Read online | April 21, 2026

(Hannah McAtamney/Unsplash.com)

By Jeffrey Tucker

Commentary

Something big is developing in the religious attachments of young men.

After falling consistently for decades, the number of young men who report that religion is important to them has dramatically broken the trend, shooting up 28 percent in two years in the latest Gallup polls. It now far exceeds what young women report.

The polls back the anecdotes. Many Catholic parishes around the country saw the biggest class of converts in decades, with Holy Thursday services lasting many hours to get them in the door, while confessionals are filling up with penitents.

This seems to be affecting all faiths but especially the orthodox and more conservative churches. Something big seems to be happening and I seriously doubt that science can reveal the answer.

My theory: the failure of secular leadership in every area of life has never been more screamingly obvious. The search for meaning and truth is going elsewhere fast.

No demographic has been so put upon by academia, media, and secular elites in general, as the campaign to demonize masculinity itself as toxic has reached its apotheosis. You can only tell half the human race to hate itself for so long without provoking a backlash.

This comes six years following the most impactful generational disturbance since the Second World War, namely the pandemic response that forced much of the population into a cowardly hide-from-the-virus mode as if nothing could be more terrifying than a respiratory infection. This experience hit as the feminization of the professional workplace (HR hegemony) and academia was complete.

Finally young men are standing up and saying no more. They are seeking and finding other outlets to figure out their identities and purposes.

What does this portend for culture and even the cause of freedom about which we should be deeply concerned? I would argue it is a very good sign.

The debate over the role of religion in the rise of freedom and its defense has been a subject of hot debate for centuries. A key claim of leading Enlightenment intellectuals was that free minds must be detached from religious dogma. A counterclaim is that minds with higher and eternal ideals, which most religions assert, are more prepared to resist earthly despotisms and hence defend freedom.

Whatever the answer is, history does not settle the dispute in a way that is without some tension or contradiction. For me, I had an experience five years ago that strongly led me to believe that adherence to traditional faith does in fact provide mental and spiritual strength to stand up for what’s right when it really matters.

The revelation came in some of the darkest days of lockdowns. Some states were starting to open up while others still had classes cancelled, businesses closed, and gatherings banned. I was driving from Massachusetts, one of the most closed states, to Texas which was far from open and normal but was being pilloried in the press for allowing churches to meet and students to go to school.

The environment in Massachusetts was chilly beyond description. There was no way to enter a retail shop without a mask. Lines formed outside groceries as health authorities had determined that only a certain number could be inside at a time. Kids were hunkered down in bedrooms devouring social media. Events were cancelled. Concert halls were closed and infection tests for everyone were routine.

This was true of most Northeastern states. I was headed to central Texas which took me further south with each hour. I could feel the fear melting as I looked at parking lots growing ever more full and lights on in commercial centers. I would stop from time to time and there was a growing sense that life had begun returning to normal.

At the same time, I was listening to the radio. Religious stations in the NE region are a bit rare. As I drove further south, they were more common. At some points, I could find nothing but preachers and gospel music stations. Meanwhile, the billboards changed from fast food and jeans to ever more signs about Jesus and quotations from the Bible. Megachurches were visible from the highway.

Ten hours into my journey, it was a changed land, with people out and about, absent of fear, and commercial enterprise moving about.

It was not as if the virus was circulating less in the south than the north. The numbers were about the same. Why was one area of the country hunkered down in fear and loathing while another was seemingly crawling its way back to normalcy?

The most conspicuous difference between the two regions concerned religious belief. The northeast is highly secular whereas the south is far more religious. This was obvious in the radio stations, the signage, and the demeanor of people, even to the point of language. The way people in the south would weave in religious phrasings to their language was unheard of in the north, for example.

They will say, “Have a blessed day” and “Lord willing ...” or “By the grace of god ...” It’s a habit of normal speech that would discombobulate anyone in the north.

The differences were palpable. But so was the deference to pandemic protocols. In the north, when public health would say you have engaged in complicated masking and sanitizing rituals, none of which achieve anything, people gladly went along. In southern states, defiance was far more common. Later in 2021, life was mostly back to normal in southern states even as northern and west coast states could not get enough fear, panic, and submission to health directives.

Why might this be? The answer might be rather simple. Those who obey a higher authority than government are also blessed with incredulity toward secular elites. Religious people have a different story to tell themselves about their lives. It is not always about staying safe. It is often about doing what is right: following God’s commands and giving one’s life over to a higher cause. They are less easily controlled.

It was G.K. Chesterton who famously observed that those who believe in nothing will believe in anything. The COVID period made the point about as well as anything I’ve experienced. It was a time of the most absurd antics and claims pushed by the most highly educated and powerful people in our society. It also proved to be wholly wrongheaded. It was the discrediting of an entire generation of media voices, intellectuals, political leaders, and bureaucrats.

Now we have a generation of the most impacted by this experience doing something no one particularly expected: filling up the pews and swearing by a different faith entirely. Does this bode well for the future? I say it comes just in time.

Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently “Liberty or Lockdown.” He is also the editor of “The Best of Ludwig von Mises.” He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.