Can millennial and Gen Z Catholics – many identifying as “trads” or traditionalists attracted to the order of the Church against the chaos they see in the modern West – really save the US and other Western nations? Many in the millennial and Gen Z ‘New Right’ have turned against neoliberalism just as they have embraced a more statist and Catholic-infused ideology which has more in common with Viktor Orbán than Ronald Reagan.

As Sam Adler-Bell wrote for the New Republic: “The New Right wants to see Republicans abandon their fealty to free-market dogmas, embrace traditional Christianity, and use the levers of state power to wage the culture war for keeps. Importantly, most of them are Catholic. The Church has always had an allure for conservatives—with its strict rules, hierarchies, and status as an institution bestriding antiquity and modernity.” 

According to Adler-Bell, some on the New Right “support pro-family welfare policy and reject the GOP’s [Republican Party’s) tax-cutting orthodoxy”, while “others are Roman Catholic integralists, aspiring to a theologically ordered politics”. The New Right flies in the face of mainstream conservatism, which it largely sees as having failed society, and at worst, having enabled social decline.

According to Boris Kálnoky, writing for Spiked: “Historically, Western conservatives’ main weakness has been that they’re seen as socially insensitive, advocating a small state at the expense of those a larger, more interventionist state might be able to help.” However, Orbán broke “with conservatism’s aversion to state intervention”. 

Hungarian state intervention has ensured that – since 2010 – the marriage rate has doubled, the abortion rate has halved, the fertility rate has risen by a quarter, and the divorce rate has hit a record low. Although, “the Hungarian government has lowered redistribution rates over the past 12 years, cutting unemployment benefits to a mere 90 days (instead of one year) and introducing a very low, flat-rate income tax”, Budapest “has pursued a highly interventionist social and economic policy.” 

According to Kálnoky: “This means that the Hungarian state is always willing to intervene, in a radical and massive way, to solve specific problems facing people.” Orbán’s policies include waivers on income tax for women raising at least four children, subsidies for large families to buy cars, and loans to help families with at least two children buy homes. Every Hungarian woman under 40 is also eligible for a preferential loan when she gets married. 

When one hears the rhetoric of many young, Trump-aligned Republicans, this is the kind of language they speak. But these types of policies work better in countries with greater national cohesion and consensus than heterogenous societies pulling in all sorts of directions, like the UK or the US. A society which feels like one big family is more likely to implement policies which encourage all women to have children than sectarian societies where ‘tribes’ favour their own survival.  

Then there is the authenticity question. According to Ann Manov, writing for UnHerd, “there is something shocking about the “Catholic revival” driven by downtown New York scenesters – that is, the phenomenon of attractive, highly social ketamine enthusiasts saying they are Catholic.” According to Manov, “there has not been a mass return to traditional Catholicism among New Yorkers,” while ““Young Catholics” today, long after organised religion fell from centrality in American life, are scraping its remains”. 

Regarding a recent article in the New York Times – “New York’s Hottest Club is the Catholic Church” – Manov claims the shocking thing “is not, primarily, its subjects’ half-hearted prostitution of Catholic imagery”, but “the seeming guilelessness with which its author Julia Yost, editor of the established conservative journal First Things, seems to take them at their word.” 

Of course, any insincerity is perhaps indicative of how far gone countries like the US now are, meaning that attempts at rediscovering faith have to be filtered through a materialistic and degenerate popular culture. In essence, many of these social-media savvy ‘neo-Catholics’ are simply unable to embrace a genuine form of the faith they crave given how much they have been sucked in to the general cultural vapidity they long to escape.

Meanwhile, in America and across Europe, Catholic attitudes are both mixed up are trending along lines of national consensus, undermining attempts at pushback. Even before the Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs which overturned Roe vs. Wade, the Pew Research Center found deep divisions on Catholic attitudes towards abortion. After the ruling, Pew found 51 per cent of US Catholics disapproved. Pew also discovered that just 39 per cent of US Catholics believe abortion should be illegal in some or all cases, against 60 per cent who feel abortion should be legal.

Meanwhile, what the Pew Research Center discovered with regards to a divide on social attitudes across Europe is mirrored by the Continent’s Catholics. According to Pew: “In Western Europe, large majorities of Catholics said in 2017 that they support legal same-sex marriage.” However, “in almost all of the Central and Eastern European countries surveyed by the Center in 2015 and 2016, most Catholics oppose same-sex marriage”. 

The data for general acceptance of same-sex partnerships is more ambiguous, but the trendlines are clear. In Germany, for instance, 93 per cent of Catholics are supportive. But this drops to 48 per cent in Hungary, 46 per cent in the Czech Republic, and 45 per cent in Poland. The implication seems to be that, just as young trads in New York are sucked in by the culture they long to escape, so Catholics across western Europe and the US are more than a little influenced by the overarching culture they must now navigate.

The upshot seems to be that the New Right trads are trying to get off a train which has already left the station, since conditions in the Anglosphere and western Europe make their goals increasingly unachievable. Instead, it is likely those countries where national cohesion remains strong which have the greatest chance of implementing trad values. This is before we get to issues of sincerity, and differing Catholic attitudes. Trads can only save America and the West if conditions on the ground fundamentally change, and if the trads can articulate their faith without a progressive and materialistic filter.

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