WHY MEN ARE GOING BACK TO CHURCH

Young men are turning up to church in Britain, and it is worth understanding why even if you have no intention of joining them.

The Bible Society's Quiet Revival report, published last year, claimed that monthly church attendance among 18-24 year olds had quadrupled in its sample between 2018 and 2024, from 4% to 16%. Among young men specifically, the figure jumped from 4% to 21%. The methodology has been disputed — the British Social Attitudes survey, which uses random sampling rather than an opt-in panel, tells a more cautious story. The precise numbers can be argued.

What is harder to dispute is that something is moving. The Church of England has posted four consecutive years of attendance growth. Anecdotally, clergy across the country report the same thing: young men, previously the group least likely to walk through a church door, are showing up.

I have noticed it in my own church, where over the past six months the number of young men attending regularly has grown in a way that would have seemed unlikely not long ago.

This is happening at the same moment that Tucker Carlson — currently one of the most listened-to voices in Western conservatism — has placed Christian heritage at the centre of his commentary and begun publicly challenging the Christian Zionist consensus that has dominated American evangelical politics for decades. In Britain, the Restore and Reform political parties are pushing the same territory, arguing that the country's Christian foundations are not an embarrassment to be managed but a heritage to be reclaimed.

Meanwhile in the United States, 27-year-old live streamer Nick Fuentes commands hundreds of thousands of viewers per show on Rumble, framing much of his content in explicitly Catholic terms. Whatever you think of Fuentes - and there is plenty to object to - the size of his audience among young men, and his self-proclaimed ‘generational run’, point to an appetite that more respectable institutions have failed to meet.

The question is not whether these commentators are admirable or should be shunned, but what need is being met.

Young men in their twenties are in a difficult position. Loneliness is high. The formal structures that once organised everyday male life — apprenticeships, trade guilds, working men's clubs, national service, even the pub as a genuine community rather than a venue — have largely dissolved. The digital alternatives are not substitutes. An online forum gives you an audience, not a community. A group chat asks nothing of you and holds you to nothing.

Church offers something structurally different. It is a weekly rhythm that exists independently of your mood or motivation. You show up on Sunday not because you necessarily feel inspired but because it is Sunday and that is what you do. Over time, that structure does something to a man that no amount of self-scheduled discipline can replicate: it makes attendance a matter of identity rather than willpower.

Beyond the rhythm, church places you in a physical room with other people who know your name and will notice your absence. That level of accountability is almost impossible to manufacture artificially. You can cancel a gym session, leave a Discord server, unsubscribe from a newsletter. You cannot quietly disappear from a church community without someone eventually asking where you have been. For men who are prone to withdrawal when life gets hard - and most men are, at some point - that matters more than it sounds.

There is also the question of what church asks of you. Most modern spaces are designed around consumption. You attend a concert, watch a match, scroll through an X feed. Church inverts that. You are expected to participate - to sing, to pray, to serve, to give. You are placed in a story that is explicitly not about you, and you are asked to orient yourself around something larger than your own development and goals. That is a rare experience for a generation raised on the language of self-expression and self-improvement.

None of this requires you to resolve theological questions. Whether or not you believe the Nicene Creed, you can observe what the structure produces. Men who attend church regularly are, on average, more likely to have stronger social networks, lower rates of depression, more stable relationships, and a clearer sense of purpose. The research on this has been remarkably consistent across decades and countries. It does not prove that Christianity is true. It does suggest that the architecture of a weekly gathered community, with shared ritual and mutual obligation, does something for men that other arrangements do not.

The secular alternatives such as therapy, mindfulness, men's groups, online communities, are not worthless. But they share a common limitation: they are all ultimately oriented toward the individual's wellbeing. Church asks a different question. Not how are you feeling, but who are you becoming and what are you here to do.

The men showing up in churches across Britain right now are not, by and large, doing so because they have resolved every doubt or undergone a dramatic conversion. Most of them are doing so because they are looking for something the rest of their lives is not providing. A room full of real people who believe in something greater than themselves. A framework for behaviour that does not change with the culture. A story to belong to. And work to do.

The generation that was told it could build a meaningful life out of career, consumption, and an online persona is discovering, in increasing numbers, that it cannot. Some are finding their way to the gym, some to political movements, some to figures online who speak the language of tradition and belonging. The ones finding their way to church are encountering something with more depth and considerably more history than most of the alternatives on offer.

You do not have to believe to go. You only have to be willing to sit in the room. You might find it worth showing up.

“Non nobis, Domine, non nobis; sed nomine tuo da gloriam”.

Richard Morrissey