Traditional Catholicism, the new ‘cool’ for young Americans

John Mac Ghlionn• June 6, 2025

The incense is rising again.

Not just in Gothic cathedrals or Latin Mass enclaves—but in the hearts of young Americans who, against every cultural current, are swimming upstream toward Catholicism. It’s a phenomenon that baffles secular elites and liberal Protestants alike. How, in this age of deconstruction and digital nihilism, could the Church of hierarchy, ritual, and confession be considered—of all things—cool?

Yet it is. Quietly, steadily, and then suddenly. The Latin Mass is trending. Catechisms are bookmarked. Young adults are quoting Aquinas in the same breath as Camus. It’s not ironic. It’s not aesthetic. It’s not cosplay. It’s a revolt against rootlessness.

Because what looks like a religious revival is also a cultural rebellion.

We were told the future would be limitless, utterly empowering. We were told we’d be happiest with fewer rules, fewer roles, fewer traditions. Just vibes.

But the experiment failed. We’re lonelier. Sicker. Spiritually starved. In place of meaning, we got algorithms. In place of transcendence, we got TikTok therapy. And beneath the saccharine haze of self-care, many young people feel the gnawing presence of something missing.

Catholicism offers what the modern world cannot: structure. Discipline. Mystery. It doesn’t whisper that you’re perfect just the way you are. It demands transformation. It demands submission—to something older, wiser, and greater than you.

To be Catholic is to live inside a story. A two-thousand-year-old, blood-soaked, gold-threaded, world-shaping story. It has martyrs and miracles. Saints and scoundrels. Architecture that makes you weep. A God who became man. A carpenter who suffered for your sins. A virgin mother crowned in heaven. Try fitting that into a 15-second Instagram reel.

For young Americans raised on Marvel movies and deconstructionist memes, the sheer audacity of Catholicism is intoxicating. It doesn’t hedge its bets or dilute its claims. It says: This is the Body. This is the Blood. This is the Truth.

And young people, weary of euphemisms and moral relativism, are saying: Amen.

The Church, for all its failings, never promised to be perfect. It promised to be true. And for many converts, especially those raised in sterile megachurches or atheist households, Catholicism offers the one thing missing from every “spiritual but not religious” gathering: gravity.

You don’t walk into a traditional Catholic Mass and feel like you’ve stumbled into a self-help seminar with hymns. You feel the weight of two millennia settle onto your shoulders. There are no mood boards, no fog machines, no pastors in skinny jeans offering life hacks. There is only the priest, the altar, the sacrifice, and the silence. A silence that, for many, is more honest than any sermon.

And then there’s the internet. Ironically, the same technology that helped secularism colonize the culture is now helping Catholicism fight back. The same platforms that once reduced truth to trend are now hosting longform debates about the Council of Nicaea and Marian dogma. YouTube debates, Substack essays, and “TradCath” social media accounts are turning old-school apologetics into viral content. The memes are sharp. The arguments are airtight. What began as curiosity—“What even is the Latin Mass?”—has become conviction, conversion, and catechesis. These aren’t just content creators. They’re apostles with WiFi, armed not with ring lights but with Church Fathers and footnotes. And they’re winning souls in 4K.

Their message is clear: the Church isn’t anti-intellectual. It invented intellectual tradition. It canonized reason long before modernity tried to sterilize it. And for a generation raised to believe in science but yearning for metaphysics, Catholicism feels like the missing link—mind and soul in harmony.

But don’t mistake this for a mere philosophical exercise. Something deeper is stirring.

In a culture obsessed with identity, Catholicism offers identity through surrender. Not the curated, performative kind, but a cruciform kind—dying to self to live in Christ. It’s everything the modern self recoils at, which is precisely why it’s so powerful.

In a world of soft edges and moral mush, the Church still dares to say no. No to abortion. No to relativism. No to hollow rituals of progress. And each “no” is tethered to a resounding “yes”—to life, to truth, to beauty, to the sacred dignity of the human soul.

That’s not oppressive. That’s liberating.

It’s not “based.” It’s beatific.

This isn’t a spiritual fad. It’s a countercultural movement—precisely because it refuses to flatter the culture. It demands something. It risks something. It costs something. And that’s exactly why it’s working.

The Catholic Church isn’t “cool” in the way marketers understand the word. It’s cool because it doesn’t care if it is. In an age obsessed with branding, Catholicism offers belonging. In a culture of collapse, it offers a cathedral. And for many young Americans, that’s the only kind of future worth building. Because when everything else is crumbling, tradition isn’t dead weight.

It’s scaffolding.

(Photo by Simon Caldwell)