The New Rugged Cross

Earl Fowler

A warning delivered by Jesus Christ against false prophets is relayed in the King James Version of the Bible thus in Matthew 7:15-20:

15 Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.

16 Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?

17 Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.

18 A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.

19 Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.

20 Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

By their fruits ye shall know them sprung to mind when I was reading my local newspaper last week and came across an Associated Press story about a religious revival among young American men:

A new Gallup poll shows more young men in the U.S. say religion is “very important” in their lives compared to young women — the first time young men have surpassed young women on this measure of religiosity going back 25 years.

Gallup’s latest data shows that 42% of men in the U.S. ages 18-29 said religion is very important to them, a notable increase from 28% in 2022-2023. Over the same time, young women’s attachment to religion has stayed low, at about 30%.

This marks the first time young men have overtaken women by a big margin on this measure, which goes back to 2000. Gallup reports aggregate findings every two years to ensure the estimates are stable. …

Much of the growth in religiosity is happening among young Republicans. The data shows that since 2022-2023, religious attendance has increased among Republican young men and women compared to Democratic men and women. The percentage of young Republican men who attend church, synagogue, mosque or temple at least weekly has been rising since 2019, while young Democratic men’s attendance has largely fallen.

There’s a similar pattern among women. Now, only about one-quarter of Democratic women under 30 attend church at least monthly, compared to about 6 in 10 young Republican women.

Political scientist Ryan Burge of Washington University in St. Louis, a leading researcher into religious trends and a longtime pastor in the American Baptist Church, said to see the gender gap with religion reversed in Gen Z adults “represents a seismic change in society and the future of the church.”

“It could change the way children are raised,” he said, which could affect the future of the country’s religious landscape if more men are raising religious children.

Burge says young men are more drawn to religion now because it is a space where they feel more accepted in a world where other institutions are “less interested in white men compared to women and people of colour.”

“It’s the only place where you don’t have to apologize for being a white man,” he said. “American religion is very white male dominated and young men are drawn to institutions that elevate them and give them influence and power.”

Et voilà. There it is.

Now, you might think that gaining a sense of influence and power is precisely the wrong reason to adopt a religious outlook, which used to be (was supposed to be, anyway) about love and mercy toward others. But that was back in olden times, when righteous men wore robes and sandals. Or possibly grey flannel suits.

The new muscular, evangelical Christianity on vanilla protein powder — for that’s what we’re really referencing here, under the big tent of an Elmer Gantry-style religious revival — is best exemplified by Pistol Pete Hegseth’s pornographic fantasies of raining “death and destruction from the sky all day long” on the Iranian infidels.

(Oh, and also on low-IQ reporters who ask impertinent questions, of course. Enemies of the people all.)

Because that’s whom the Sky God detests, baby. None of this dewy-eyed Earth Mother hooey for the stupid, arrogant, self-congratulatory, unimaginative, humourless white men who take that Adam and Eve injunction about having “dominion” over creation as carte blanche to exploit the crap out of the Earth’s resources.

“Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation,” Hegseth implored his bloodthirsty and avenging deity during a prayer service at the Pentagon in late March. “Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

The remarks came a day after Hegseth announced changes to the military’s chaplain corps, which he said in a video message had been “infected by political correctness and secular humanism” until they were “watered down” to be “nothing more than therapists” who focused more on “self-help and self-care” than faith or virtue.

The chaplain corps is in the midst of having its religious affiliation codes reduced from about 200 different faith codes down to 31, he said. The chaplains will also no longer wear their officer rank insignia on their uniforms, but instead their religious insignia.

The changes are in pursuit of “making the chaplain corps great again,” said Hegseth, who has instituted monthly prayer sessions at the Pentagon. All have been presided over by hawkish, right-wing evangelicals.

Hegseth himself is member of a church affiliated with the Congregation of Reformed Evangelical Churches, founded by Doug Wilson, who self-identifies as a Christian nationalist and has himself led a session of the prayer service at the Pentagon.

In response to this homicidal hysteria masquerading as raging righteousness, let’s cede the floor for a moment to Calvin Sandborn, a retired lawyer and author of a book about men and anger, who offered these thoughts in a recent commentary in the Victoria Times Colonist:

Christian voters are largely responsible for the Trump presidency. He received 76% of white evangelical votes in 2024. Yet Trump’s life and message flatly contradict the gospel:

The Bible teaches not to lie. Trump lies every second breath.

The Bible warns that the love of money is the root of all evil. But the love of money is who Trump is — he worships wealth and gold.

Jesus taught “turn the other cheek”. Trump openly boasts: “You hit me, I hit you back twice as hard.”

The Bible forbids sexual abuse and adultery. Juries ruled that Trump sexually abused Jean Carroll and faked records about hush money for porn star Stormy Daniels.

Much of his wrongdoing is common human frailty. We all sin and fall short. But Trump’s egregious heresy is his Big Lie about Jesus’ central mission – bringing love to the world.

Jesus’s “Great Commandment” is to love God and love your neighbour. He specifically called us to love our enemies. To the contrary, the president encourages his followers to hate a long list of scapegoats — immigrants, minorities, LGBTQs, reporters, Democrats, academics, “mean and nasty” Canadians …

Where Jesus stressed the paramount obligation to care for the sick, poor, widowed and orphaned, Trump delights in cancelling food aid and medical aid. The Lancet has estimated that single Trump decision could kill 14 million men, women and children.

Where Jesus urged followers to welcome the stranger and treat them with compassion and justice, Trump constantly dehumanizes immigrants — slandering millions of upright, hardworking undocumented immigrants as murderers and rapists.

Where the Bible enjoins Christians to “love mercy”, Trump showed his contempt for mercy in one revelatory moment – when he grotesquely mocked the reporter with palsy.

In sum, the Trump brand of Christianity has twisted a religion of love and mercy into a pagan cult of hatred and cruelty. Completely missing is the central mandate to work towards a beloved community for all.

As Trump replaces the gospel’s good news with fake news, he deeply damages Christianity. How many millions of potential converts are repulsed by a Christian Nationalist movement that calls upon us to “Revile your neighbour?”

That’s a question I haven’t heard put to obsequious, sanctimonious Republican Bible thumpers, but they’re much too busy money-changing at the foot of the Conservative Political Action Conference’s 22-foot golden statue of Trump to put a lot of thought into the future anyway.

There are no striking affinities afoot or blatant resonances in play between the newly minted Gold Trump (aka Don Colossus) installed at the president’s Florida golf course and the Golden Calf that so outraged Moses, of course.

“I don’t want to suggest this is actually a case of false idolatry,” comedian Jon Stewart joked on Monday’s episode of The Daily Show. “If it was, God would probably be punishing us the same way he did in the Bible with a plague. And I mean, that’s not happening,” he said, cutting to a clip of news coverage about the panic over this month’s hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship.

To the young men attracted to this obscene form of proselytizing — where the Golden Rule has been superseded by the Golden Bullshitter — concerns about looming environmental catastrophes and the decline of democratic traditions and the frantic new arms race and the unfettered rush to unleash all aspects of artificial intelligence irrespective of the consequences ... well, they’re fake news. A loony Left and/or Chinese hoax.

And even if we’re actually in peril, there’s no reason to worry, given that the Calvary cavalry will come to the rescue with the Rapture at the end of the world. Or maybe Elon Musk will take the techno-faithful with him to Mars when he and his fellow oligarchs have completely junked this planet.

There are even impatient True Believers who want to force God’s hand by triggering a Third World War and bringing on Armageddon (at the Lord’s earliest convenience, of course).

In the meantime, girls are girls and men are men again. Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself and gee our old LaSalle ran great.

“Men love war,” novelist John Fowles wrote in 1968’s The Magus, “because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.”

An observation by Margaret Atwood that I heard during a radio interview in the 1980s has always struck me as a sort of neat corollary: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition. Give me that old-time religion. The fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah part, anyway.

We can leave the fruits of spiritual renewal that Jesus cited in Matthew  — “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” — for after we’ve crushed the enemy.

But back to the poll results and the obscene deification of a false prophet whose inspiring Easter message on his social media platform was: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

The same genocidal Titus Andronicus type (first fake madness, then become so in reality) who also posted on Truth Social, before climbing down when an equally deranged Iranian regime refused to flinch, that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

In Jesus’s name, Amen.

Last month’s Gallup finding is easy to dismiss as a dry sociological observation with percentages and demographic trendlines and all the bloodless language of “religious attachment” and “institutional participation” — as though what’s occurring is merely a shift in consumer preference, like young men suddenly deciding they prefer vinyl records or cast-iron cookware or bespoke beard oil.

In fact, what’s being described is the migration of a certain kind of wounded masculine ego toward the one remaining American institution willing to assure it that its resentments are not only justified but holy.

Contemporary North American life — atomized, digitized, eroticized, algorithmically sorted into mutually hostile tribes — produces in young men a kind of diffuse and chronic humiliation that is very hard to talk about honestly without either sounding cruel or sounding like you’re auditioning for a podcast hosted by a man who supplements with powdered elk organs and thinks the Roman Empire fell because of feminism.

The humiliation is real. So is the loneliness. So is the sense of drift. The problem is not that these young men feel alienated. The problem is who’s waiting at the end of the alienation with open arms and a giant cross wrapped in an American flag.

Because what’s being sold here under the label of “religion” is often less Christianity than a highly monetized fantasy of restored hierarchy.

A fantasy in which every ambiguity about modern life — economic precarity, changing gender norms, racial pluralism, ecological collapse, the unbearable cognitive overload of online existence — can be resolved through the reassuring simplicity of dominance and submission. God above man, man above woman, humans above nature, America above everybody else.

It’s spiritually elegant in the same way a sledgehammer is elegant.

And one of the strangest things about this new evangelical masculinity movement is the degree to which it borrows the aesthetics of rebellion while functioning as a machine for obedience.

Young men are told they are rugged dissidents courageously resisting “the system,” while simultaneously being instructed exactly whom to hate, whom to distrust, whom to mock, what books to fear, what words not to say, which historians are lying, which journalists are demons, which professors are “groomers,” which immigrants are invaders, which women are too loud, too educated, too independent, too unwilling to perform the emotional janitorial labor required to keep fragile men from collapsing into grievance.

It is rebellion in the same sense that buying tactical coffee from an Instagram ad is rebellion.

And because modern American capitalism can absorb and merchandise literally any impulse, including anti-materialist spirituality, this whole thing arrives wrapped in the visual language of hyper-consumption: branded Bibles with camouflage covers, “warrior” devotionals, podcasts monetized through testosterone supplements, sermons clipped into TikTok reels over cinematic music that makes every mediocre opinion sound like the prelude to a crusade.

Christ as influencer. Discipleship as lifestyle optimization. The Prince of Peace repackaged as a kind of divine mixed-martial-arts coach screaming at you to reclaim your masculine essence.

Which would merely be absurd if it were not also politically combustible.

Because once a religion becomes primarily a delivery system for identity panic, it stops placing moral demands on its adherents and instead begins flattering them. And a faith that flatters people — especially people already inclined to believe themselves dispossessed heirs to a stolen birthright — becomes uniquely dangerous.

The Jesus of the Gospels spends an almost inordinate amount of time talking about humility, wealth, mercy, hypocrisy, forgiveness, care for the poor, and the radical moral obligation to see the humanity even of enemies. The new nationalist evangelicalism hears all that and responds, basically: Yes, fine, but what if we made Christianity about winning instead?

Winning culturally. Winning sexually. Winning politically. Winning demographically. Winning apocalyptically.

Especially apocalyptically. Charlie Kirk apocalyptically. Charlie Sheen apocalyptically.

Because one of the underrated psychological luxuries of end-times theology is that it relieves believers of responsibility for the future. Why preserve ecosystems, strengthen democratic institutions, or cultivate civic solidarity if history itself is merely a countdown timer before divine extraction?

If the world is a sinking cruise ship (with or without a hantavirus outbreak) and the faithful are getting airlifted out anyway, stewardship starts to look suspiciously like a sucker’s game. Which is how you end up with a theology weirdly compatible with both environmental destruction and billionaire escapism: either Jesus returns or technology saves us. In either case, accountability becomes unnecessary.

And underneath all of this — beneath the swagger and memes and tactical masculinity and fake Roman-statue profile pictures — there remains something profoundly sad. Because what many of these young men actually seem to want is not domination but meaning. Not supremacy but belonging. Not patriarchal authority but relief from isolation and despair.

They want rituals, purpose, transcendence, moral clarity, community. Which are legitimate human desires, maybe the most legitimate ones there are.

But the tragedy is that the loudest religious entrepreneurs in America have figured out that fear is easier to monetize than compassion, grievance easier than grace, certainty easier than love.

Love, after all, is demanding. Love requires self-interrogation. Love requires recognizing the full humanity of people who do not resemble you, vote like you, worship like you, desire like you. Love is unstable because it opens the possibility that you yourself may be wrong.

Resentment, by contrast, is effortless. Resentment gives you enemies. Resentment gives you a story. Resentment gives you the narcotic pleasure of feeling persecuted and superior at the same time, which may be the single most addictive emotional compound in North American public life.

And perhaps that is the real crisis hidden inside all these upbeat headlines about religious revival among young men. Not that young people are rediscovering faith, but that faith itself is being hollowed out and replaced with something colder and more primitive: a politics of sanctified entitlement wearing religion’s skin like a stolen suit.

Early this year, when The New York Times asked Trump whether there were any limits on his global powers, he replied: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind.”

That’s not religion.

That’s the vainglorious madness of a trumped-up megalomaniac who would respond to Pope Leo XIV’s denunciation of “the delusion of omnipotence” by posting an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus healing a sick man as a soldier and a nurse look on in awe. A high-resolution digital image of which you can now purchase on Etsy, I notice, for $1.92 Cdn.

(If you’re on board for the former, you might also want to pick up a copy of the God Bless the USA Bible — billed as “the only Bible endorsed by” the president and the only one that uses his “name, likeness and image” under a paid licence from a Trump organization, CIC Ventures LLC, for a paltry $60 US. “Buy any 2 Bibles, get a free singing gift bag,” exhorts the godblesstheusa.com website “inspired by Lee Greenwood’s patriotic anthem and hit song.”

As Jesus is reputed to have yelled as he angrily expelled the merchants and the money changers from the Temple in Jerusalem: “Cheap imitations will not be tolerated! Everything must go!”

One final point. If you dig into other recent surveys, you’ll note that young American men also diverge from young women on some important moral questions.

Pew Research Center surveys conducted in March 2025 found about four in 10 men younger than 30 say divorce is morally wrong, compared with only about two in 10 young women. Even more men under 30, about half, say abortion is morally wrong, compared with only about one-third of women the same age.

Guess how that’s going to play out when men are taught to consider themselves the sacred head of the family, as Christ heads the church, and the women they’re with either find themselves with unwanted pregnancies or want out of the relationship altogether.

Not a problem for the twice-divorced, thrice-married Hegseth, who was accused of abusing his second wife and paid $50,000 in 2017 to settle a sexual assault allegation against another woman who claimed he took her phone and locked her in a hotel room before attacking her.

That was in his drinking days before seeing the light and pledging allegiance to Dark Lord Sauron, mind you. Hoo-wah! Don’t you just love the smell of napalm in the morning?

Line starts at the right, lads. Far right.

Just behind the Pied Piper.

Trump claimed the photo below was merely meant to show himself as a doctor. Only the fake news would think otherwise. Physician, heal thyself.

Take heed, idolaters. This is the Full Veal Deal in action. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.