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Remember Roosh V? The repugnant far-right pickup artist who hated women and Jews, who proposed making rape legal on private property, and who had some unusually capacious notions of what counted as sexual consent? The guy who, after preaching his gospel of sexual predation for more than a decade, gave up his life of (by then mostly theoretical) debauchery and embraced Jesus after getting really, really high on mushrooms?
Not only did Roosh become a Christian; he became an Orthodox Christian. In 2019, Roosh joined the Armenian Apostolic Church, an Oriental Orthodox sect. Two years later, complaining that the church wasn’t “able to support my zeal with enough materials and resources that made me confident my soul would be guided into Paradise,” Roosh abandoned Oriental Orthodoxy for Eastern Orthodoxy (it’s all very complicated), getting baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR), widely considered the most conservative and traditional of all the Orthodox sects.
He explained in a post on his now defunct blog that he picked this particular church in part because “it fully grasps spiritual warfare, does not dabble in new ideas, [and] has clergy that understands the Jewish revolutionary spirit … .” That last phrase is sort of a deep cut antisemitic dogwhistle, a reference to a book by the same name by Catholic writer E. Michael Jones that blames Jews for everything from the Russian revolution to internet porn. Roosh loved the book, naturally, enthusiastically recommending it to his readers in a wildly hateful blog post titled, no joke, “Why Are Jews Behind Most Modern Evils?”
Well, it turns out that Roosh was way ahead of the curve on this whole religion thing. It seems that everybody is getting religion these days, if by everybody you mean a lot of mostly right-wing men. And more than a few of them are going Orthodox.
Rooting about in some of the darker corners of X/Twitter the other day, I ran across this Xweet from a self-proclaimed “Monarchist [and] Poor excuse for an Orthodox Christian.”
I looked up the article in question, a profile of a ROCOR priest in Georgetown, Texas known as Father Moses, who told the BBC that “in the past year-and-a-half our congregation has tripled in size,” boosted by an influx of young men looking for a more traditional, more “masculine” church.
The notably swole Father Moses seems to be the ultimate avatar of this new incarnation of Muscular Christianity. He has a YouTube channel, naturally, boasting a hefty 153,000 subscribers, where he posts videos with titles like “Priest Asks ChatGPT to Think Like the Devil” and “Why Men Should Not Be Friends with Their Wife.” In a popular video titled “Priest Ranks Least Manly Activities,” he derides supposedly effete things like shaping your eyebrows, wearing skinny jeans, growing a Timothée Chalamet mustache, and crossing your legs (they should be too muscular for that). Also for sissies?
Eating a soup that you could not eat with a fork. Ok, what I mean is … if the soup does not contain large chunks of meat but requires a little spoon that you slurp off of there is something catastrophically wrong going on.
Apparently, the good Father is an anti-spoonite. What happens to all the leftover broth?
Anyway, for any of you who might doubt Father Moses’ commitment to macho Jesus, well, I direct you to this short. In your face!
Sometimes I wonder if Father Moses might be trying just a bit too hard to be a manly man.
As it turns out, Father Moses’ congregation isn’t the only one reportedly growing like gangbusters. For the last several years, according to numerous observers, Orthodox churches of assorted varieties have seen a large influx of mostly male, mostly young converts, swelling their small and once shrinking ranks. As the New York Post put it in a recent headline, “young men [are] leaving traditional churches for ‘masculine’ Orthodox Christianity in droves.”
Also seeing an influx are some more traditional Catholic churches and even a few Anglican ones. There aren’t good stats on this, just a lot of anecdotal reports. But the prevalence of men among the new converts isn’t in doubt. A recent Pew survey indicates that 61% of Orthodox Christians today are male, a striking increase from 46% in 2007.
While most of these new converts seem to be abandoning less conservative churches for Orthodox ones, there’s been a striking religious reawakening among Gen Z men overall. Meanwhile, young women have been leaving the churches, in many cases feeling deeply frustrated by their backwards ideas on gender issues from abortion to trans rights.
Historically, and for every generation older than Gen Z today, more women than men have attended church. But today, a full 39% of Gen Z women are religiously unaffiliated, compared to 31% of Gen Z men. Weekly church attendance is at 40% among Gen Z men, compared to only 28% for Gen Z women. That’s huge. And these men are rejecting what they often see as too-feminized mainline churches. As the right-wing ecumenical religious journal First Things (which pays close attention to things like this) observes,
Many Gen-Z men appear to be gravitating specifically to churches that are traditional in liturgy and conservative in doctrine, and that exert a “masculine” appeal. They are taking a pass on mainline and progressive evangelical churches that echo the broader culture’s suspicion of masculinity.
The new Orthodox converts are in the minority in this new religious revival, largely because the various Orthodox sects are so small, together making up less than 1 percent of the American population, according to a 2025 Pew Research survey. (As of 2020, ROCOR only had 24,000 members; even if the numbers have increased dramatically since then it’s still a small sect even by Orthodox standards.)
Most of the action is taking place in more mainstream, if still conservative, Protestant or Catholic churches, like the Southern Baptist Grace Church in Waco, Texas, profiled in a New York Times article last September. It’s an “ordinary evangelical church” so overwhelmed with newly minted male parishioners that one pastor associated with a small satellite church found himself wondering out loud to a NYT reporter “why is [the Lord] sending us all of these young men?”
The young men who are joining these churches–or simply choosing to stay in them as their female counterparts leave–are seeking more or less what Roosh thinks he’s found in ROCOR: a properly “biblical” vision of masculinity. “So if Gen Z women are exiting the church, why are Gen Z men like me staying?” asks a writer on the Gospel Coalition website.
Because the church is giving us real masculinity. …
Today’s gender-neutral, gender-fluid world has blurred the lines of God’s creation of males and females as distinct expressions of humanity. It has questioned masculinity’s value. Gen Z men like me long to hear that our God-given power has purpose, our responsibility has reward, and our valor has value. … in a culture of confusion, the church has provided a clear and consistent vision of manhood shaped by the cross.
Trouble is, these churches aren’t just attracting conservative young men; some, particularly the Orthodox churches, are attracting far-right converts, including many as hateful and Jew-obsessed as Roosh. Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, now an assistant professor of religion and anthropology at Northeastern University who wrote a book about her year-long study of a ROCOR parish in West Virginia, told NPR last year that some of the converts she studied turned out to be white nationalists with a hatred of democracy and a love of Vladimir Putin. ROCOR has traditionally been an “immigrant faith,” she noted.
It’s now being sort of colonized by these converts in many respects … They’re vocal in their parishes. They’re vocal online. They’re very digitally savvy and very connected to other far-right actors in the United States and across the globe. And that’s really changing the faith.
Texas Monthly, meanwhile, reports that far-right, chronically online “Ortho Bros” have “found common cause with the Confederacy, fascism, monarchism, and white supremacy.” Recent episodes of World War Now, a podcast co-hosted by Orthodox monarchist Conrad Franz, have taken aim at “Judeo-Bolshevism” and ZOG, that is, the “Zionist-Occupation Government,” using a term coined by an American neo-Nazi in 1976. Michael Sisco, another Ortho Bro podcaster highlighted in the Texas Monthly article, “has acknowledged being friends with the white supremacist Nick Fuentes; boasted that he named his cat after Eva Braun, Adolf Hitler’s wife” and declared that Texas Republicans who say they oppose antisemitism are “gay.” These are supposed to be jokes, he assured the magazine.
Sounds like Roosh picked the right church to join!
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Religiosity has always been a sign of insecurity and weakness.
This is something which isn’t directly tied to Roosh or far-right churches, but it is relevant in a bigger picture way: Pro-natalists have been machine-gunning themselves in the foot in recent years, at least if you take their usual rhetoric at face value.
And that usual rhetoric is: society is becoming top-heavy with elderly people, and that we need to breed up a lot more young workers in order to support them financially and to provide eldercare.
Okay, so let’s say that they manage to convince (or force) the Zoomers, and later, the older members of the currently unnamed Gen-α, to breed up large families so that the yet-unborn* Gen-β will end up being the new Baby Boom. When that generation truly comes “online” economically, they’ll be maybe 15-30 years old, which will take 31 years from whatever point this gets started.
*[It’s possible that the very oldest members of that generation have already been born, depending on where the semi-arbitrary dividing line is retroactively set. But if a new Baby Boom were to happen soon, then that would almost certainly end up being the dividing line.]
This results in one of 3 scenarios:
A. No major advances in life extension in the next few decades, or it is unavailable to all but the richest: Most of the surviving elderly people will be Generation-X, which is the least populous generation. This will make the whole thing entirely pointless.
B. Major advances in life extension, and most old people become functionally a lot younger as a result: Much of the Baby Boom generation will still be around, but neither they nor Gen-X need a lot of young people to support them. Again, pointless.
C. As above, but they don’t become functionally younger: Not pointless in a vacuum, but technology might still change that – see below.
There is an alternate rhetoric where we need lots of young people for reasons of economic strength – and possibly, military strength as well. But given how ridiculous quantities of money are being poured into making large numbers humans unnecessary for those purposes, there’s a good chance that they’ll succeed within the next few decades, making that also pointless.
Finally, the rarely-stated-in-mixed-company third rhetoric: To stanch the bleeding of people leaving organized religion, and reestablish cultural supremacy via sheer numbers. That would require a lot of things to go right on their part, even after breeding up a new βoom-gen. (Getting into that is a whole ‘nother topic.) And I’m not sure how they’re even going to accomplish that first step. At least in the US (and apologies for being US-centric, as usual), conservatives seem hellbent on re-creating the economic conditions which resulted in Gen-X being so small in the first place. Some of them seem to realize that on some level, which is why they’re going all-in on “contraception should be illegal” and offering pathetically small bonuses for childbirth, because they don’t want to fix the economy to be more family-friendly.
And on top of that, they may have radicalized a small but significant portion of male Zoomers, as David states, but they did so in a way which makes those men look dangerous to most women… resulting in them being considered poor partner candidates by said women, and a lot of young women swearing off men altogether. That backfire combined with the economic conditions could easily result in Gen-β being even smaller than Gen-X.
TL;DR: Not only will their current tactics almost certainly not work, there’s a high chance it will end up being pointless even if it does.
Oh, please. “There’s an internet on a planet populated by 8 billion horny apes” suffices to explain the existence of internet porn, without resort to conspiracy theories.
@Sylvia:
No kidding. I can’t find references to any surviving erotica that predates Judaism, but it almost certainly existed. (I found a reference to verifiable historical erotica that was traced back to 1185 BCE, which isn’t quite far enough; though that included a note that their definition of ‘erotica’ included ‘no ritualistic purpose’, so religious ceremonies that involved sex weren’t counted. This is obviously a topic on which defining the category limits is going to have a major impact on the date.)
Not to mention that some of the Jewish subgroups are every bit as much anti-pornography as the more strident Christian churches, and those same Jewish subgroups tend to be just as much anti-woman and sexist as the Christians described here. Anybody who thinks all Jews are part of some grand conspiracy has never seen the sorts of internal arguments they can get into.
@ jenora
Gawd, my search history now. But, if this counts, then between 2037 BC and 2029 BC. So depends on what you count as the start of Judaism.
“why is [the Lord] sending us all of these young men?”
It’s not the Lord. It’s the racism. It’s the fascism. It’s the sexism.
This is leaving aside the tendency of many archaeologists to claim “ritualistic purpose” for anything where an honest answer would have been either “I don’t know” or something they weren’t comfortable with. Unidentified object? Ritualistic purpose. Male-sexed skeleton buried with female garments and grave goods? Obviously the items ended up in the wrong grave, or else ritualistic purpose. Etc.
Those’d be the same subset who find a statue in northwestern Europe with an obvious cornrows hairstyle and claim the hair “must have been damaged” or “poor workmanship”, because heaven forfend someone in ancient northwestern Europe wasn’t white. (And, in actuality, probably everyone in ancient northwestern Europe wasn’t white, until just a few thousand years ago. White Europeans might be a mutation not much older than adult lactose tolerance, with both of them spreading there for the same reason: to better obtain vitamin D in a high latitude cloudy region.)
Which brings me to one of the earliest identified items that quite possibly were porn. The neolithic so-called “goddess figurines” were, of course, ascribed “ritualistic purpose”, but it’s quite likely that for the girls they were stone-age Barbie toys and for the boys they were stone-age Playboy centerfolds. But of course suggesting they may have been Barbie toys would be anathema because they weren’t thin to the point of emaciation, and suggesting they were objects of sexual desire not only runs into the same hangup, but also that of prudishness. So, “ritualistic purpose”.