EWTN News portal reports that Gallup data from 2024–2025 indicates young U.S. men (ages 18–29) now surpass young women in claiming religion is “very important” to them—42% versus 29%. The article frames this as a positive development, noting increased religious attendance and identification with specific religions among young men. However, this statistical uptick in self-reported “importance” of religion reveals nothing about the state of souls, the integrity of faith, or the fidelity of those institutions where these young men allegedly worship. In an age of apostasy, numbers are not a measure of grace but of confusion.
The Illusion of Religious Revival in an Age of Apostasy
The article presents Gallup polling data showing that 42% of young American men now say religion is “very important” in their lives, up from 28% in 2022–2023. Religious attendance among young men has also risen to 40% attending weekly or monthly. On the surface, this appears encouraging. But what religion? What faith? What worship?
The article never asks the most fundamental question: Which religion are these young men embracing? In a nation saturated with Protestant sects, Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Islam, Eastern mysticism, and the post-conciliar conciliar sect that calls itself “Catholic,” the mere assertion that religion is “very important” is spiritually meaningless—indeed, it may be positively dangerous. A man who fervently embraces a false religion is in a worse state than one who rejects all religion, for he substitutes a lie for the truth and calls it devotion.
Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), condemned the proposition that “every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true” (Proposition 15), and further condemned the idea that “man may, in the observance of any religion whatever, find the way of eternal salvation” (Proposition 16). The Catholic Church has always taught extra Ecclesiam nulla salus—outside the Church there is no salvation. Yet the article treats all religious affiliation as equally valid, a hallmark of the indifferentism that Pius IX explicitly anathematized.
The Silence About the One True Faith
Not once does the article mention the Catholic Church as the sole ark of salvation. Not once does it distinguish between true religion and false. The data lumps together “Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, or another religion” as if these were interchangeable paths to God. This is not journalism; it is theological relativism masquerading as demographic analysis.
The conciliar sect—the post-Vatican II structure occupying the Vatican—has spent decades dismantling the distinction between truth and error. Its “ecumenism” has taught generations that all religions are merely different paths to the same God. That young men now report higher “religious importance” in this environment is not a sign of Catholic revival but of confusion exploited by the enemy. The conciliar sect’s own “bishops” and “priests” have systematically emptied churches of doctrine, replacing the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass with a Protestantized memorial meal, and substituting the social gospel for the preaching of Christ the King.
Pius XI, in Quas Primas (1925), declared: “His reign, namely, extends not only to Catholic nations or to those who, by receiving baptism according to law, belong to the Church, even though their erroneous opinions have led them astray or discord has separated them from love, but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.” The article’s authors, writing for a nominally Catholic outlet, are silent about this universal kingship of Christ—the very foundation of Catholic social teaching.
Political Religion vs. the Reign of Christ
The article notes a stark partisan divide: 52% of young Republican men attend religious services monthly, compared to 26% of young Democratic men. It attributes the overall rise in male religiosity partly to political polarization. This reveals a disturbing truth: religion is increasingly viewed through the lens of political identity, not divine truth.
When religion becomes a marker of tribal affiliation—when men attend services because it aligns with their political party rather than because they believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the necessity of confession, the reality of hell, and the infallible Magisterium—then “religion” has become an idol. It is no longer the worship of God in spirit and truth (John 4:24) but the worship of self, projected onto a deity that confirms one’s political preferences.
St. Pius X, in Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907), condemned the modernist proposition that “dogmas, sacraments, and hierarchy, both in concept and in reality, are merely modes of explanation and stages in the evolution of Christian consciousness” (Proposition 54). The reduction of religion to a sociological or political phenomenon is precisely what the modernists desired—and what the conciliar revolution achieved.
The Myth of “Frequent Attendance”
The article celebrates that 40% of young men now attend religious services “weekly or monthly.” But attendance at what? If these young men are attending the post-conciliar “Mass”—the Novus Ordo Missae promulgated by the apostate Paul VI in 1969—they are not attending the Most Holy Sacrifice of Calvary. They are attending a service that the “archbishop” Bugnini, a suspected Freemason, designed in consultation with Protestant ministers. The 1969 rite deliberately obscured the propitiatory nature of the Mass, the Real Presence, and the sacrificial character of the priesthood.
Cardinal Ottaviani and Cardinal Bacci, in their famous 1969 letter to Paul VI, stated that the new rite “represents, both as a whole and in its details, a striking departure from the Catholic theology of the Holy Mass as it was formulated in Session XXII of the Council of Trent.” To attend such a rite believing it to be the true Mass is to participate in a counterfeit—and to receive “Communion” in such a rite, if not sacrilege in the strict sense, is at minimum an act of profound self-deception.
The article is silent about the distinction between the true Catholic Mass and the conciar counterfeit. This silence is itself a condemnation of the outlet’s editorial stance: it serves the conciliar sect by treating all “worship” as equivalent.
The Deeper Apostasy: What the Data Hides
The most telling statistic in the article is not the rise in male religiosity but the persistent decline among young women. Only 29% of young women say religion is “very important,” down from 54% in the early 2000s. The article attributes this to partisan identification—young women lean Democratic, and Democrats are less religious.
But there is a deeper spiritual reality at work. The conciliar sect has aggressively promoted feminism, “women’s ordination,” and gender ideology within its structures. Young women who might once have found in the Catholic Church a clear teaching on their dignity as wives, mothers, and consecrated virgins are instead told that the Church “oppresses” them. The conciliar sect has alienated its own daughters by embracing the spirit of the world.
Pius XI warned in Quas Primas that “the plague which poisons human society” is “secularism… its errors and wicked endeavors.” He described how secularism “began with the denial of Christ the Lord’s reign over all nations” and progressed until “states thought they could do without God and that their religion was impiety and contempt for God.” The Gallup data, far from indicating a religious revival, confirms the triumph of secularism: even those who claim religion is “very important” do so in a cultural context where God has been banished from public life, law, and education.
The Duty of the Hour
Statistics about “religious importance” are spiritually vacuous without reference to the truth of the Catholic Faith. The duty of every Catholic is not to celebrate rising numbers but to preach the unchanging Gospel, administer the true sacraments, and form souls in the integral faith of the Fathers.
The conciliar sect cannot save souls. It does not possess the true Mass, valid holy orders (given the dubious nature of post-1968 ordinations), or authentic magisterial authority (given the manifest heresy of the post-conciliar “popes”). Young men who seek God must be directed to the true Church—the Church of all ages, not the neo-church of the Antichrist that occupies the Vatican.
Let us not be deceived by numbers. Strait is the gate and narrow is the way that leadeth to life, and few there are that find it (Matt. 7:14). The task is not to make religion “important” in the eyes of Gallup pollsters but to make Christ King in the hearts of men—through the true Mass, true doctrine, and true obedience to the immutable Magisterium.
Source:
Young U.S. men overtake women in saying religion is ‘very important’ (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 16.04.2026