Washington Post: Awakening, by Matthew Schmitz (Co-Founder, Compact):

What explains the upsurge in Catholic converts, many of whom seem to be young? One factor, Julia Yost suggests below, is the importance of images for a generation raised on TikTok. If we’re becoming a postliterate society, it will be hard for a textual faith such as Protestantism to compete with the pomp and dumbshow of popery.

Washington Post: Why Catholic Converts Are Surging With an Unexpected Demographic, by Julia Yost (First Things):

[T]he recent wave of converts is best understood as a response to religious decline. In a secularizing world, becoming Catholic has a rebellious cachet.

This Easter, Catholic dioceses across America welcomed a surge of converts. According to data collected by the religion app Hallow, the average American diocese received 38 percent more converts this year than in 2025, with cohorts more than doubling in cities such as Los Angeles, Tallahassee and Pittsburgh. In many places, the converts are disproportionately young. …

The age of Instagram and TikTok favors Catholicism. An earlier era of the internet, that of the blogosphere, was congenial to Protestantism, with its biblical and exegetical basis. The result was the Young, Restless and Reformed movement — mostly male Protestants reading one another’s blogs and finding their way from seeker-sensitive evangelicalism to high-proof Calvinism. Today’s internet, by contrast, is image-forward and postliterate. This helps to explain why today’s online Christians tend to be Young, Restless and Roman. …

An old stereotype has it that Protestantism is for people who read books, and Catholicism is for people who want spectacle. Say hello to Gen Z. … Is “hot” Catholicism a form of evangelism, or a perversion of the Gospel message? Jesus died for everyone, the cool and especially the uncool.

Today a conversion to Catholicism once again has a countercultural meaning. In its opposition to contraception, for example, the Catholic Church dissents more fiercely from bourgeois norms on sex than does any large Protestant body. So if infinite liberty leaves you with a hollow feeling, Catholicism has rules for life. Submission to the pope is rebellion against the man, at least in professional-class precincts. As a book editor recently told me, being Catholic seemed like “the most punk-rock thing I could do.”

People join the Catholic Church for all kinds of reasons — because they’re marrying someone already in it, or because their parents want them to. Is there such a thing as a bad reason to go to church? Presumably God wants to reach people who are driven by dissatisfaction with society, or even FOMO [fear of missing put]. In any case, the recent wave of Catholic converts are doing the work. They went through months of instruction to receive the sacraments, and those sacraments aren’t any less efficacious if you’re on TikTok.

Washington Post: Why Catholicism Is Drawing in Gen Z Men, by Shane O’Neill:

Young men in their 20s and 30s are increasingly drawn to the Catholic Church as they seek truth, beauty and, yes, girlfriends. …

Parishes in Catholic strongholds like New York, Washington and Chicago have all anecdotally reported renewed interest from young people, particularly young men.

Meanwhile, the Rev. Dwight Longenecker, the pastor of Our Lady of the Rosary Church in Greenville, South Carolina, said that his parish has attracted “a startling number of young men” who were growing disillusioned with the experience of worshiping in the “big box” churches of the Bible Belt.

“I don’t want to be too disparaging about them because they’re our Christian brothers and sisters, but worshiping in a big former supermarket with dry ice machines and a pop band, it’s not really traditional Christianity,” Father Longenecker said.

His new parishioners are attracted to “very traditional worship with lots of incense and altar boys and sacred music in the traditional style.”

“In other words, they want it to look and sound Catholic,” he added.

Other Catholic cultural touchpoints have recently accumulated: an Oscar for the movie “Conclave,” a pope from Chicago, Rosalía as a nun, nuns as podcasters, monks as memelords and JD Vance’s forthcoming Catholic memoir.

“I absolutely think it’s a phenomenon,” said David Gibson, the director of Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture. But he cautioned against mistakingan uptick in conversions fora full-blown revival.

Gibson cited a 2025 study by the Pew Research Center that found that for every young person coming into the Catholic Church, around 12 young people left.

That doesn’t mean that the new members aren’t having an effect. “If you have this smaller cohort of theo-bros coming in and you have everybody else leaving, that changes the nature on the ground,” he said.

Thomas L. defined the theo-bro as “the extremely online religious man — that usually is a convert — who experiences the faith in either a rules-based or power-based understanding rather than a service- and community-based understanding.”

That’s basically how Clavicular — a 20-year-old internet personality obsessed with physical beauty and blasé about racial slurs — described Catholicism to the influencer Alex Eubank between weightlifting sets during a live stream: “Why I became Catholic in the first place is I really liked the order it followed, right? It’s having some sort of authority that I believe to be one that’s virtuous, kind of keeping people in line.”

Thomas L. thinks attitudes like this miss the point. “From the beginning, the [Catholic] church has been hospitals, it has been outreach, it has cared about the people that no one would touch, the lepers of society, right?” he said.

“I’m afraid that that’s something that maybe some of the Catholic gym bros might be missing,” he added.

Online self-improvement culture does share remarkable parallels with the Catholic concept of mortification of the flesh.

Fitness challenges like Whole30 and 75 Hard dovetail with the Catholic value of harmony between body and soul. The “NoFap” Reddit community and the “No Nut November” challenge are secular forms of chastity. “Sober October” and “Dry January” are pretty similar to giving up a vice for Lent.

Several apps and tech companies have popped up that offer digital aides to Catholic practices. The Exodus90 app offers daily challenges for three months that can include prayer, cold showers and almsgiving. There’s the D180 app, which offers a 180-day program to discern whether you’re called to enter the priesthood. Maybe you’ve seen an ad for the Catholic prayer app Hallow featuring actor Chris Pratt or singer Gwen Stefani.

Collin Bass, 24, completed the Exodus90 and D180 discernment programs. He ultimately decided not to enter the priesthood, but now has a robust Instagram presence under the handle catholiclayman.

“One side of me is worried,” he said from his home in Houston. “The church shouldn’t be a social media trendy thing, but it is becoming one.”

But he’s mostly encouraged. “It’s a window into the heart of so many souls of our generation. People are eager to dive into something bigger than themselves,” he said.

The Rev. Mike Schmitz, the creator and host of the “Bible in a Year” podcast, has worked as the chaplain for the Newman Center at the University of Minnesota at Duluth for more than 20 years. It has always had a strong community of Catholic men, but he has found that certain figures in the “manosphere” were attracting men to the faith.

“I noticed there were some people who were showing up with no experience of religion and no experience of Christianity, but they had exposure to people who are — for lack of a better term — ‘faith-adjacent,’” he said. Father Schmitz specifically mentioned Jordan Peterson and Andrew Huberman, who recently started talking about the benefits of prayer on his health podcast.

“These faith-adjacent people have not necessarily led people through the door, but they’ve pointed out, ‘Hey, that door that’s open over there? That is not unreasonable,’” Father Schmitz said.

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