For a couple years now, we’ve been hearing about certain aesthetics adopted by alt-right Gen Z Christians. So today, let’s check out the latest news about the alt-right, then check out why their followers find alt-right flavors of Christianity so appealing—and see what right-wing Christian leaders think about this influx of young men into their churches.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 1/23/2026.)
(WARNING: Expect all of my video links to contain rude language. Also: I’m not saying any of these people are fake Christians. By definition, anyone claiming to be a Christian is one. They’re just really hypocritical Christians.)
SITUATION REPORT: Everyone, meet some TRUE CHRISTIAN™ leaders
Ethan Ralph is an alt-right shock-jock, unapproved-sex-haver, and alcoholic pillhead. On his podcast, The Ralph Retort, he screams profanities at people in between blacking out and falling over mid-stream.
There’s at least one sex tape of his that’s escaped into the wild, but I won’t trouble you with it. Instead, have another falling-over video.
In addition to these fine qualities, Ethan Ralph is also a right-wing Christian. Enjoy these tweets of his from the past year or so:
And my personal favorite:
Frankly, I doubt any good god would approve overmuch of Ralph’s content. But he’s far from the only one. Nick Fuentes, another leader in the alt-right, is also conservative Christian—but he’s tradcath, or “traditional Catholic.” He’s been trying to make a weirder, more sexualized version of Turning Point USA for years now. It’s called “America First,” and it’s a clownshoes joke.
[Also, an obligatory rant from Yr. Loyal Correspondent &etc., who was raised Catholic: Tradcaths have nothing to do with normal everyday regular Catholic families. They are not traditional in any sense of the word. To them, the term “tradcath” just means hardline evangelicalism, just with confessionals and 110% more prayers to the Blessed Virgin Mary. They use tradcathery as an excuse to be extra-misogynistic and avoid doing the boring stuff Jesus actually ordered his followers to do.]
And oopsie! Nick Fuentes got caught in 2022 watching trans porn, which is off-limits to tradcaths for any number of reasons:
That isn’t all Fuentes has been caught doing. Not long ago, he—along with Andrew Tate and a number of other big names in the alt-right—proudly recorded themselves singing along to Kanye West’s new mega-smash-hit “Heil Hitler.” In fact, they recorded themselves singing this song twice while they were out clubbing in Miami.
Somehow, my CCD lessons in childhood did not include “clubbing in Miami” and “singing the n-word,” much less “praising the leader of Nazi Germany.” Obviously, t’was a sad oversight. I’m sure more modern lesson plans include these essential and oh-so-very-traditional Catholic devotions.
None of this hypocrisy is new. Rather, it’s part of a long-established pattern. From Milo Yiannopoulos’ post-conversion scandals to Nick Rekieta’s ongoing catastrophe of a life to Tactikal Templar turning out to be just another porn-obsessed goober, pretty much any alt-right culture warrior claiming to be a conservative Christian on social media should be dismissed out of hand. All they’re doing is LARPing and grifting. (And a lot of the ones who don’t posture as Christians also fail to live up to their personae, like Bronze Age Pervert and Jack Murphy. But that’s a topic for some other day.)
These days, just the aesthetics of right-wing Christianity attract a certain kind of young man: the kind who want to follow a man exuding power and authority, who are easily swayed by appearances over reality, and who want good excuses to be racist and sexist. Unfortunately, even as Christianity continues to lose members and cultural power, there are still a lot of young men like that.
Today, let me show you the aesthetics I’m talking about—and let’s explore why these aesthetics exist in the first place.
The persona we’re talking about today
Picture him in your head, the persona we’re discussing today. He’s young, in his 20s, college-educated, and deeply concerned about a culture he feels is leaving him behind. He perceives masculinity and maleness as denigrated and less-than compared to femininity and femaleness. Naturally, nobody likes feeling that way on the basis of something innate to themselves, so he grows frustrated and angry.
And then, he notices a culture that places a high importance on masculinity and maleness. That elevates both to pedestals, that considers them prerequisites to positions of leadership, that always slots women below men. He begins viewing conservative political positions as complementary to that religious worldview (not realizing that religious leaders deliberately created the politics).
His new heroes tell him that rather than feeling shamed by his maleness, he should be proud of it. Rather than deferring to women, he should control them. He is the king of this world, and all he must do is reach his hand out for his crown. Beards, brown liquor, cigars, “ironic” racism and sexism, and conservative politics swirl together in his mind as ideals.
After all, even Jesus himself wants it that way.
The alt-right churches pretending to be ‘masculinity clinics’
So how did Gen Z men become followers of these grifters who use alt-right Christian aesthetics to ensnare them? Let’s start by checking out the affiliation trend in Gen Z men.
In the past year or so, we’ve been hearing a lot about Gen Z men joining right-wing Christian groups—namely Calvinist evangelical and tradcath churches. Of course, their generation is still overall the least religious one in post-Civil War American history (at least till Alpha ages up a bit more!). However, more Gen Z men than women involve themselves in Christianity.
In a November 2025 post by Clint Schnekloth, he complained about right-wing churches being little more than “masculinity clinics”:
You’ve seen the headlines about young men “returning to church.” Just not to (mostly) to ones like mine. In my congregation (progressive, queer-affirming, led by women, LGBTQIA folks, and people not particularly interested in recreating Eisenhower-era gender norms) we are not evangelizing the Joe Rogan demographic. The surge is happening elsewhere, in churches that offer a very specific kind of masculine identity: the unchallenged male leader, restored to his rightful pedestal, and guaranteed a starring role in the movie of Western Civilization. For some young men navigating an uncertain world, this script lands with the force of revelation. It promises clarity, purpose, a straightforward role, and a cosmic narrative in which their disorientation gets reinterpreted as spiritual warfare.
And well, that’ll just about cover the flybys. We see the same concerns in mainstream reporting, too. For example, a November 2025 piece at New York Times describes the Gen Z men attracted to that “script”:
They are drawn to what they describe as a more demanding, even difficult, practice of Christianity. Echoing some of the rhetoric of the so-called manosphere, new waves of young converts say Orthodoxy offers them hard truths and affirms their masculinity.
This manosphere branding has been building up over decades, as Schnekloth points out. This branding is less of a gospel and more of “a return to a mythic identity template,” as he puts it—one that deliberately ignores or even rejects all the boring stuff Jesus actually told them to do as suspiciously womanish. And as I wrote 12 years ago on Ex-Communications, churches selling this template draw to their banner men who desire unearned privilege and unfettered power over women.
That’s what they sell to these men. That’s what these men join to gain. They adopt conservative politics and a persona of manly-manliness that has the barest whiffs of Jesus adorning it, then push this as TRUE CHRISTIANITY™. It’s deliberately done, too, argues one doctoral dissertation by Sarah Diefendorf in 2018:
Donald Trump works as a symbol who will hold the imagined secular world at bay while evangelicals actively discuss and debate ways in which they can rework some of their beliefs and approaches to maintain cultural relevance during a period in time in which they feel as though they are quickly losing cultural sway
As well, a 2024 article at Religion Dispatches asserts: “The overwhelming whiteness and increasing maleness of churches isn’t an accident — it’s a selling point.”
Alas for them, the results have been markedly un-Jesusy: Form over function, illusion over reality, appearances over truth, a purely aesthetic persona adopted by young alt-right men who seek power over women and validation of their worst desires.
If you’re wondering if religious leaders are concerned by this aesthetics trend: Oh yes, they definitely are.
The conservative Christian leaders worried about the aesthetics trend
It’s not just mainline and progressive Christians noticing this aesthetics trend, as we just saw in Clint Schnekloth’s writing. Over at the hardline evangelical site The Gospel Coalition (TGC), a September 2025 post by J.T. Reeves complained about churches teaching Gen Z men poorly:
It’s not wrong for young men to come to church seeking meaning and empowerment as men. But what they need to hear from churches is not a Jesus advertised as a political activist, culture warrior, or self-improvement guru.
Reeves is joined by Benjamin Vincent, who wrote this for TGC just last month:
The ongoing “masculinity crisis” in Western culture is likely part of what’s bringing young men to church. [. . .] [S]ome of the young men currently drawn to the church because of its culture run the risk of becoming nothing but cultural converts. They may fall in love with the atmosphere and traditions of the church but never learn to love and obey the person of Jesus Christ.
Vincent, like almost all of his peers in Christian leadership, is certain that “rigorous discipleship” will totally fix that problem. (It won’t, as I’ve discussed many times.)
Meanwhile, a July 2025 editorial at Christian Post frets:
It’s also possible that some young men are returning to church for the wrong reasons. They still need to hear Christianity taught accurately and in its entirety. Church should not be sold to them as a “based” social club, but as a place that belongs to the God of the universe, and the faith as a way of seeing all of life and reality in surrender to Christ’s loving lordship.
Out of all of the resources I checked out, I really liked a 2024 analysis from Aaron Renn. His main points were:
- “Religion is being overlaid on a pre-existing trend of gender polarization among young people.”
- “Young men coming to church today are pre-catechized by online men’s influencers.”
- “Young men could become the new ‘customer’ of the church.”
I completely agree, based on everything I’ve seen. If anything, that “could” in the last quote does a lot of heavy lifting. If young men comprise the primary userbase in a church, then obviously the church’s leaders will begin catering to them at the expense of women. Ironically, alt-right men think the opposite situation is the case right now!
Why oh why are young men drawn to these types of churches?
A March 2025 analysis by Paul Djupe and Brooklyn Walker reveals some extremely interesting facets of young men’s involvement with right-wing religious groups. This analysis revealed that young men between the ages of 20-40 not only attend church more often and are more involved with church than women of the same age, but they also score markedly higher on measures of Christian nationalism and apocalypticism.
Combine these traits with admiration for macho male leaders who promise to teach them to be big strong tough men, and I can see why the aesthetics of conservative Christianity appeals so much to young men who may otherwise feel adrift in modern society.
And yes, it definitely appeals to those young men. Over time, I’ve seen the rise of “TheoBros,” who are men involved with hyperconservative tradcath and Calvinist evangelical groups. Their leaders both embody and spread the aesthetics of their end of Christianity. One Christian man wrote on Substack about what drew him in to the TheoBro world—and what about it he suspects appeals so much to young men:
I grew up wondering “how to be a man,” due in no small part to all the cultural handwringing around the question and the lack of a clear answer. [. . .] Many Gen Z men seem to be drawn to churches that nurture their sense of grievance, their disenchantment with society, and their victimhood. Then these churches tell them how great they really are and promise a return to rigid, traditional gender hierarchies that benefit them.
Even Ross Douthat echoes these concerns in a 2024 column he wrote:
The first and more pessimistic interpretation would argue that younger men are becoming more religious in the same spirit that they’re embracing various masculinist influencers, from Joe Rogan to Jordan Peterson, along with toxic figures like Andrew Tate. They’re seeking male-friendly refuges from what they perceive as an increasingly feminized and even misandrist liberal culture.
Of course, Douthat prefers a more optimistic (and charmingly reality-free) explanation for Gen Z men’s affiliation with right-wing Christianity: These groups stabilize these young men, thus making them into far better marriage material. But I think he landed on the real facts with his first guess. Alt-right men and their leaders despise women. They aren’t making alt-right Zoomers more marriageable, but far less so. In ten years, mark my words, we’ll be hearing from men in these groups who can’t find wives who meet their standards.
I’d add only this to the analyses I’ve seen: Over the past two years, I’ve seen posts from about a dozen young men saying that recent political events have drawn them into alt-right forms of Christianity. They openly perceive these churches more as a bulwark against “woke” politics than as a means of worshiping Jesus or achieving salvation. I haven’t seen many Christian leaders talk about that, but it might become more visible of a trend in future years.
Reactionary religion doesn’t tend to last long
Many years ago in the mid-1980s, my first Pentecostal church experienced a huge influx of young adults. We poured into that church as a reaction to a Rapture scare just beginning its rounds. There were easily hundreds of us. And because this influx began as a reaction to that scare, when its early predictions failed to pan out, most of us left at that point. Being far more fearful and suggestible than my peers at the time, I drifted out too before returning. But eventually, even I left for good—in fact, I fully deconverted.
Reactionary religion is not permanent religion. It just about can’t be. Rather, it’s there as long as the reaction is live. It’s like a romantic relationship: There’d better be something real underneath it, or it can’t last once the first rush ends.
Many Christians feel there’s something real under their faith. That’s fine. Maybe there is, to them at least. The social benefits, wonderment, and feelings of personal meaningfulness that religion sometimes confers on believers can be real enough. But if Gen Z men join churches that crown them the Kings of This World, then get told to volunteer doing the stuff women used to do before leaving in droves, that illusion’s going to crash very quickly.
Unfortunately for these Gen Z men, that’s an inevitable crash. The kinds of churches they favor are dysfunctional-authoritarian in nature. In other words, they operate along lines of subservience and loyalty that feed personal power to their leaders. These churches also depend mightily on the free labor of women, like all churches do. Gen Z men might gloat about the packed pews in their churches devoid of icky girls, but those icky girls did 90% of the volunteer tasks that every church needs to survive.
The aesthetics of right-wing Christianity don’t provide a comfortable middle ground between the vision and the reality of affiliation. Anything past the most nominal church membership will ask of men what pastors have always expected of women.
So I can’t wait till a crowned Gen Z king finds himself mopping floors, cleaning bathrooms, and providing childcare every Sunday, and wonders if this is really what Manly-Man Jesus really wanted men to do.
NEXT UP: The thorny dilemma of the Christian aura. See you soon! <3
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