nothing die⁴. Young people recognise that a Church embarrassed by her own past, stripped of her symbols, and apologising for her doctrine is not worth their loyalty. Beauty, hierarchy, and discipline speak the truth: God is real, and salvation is serious.
Why the ORA and SSPX Are Not the Problem — But the Proof
For decades, people have asked why the ORA, SSPX, and similar apostolates continue to attract vocations and families while diocesan parishes empty. The answer is simple: because they have preserved what the Church herself preserved for nearly two millennia. They have kept the perennial magisterium, the sacramental discipline, the sacrificial liturgy, and the unambiguous moral teaching that the laity instinctively recognise as authentically Catholic.
Peter Kwasniewski notes that the Traditional Latin Mass transmits a theology of transcendence and sacrifice that the modern liturgy often obscures⁵. Meanwhile, theologian Larry Chapp has argued that modern Catholicism has succumbed to a “therapeutic deism” in which priests become life-coaches rather than mediators of the sacred⁶. The ORA and SSPX simply refuse this reduction. They represent continuity in a time of rupture, order in an age of confusion, and supernatural faith in an era dominated by human projects and political ideologies.
Thus the growth of Orthodoxy in America — which the Times reports with surprise — is only the mirror of what is already happening among traditional Catholics worldwide. The same cultural pressures are producing the same response: a longing for worship that is masculine, demanding, ascetical, transcendent, objective, hierarchical, and beautiful.
The Clerical Crisis and the Lost Revival
Had the Catholic hierarchy not been riddled with modernism, careerism, and homosexual networks — had bishops preached with apostolic boldness instead of episcopal timidity — the revival Orthodoxy now enjoys would have been overwhelmingly Catholic. The tragedy is not that men are turning to ancient liturgy; the tragedy is that so many Catholic shepherds surrendered ours.
The Fathers of the Church understood well that when the clergy is corrupt, the faithful scatter. St. Gregory Nazianzen lamented in the fourth century that unworthy pastors *“drive away the flock by their own example.”*⁷ The same dynamic is at work today. Young men are not rejecting Catholicism; they are rejecting the emasculated parody of Catholicism that has replaced its living tradition in too many places.
Yet where the fullness of tradition is preserved — ORA missions, SSPX chapels, traditional Benedictine monasteries, faithful diocesan priests who quietly keep the old ways — the influx of young people is real and remarkable.
The Times Sees the Symptoms — We Must Name the Cause
The secular press sees young men running toward incense, hierarchy, fasting, and difficulty. It cannot or will not see the deeper truth: the human soul is made for worship, order, beauty, and sacrifice. When the Church offers these, she grows. When she abandons them, she dies.
Orthodoxy’s rise is not the defeat of Catholicism. It is the defeat of modernism.
And the growth of traditional Catholic apostolates is not a problem to be managed. It is a sign — a sign that the future belongs to those who kept the faith whole, uncorrupted, and intact.
Traditional communities are not the exception. They are the seed of the Church’s restoration.
- Joseph Ratzinger, The Ratzinger Report (Ignatius Press, 1985), esp. pp. 46–60.
- Ruth Graham and Jack Jenkins, “A surge of converts is reshaping Orthodox Christianity in America,” New York Times, 17 November 2025.
- Ibid.
- Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity (HarperOne, 1997), ch. 10.
- Peter A. Kwasniewski, Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright (Angelico Press, 2020), pp. 23–45.
- Larry Chapp, “The Catholic Church and the Disease of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism,” Gaudium et Spes 22 Blog, 2022.
- St. Gregory Nazianzen, Oration 2: In Defence of His Flight to Pontus, §§18–22.
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