Winds of Change are Blowing

The Holy Spirit is at work in Finland. As in other Nordic countries, church membership in Finland has plummeted in recent decades. But fifteen-to-twenty-nine-year-old men are bucking the trend. Only 5 percent of men in that age group attended church monthly in 2011. In 2019 participation rose to 12 percent. Self-reported regular prayer shows a similar increase among young men, as does belief in God. In 2011, 16 percent of young men said they prayed at least once a week; in 2019 the rate jumped to 26 percent. Belief in God leaped from 19 percent to 43 percent over the same eight-year period. Survey data show no increase of religiosity among women, whose monthly church attendance was lower than that of men in 2011 (3 percent) and remained low in 2019 (4 percent).

One should be cautious about interpreting trends, especially in faraway countries. But the uptick in Gen Z religiosity in Finland, especially among males, mirrors phenomena I observe in America.

There’s a great deal of discontent among the young. It’s apparent in woke radicalism, which traffics in condemnations of nearly all of Western culture (settler colonialism, systemic racism, patriarchy, and other sins). The widespread use of antidepressants and other medications suggests a glum dissatisfaction with the way things are going. A veto of the status quo is not limited to those who are depressed and despairing, or to those who lean left. As many commentators have pointed out, a growing number of Gen Z folks, especially males, lurk in the shadowy world of dissident right extremism. In those circles, the conversation is far more hostile to conventional attitudes and mainstream politics than is the subsidized radicalism you find in the local university’s black studies and womanist programs.

I sympathize with the alienation. America is a rich country, far richer than when I was coming of age. But life is lousy for young people. If your parents are rich and ambitious on your behalf, you’ll be fed into the spiritual meat grinder of meritocratic competition at school, travel teams in sports, and endless activities aiming at enrichment. If your parents are middle-class, they’re likely to be divorced. You probably attend public schools, which are run in accord with therapeutic principles that ask very little of you. Meanwhile, the smartphone colonizes your mind. If you have the misfortune to be poor, your parents won’t have married, mom will be on her third live-in boyfriend, and some of your friends will have drowned in the ocean of cheap fentanyl. As for love and romance, the dating game is almost entirely dysfunctional across all social classes. The country’s political culture isn’t healthy, either; it has been poisoned by sanctimonious Baby Boomers. Institutions are not trustworthy; employment is nakedly transactional.

In view of the pervasive sense of betrayal, I’m surprised that so few young people are radicalized. Most cynically conform, vaguely satisfied with the material consolations our system offers. Dining out! Travel! But if a recent university graduate or thoughtful young pipe fitter has a spirited nature and refuses to conform, the traditional avenues of progressive rebellion do not appeal. They have become just as professionalized as the professions. Barack Obama’s career indicates that the job of “community organizer” is now part of the grueling process of résumé-building. Today, the landscape on the left is confined and constricted; open spaces and unimpeded vistas are on the “right.”

I put scare quotes around “right” because I do not want to be misunderstood. In the United States, political conservatism has roots in classical liberalism. As a consequence, it emphasizes freedom, especially free markets. But this is an American anomaly. In the larger context of the modern West, the party of authority occupies the right, while the party of liberation occupies the left.

In previous columns, I’ve mentioned Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s sketch of modern politics. He characterizes it as a contest (fruitful in his reckoning) between the Party of Permanency and the Party of Change. In this dialectic, the Party of Permanency is not animated by a witless “fear of change,” as so many progressives like to think, nor is it mired in a pathological “rigidity,” as the pope often says. Rather, those on the right recognize that obedience can be an engine of transcendence. When we submit to legitimate authority, we’re drawn outside ourselves to serve something higher than our self-interest. This ecstatic dynamic, this “going out” of ourselves, is a necessary condition for nobility of soul.

As I detail in Return of the Strong Gods, the open-society consensus and small-minded, debunking gestures of “critical thinking” have stripped our society of legitimate authority. God is treated as an oppressive illusion. The nation is a racist conspiracy with origins in settler colonialism. Marriage has been redefined beyond recognition. Not even nature herself is permitted to issue her gentle commands concerning what it means to be born as male or female. As a consequence, we are abandoned to our unruly desires, now liberated, while at the same time enslaved to a technocratic regime of utility-maximization. Neither path leads to self-possession, which can be attained only in and through obedience to something higher than oneself.

Woke activism has great appeal because it serves as a seemingly noble cause. Fight racism! Defend transgender rights! Save the planet! From the River to the Sea! But as I note above, this option suffers from its success. A smart young person recognizes that fully funded activism (the kind that helps you gain admission to Ivy League schools) hardly counts as an adventure of the soul. Moreover, the woke agenda and other progressive programs are political. Transforming society is not the same as the interior drama of love and devotion. As a consequence, when the desire to live for something other than oneself awakens in a young person, given the cultural and political realities of our time, he’s likely to turn rightward and seek what I call the “strong gods.”

Most people follow the herd. Progressivism is sure to maintain its hegemony, at least in the short and medium term. But the old adventures of liberation have become clichés. Allen Ginsberg got establishment accolades before he died, and that was a generation ago. Today the thrill of danger, visions of heroic self-sacrifice, and the romance of transcendence are to be found in the burning embers of authority. Jordan Peterson’s remarkable ascent a few years ago was a harbinger; the popularity of the Latin Mass among young Catholics is a sign. Young men in Finland and elsewhere are not going to church in order to “turn back the clock.” Students are not reading Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt and entertaining integralist and postliberal theories because they “fear change.” They want to stoke their metaphysical imaginations and find their way out of the spiritual poverty of the late-modern West. However much I fear the false prophets and excesses of passion that are sure to come, I share their hopes and ambitions.