It seems a cadre of cool kids–well, young adults–is embracing traditionalist Catholicism. Centered in the trendy “Dimes Square” neighborhood in New York City but going viral on podcasts and social media, this movement expresses itself with style as well as substance: the Latin Mass, rosaries, veils. “Reactionary motifs are chic,” says Yost. “Trump hats and ‘tradwife’ frocks, monarchist and anti-feminist sentiments.”
Yost says of this movement, “Its sensibility is more transgressive than progressive.” Young people like to rebel, and the postmodernist aesthetic itself seeks to be transgressive. But today, ironically, the status quo to be transgressed against is politically-correct progressivism. Yost writes,
Progressive morality, formulated in response to the remnants of America’s Christian culture, was once a vanguard. By 2020, the year of lockdowns and Black Lives Matter protests, progressivism had come to feel hegemonic in the social spaces occupied by young urban intellectuals. Traditional morality acquired a transgressive glamour. Disaffection with the progressive moral majority — combined with Catholicism’s historic ability to accommodate cultural subversion — has produced an in-your-face style of traditionalism.
But the issues go even deeper than this. There is a reason why, in Yost’s words, many young adults “prefer a system in which our moral obligations are not exhausted by the avoidance of wrongthink on race and patriarchy.” Woke progressivism goes against nature, the nature of young adults; that is, the natural needs that they yearn to fulfill at this stage of their lives.
These young traditionalists are repudiating “liberal-progressive dispensation that many young Americans find both malign and banal, she writes. “By disparaging traditional gender roles and defining human flourishing in meritocratic terms, progressive moralism militates against young people’s attainment of basic goods: marriage and procreation.” She cites popular podcaster and Catholic convert Honor Levy, who “has remarked that she was raised to ‘get a job.’ But her more profound desire was to start a family, a desire that conflicts with the imperatives of meritocracy.”
Yost admits that some of this trendiness may be more aesthetic than convictional, more performance than devotion. But Catholicism lends itself to aesthetics and performance.
I would think that conservative Protestantism could be equally transgressive, or even more so. Bring a snake handler from Appalachia to New York City, and I suspect he would shock even the denizens of Dimes Square, whether secularist or Catholic.
But I can understand how hipsters, punks, and Goths would be more attracted to Catholicism. There are limits, affinities, and class issues at play.
Could Lutheranism be similarly cool? Maybe. You tell me. I have definitely met quite a few cool Lutherans, though they seem different from the crowd Yost is writing about, though there are doubtless many parallels. Most of us Lutherans, I suppose, are of an age or stage in which we just don’t care whether we are cool or not, which may be the most transgressive gesture of all.
At any rate, Yost’s article has provoked a number of indignant responses that The New York Times would publish such a thing–such as Uh, Can the NYT Please Not Treat Catholic Reactionaries as a Fun Sexy Trend Story?–which basically prove her points.
One such example of an unhinged reaction against Catholicism and all Christianity, really, from the elite establishment is worth looking at in its own right, so tune in tomorrow.
HT: Steve Bauer
Photo: Young Adults in West–Mass at Chiswick by Mazur/catholicchurch.org.uk via Flickr, Creative Commons 2.0
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