Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson are taking Gen Z men to Church

There’s an iconic photograph of the Australian Test Cricket team of the 1970s walking off the pitch. Blokey, guffawing moustachioed, shirts unbuttoned revealing barrel chests thick with hair and gold chains. You can almost smell the XXXX. 

That’s the Aussie young bloke, right? Sporty, no-nonsense, given to the odd beer…or five, mistrustful of authority and scornful of feminine activities such as housecleaning, cooking and church attendance. 

But something is changing. Australian Gen Z males are now more likely to identify with Christianity than their female counterparts. That’s according to the highly regarded National Church Life Survey (NCLS) which found almost 40 per cent of males under 28 identify as Christian, compared with just under 30 per cent of young women. 

The widest gap is the most intriguing: 37 per cent of Gen Z men agree with the NCLS statement that Christianity is good for society, while that figure is only 17 per cent for Gen Z women. 

What Is Going On? 

Why this surge of interest among a cohort that conventional wisdom says have no time for organised religion? 

A number of key issues have coalesced that are wider than Australia, but which have had direct impact here. 

The first is the sense that modern culture is no longer delivering for young men. They are being left behind. 

Educationally young men are being left behind. Schools eschew risk, provide learning methods alien to many young men, highlight gender “sameness”, and fill the humanities with texts that excoriate masculinity. 

Secondly, young men are being left behind relationally. The a priori view of a young man is that he is a porn addict who would be violent towards women if given half the chance, is given to micro-aggressions and mansplaining, and is unable to articulate his emotions  

Thirdly, there’s the cultural crisis brought about by late-modernity. While every experience is available to a young man in the West, meaning and purpose is in short supply. There is an absence of any cause worth defending, or any crisis worth conquering. 

There is also a reassessment of the role of institutions as forces of good in society rather than evil, and the desire for a sense of communal order rooted in historic truths in a chaotic world. Many young men want something bigger and older than themselves, something with gravitas. 

The modern male model

And then there is the Joe Rogan effect – or the “vibe shift”. Across the West there is a return to more conservative, albeit not necessarily Christian, values that unashamedly offer young men a place.  

When apologist Wes Huff went viral on Rogan’s show his biceps filled out his tight black t-shirt. The days of the Christian loser on TV being shredded rather than looking shredded are over. Meanwhile Canadian psychologist and internet sensation, Jordan Peterson, has been a gateway drug to Christianity for young Australian men. 

Conservative church leaders have been sniffy about Peterson. They should be grateful. Huge numbers of young men paid good money to hear him lecture on the Old Testament, piquing an interest that set many on a religious quest that landed on the doors of our churches. 

If young Aussie men come because of the ruggedness of Rogan and Peterson, they need to stay because of the Jesus who allowed himself to be “taken” for us. 

I have had conversations with young men who turned to church because of Peterson. These young men were not looking for vague spirituality, but for something that required effort and grit. I am not unique. I have spoken with church leaders seeing multiple young men turning up to services “cold call”. 

Boundaries and Frameworks 

While the NCLS reveals young Australian women are more likely to identify as “spiritual”, cautious of an institution that has harboured sexual abuse, younger men are increasingly happy to be identified as “religious”. They appear willing to embrace the discomfort of religious discipline in the same way they embrace the discomfort of physical discipline. 

Australian singer, Nick Cave put his finger on it when he said he was religious not spiritual. Cave says he values boundaries and concrete concepts that fenced in one’s impulses. “Spiritual” is seen as the equivalent of “you do you” but younger male converts are gravitating towards “crunchier” versions of church in Australia, primarily Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism.   

Of course not all young men. Self-mastery through sport and the gym, apps that dial down porn use, or reading lists that promote Stoicism and traditionally manly virtues, are all hugely popular. But so too is Latin. A Tridentine parish in Melbourne — Australia’s second biggest city, and its most secular — is booming, its services populated by younger people, many of them men. I mentioned this to a young lawyer recently. He told me that he had started going there and that he drove a good hour each way to attend.

It’s ironic that while so much of the evangelical church was trying to be relevant, it is the historical “weirdness” of Christianity that then proved most compelling. 

Caution!

A word of warning to finish, that word being the oft-misused and oft-maligned “patriarchy”.  

If young men are looking for order, meaning and purpose, along with the sense that being a man is something to celebrate, they will be offered it in places outside the church, some good, some bad. 

Having listened to countless sermons from Seattle’s Mars Hill in which Mark Driscoll said he “could never worship a guy he could beat up”, we don’t want a rerun of that. 

Jesus isn’t a sanctified Joe Rogan with a “sleeper bod” under those robes. If the best instincts of young men will be met by Jesus, their baser instincts will have to subdued by him. And that’s a discipleship issue. If young Aussie men come because of the ruggedness of Rogan and Peterson, they need to stay because of the Jesus who allowed himself to be crucified for us. 

After all the 1970s Aussie cricket team might have won a few matches, but they were boorish and obnoxious to be around.