A Fiction-Free Environment

Why young men are turning back to the church

In the absence of alternative fictions, evangelical Christianity is flourishing among young men.

21% of young men attend church once a month according to the Bible Society’s 2025 report, The Quiet Revival - an increase of 17% in just six years. This five-fold rise is cause for celebration among the faithful. It’s an answer to prayer. But setting aside the possibility of the miraculous for a moment, why exactly are young men flocking back to the flock?

To get closer to the truth, we might turn to politics, where the cool-ification of Christianity has been simultaneous with a Gen Z lurch to the Right. For example, in the US, 56% of young men were in favour of Trump in 2024, an increase of 15% from an already alarmingly high figure in 2020. Anecdotally, as a teacher of boys and young men, far-right ideas have more traction now more than ever, incubated by the rise of hard-right influencers and an algorithm that actively monetises both the shocking and the simplistic.

Apparently, a third of young people say they would be happy to be seen reading a Bible in public. The question arises as to exactly what passages they would be happy to be caught reading. The unrelenting calls to be hospitable to the stranger in the Hebrew Bible? Jesus’ repeated ridiculing of the wealthy? The proto-socialism of the early Church? In purely economic terms, the Christian Bible is not readily available to right-wing interpretation. So explanation for the concurrent right-wards, Christ-wards turn of the teens and young adults is probably not to be found in a genuine seeking for a coherent marriage between text and ideology.

So where is the answer, then? Why are young men turning back to God?

I contend it is be found in fiction.

Presently, young men are being fed algorithm-friendly theological slop through their screens on a minute-by-minute basis. Charlie Kirk was the most visible proponent of this tactic. Short, binaried debate between a Christian apologist (a rational, calm man with admirable patience) and a woke student who affirms the existence of three hundred sexual orientations who probably has pink hair and a septum piercing. These videos are held up as examples of fair debate, objective accounts of the defender of common sense bravely battling the insidious forces of the commie-liberals. That the Christian apologist is the one cutting and editing the videos seems important. The infamous Oxford Union debate highlights how well these influencers do in longer form formats.

These videos, liked, shared and parroted, are a fiction, of course. And they are landing in an otherwise fiction-free vacuum.

You see, Christianity is a mythopoesis, a sacred story that in some sense seeks to explain reality. Its survival across millennia is at least partially down to how attractive and persuasive that sacred story has been. It has a coherent message: humans are inherently sinful, God is good and Jesus bridged the chasm. Christianity, even in its most simplistic forms voices fundamental questions like, why do I feel so anxious? How am I meant to live? Is there a purpose to life? The quality of answers to these questions varies depending on the flavour of Christianity you try, and it seems to me that the worst kinds, the ones that deal primarily in simplifications and bigotry, are triumphing right now. This is unsurprising given the capitalistic incentive to reduce nuanced, centuries old ideas and debates to twenty second clips of a ‘former-homosexual’ celebrating his conversion to the same tradition that supported lynchings.

After 9/11, New Atheism tried its best to demystify Christianity, and, for a while, it worked. Church numbers went down in the 2000s, and lonely young men then were more likely to watch YouTube videos of ‘Hitchslaps’ in their bedrooms than join a sub-culture of vaccine scepticism and go to their local church. Then, Christianity was de-fictionalised by Dawkins and Hitchens, treated like a bad scientific hypothesis. That religion was always about story, not positivistic fact passed these men by entirely, it seemed, and the rise in far-right Christianity is in some part down to the very poor job the New Atheists made of replacing the faith they critiqued. Dawkins and Hitchens didn’t understand what it was they were critiquing, and rushed in were angels fear to tread. Now, the fictive absence they left behind has been filled by an even worse version of what it was that angered them so much in the first place.

A worldview devoid of fiction is inhuman, and that is exactly what was offered to the generation that followed my own (I am 33). I was brought up in the rich tradition of Irish Presbyterianism, in a flourishing youth fellowship in which I was encouraged to pray, read scripture and debate hermeneutics. When I later deconstructed everything I had been taught, I at least had sound grounding in exactly what it was I was rejecting. I had discovered the truth that stories and ideas are sustaining. I went in search of suitable replacements. For younger men and boys, a fiction-free environment means that ideas that ought to have died out (the existence of hell; the theologically justified exclusion of LGBT people; the lower status of women) are now being taken up as novel and powerful. Young men in particular are being radicalised into belief systems that progressives mistakenly thought would be left behind by the natural, albeit long arc of justice.

There is no conclusion to this piece, yet. I am unsure where the solutions to the situation are. But the Left need to get their mythopoetic ducks in a row if they are to in any way to meet the challenges of an online and pew culture of toxic misogyny, homophobia, racism, etc etc. Where are the better stories? And who will be brave enough to tell them?