Editors’ note: This article is part of a roundtable discussion in America on “Faith, morality and the ‘Manosphere’,” adapted from a panel conversation organized by the McFarland Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., on Feb. 26, 2026.

On Jan. 6, 2021, as supporters of Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election, one image on the news caught my eye. Amid the mob’s array of flags and paraphernalia, I spied a navy blue banner adorned with a familiar golden logo and, in a vaguely elven-looking typeface, the motto “God, Country, Notre Dame.” It billowed from a thin, sloping pole underneath Blue Lives Matter banners and American flags. The image disturbed me, but it also fascinated me. Who brings a Notre Dame flag to an insurrection? 

Conversations on Christian nationalism have largely focused on the role of evangelicalism in American public life. Works such as Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne have traced the symbolic and literal alliances between evangelical Christianity, white male supremacy and far-right political ideology. Historically, Catholics have been ambivalent guests at the banquet of American religion, neither entirely welcome nor entirely comfortable. Such histories often serve as a self-exoneration for Catholics seeking to distance ourselves from culpability for America’s current political situation. As a result, however, Catholicism’s role in the current national surge in reactionary masculinity has gone largely uninterrogated. 

In Catholicism, the Christian nationalist movement has found a trove of riches: intellectual self-justification in postliberal and integralist political theologies; deep pockets in the conservative Napa Institute; and ritual legitimacy and aesthetic capital in Catholicism’s liturgical and artistic traditions. Online, Catholicism has become a ready refuge for young men yearning for a disciplined lifestyle to beat back cultural and social alienation. 

Social media has facilitated the production of a strange yet distinctively Catholic “bro culture.” Ads tout rosaries with tactical-gear themes and American flag crucifixes. Podcasters and YouTubers lament the feminization of church and culture. Influencer priests post workout videos. Ninety-day asceticism challenges promise to make men “uncommonly free.” Latin-pseudonymed posters on X rail against vernacular liturgy and accuse the pope of being woke. 

The claims of these personalities, products and ideologies implicitly resonate with millennial and Gen Z Catholics raised in a post-“theology of the body” church obsessed with defining sexual difference. This digitally siloed refraction of the church appears primarily concerned with announcing itself as a provocative countercultural force uniquely capable of owning the libs.

One response ventured by certain church leaders to the emergence of the manosphere has been to try to forge alliances. The most influential example is that of Bishop Robert Barron, founder of Word on Fire Ministries and current head of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minn. Before the emergence of MAGA, Bishop Barron was a mainstream voice within the American episcopate. Today, he sits on Donald Trump’s Commission on Religious Liberty and uses social media to decry “wokeism” and “cultural Marxism” in a key almost indistinguishable from secular online culture warriors. 

At Word on Fire, Bishop Barron has hosted “dialogues” with the conservative political controversialists Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson, the manosphere’s resident psychologist-influencer Jordan Peterson and male celebrity Catholic converts like Shia LaBeouf.

There is something to be said for tactically inserting oneself into a cultural moment in order to understand it and more ably critique its excesses and idols. But in a social media ecosystem that preys on ego, rewards provocation and encourages tribalism, holding the line is tricky business. One who sets out to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house is likely to find that he or she has become a tool of the master. From the standpoint of integrity, Bishop Barron’s rapprochement with the manosphere has been disastrous.

The Christian persecution narrative at the heart of the Catholic manosphere’s brand of apologetics relies on a fantasy of defense—of the faith, of the church, of a narrowly defined vision of the true and good and beautiful. It is a worldview that is powerfully and insidiously consoling to young men emerging into adulthood in an economy that has left them behind, and with them the sense of identity that traditionally comes from starting a life. Many influencers in the Catholic manosphere console their followers by assuring them that such failures are not their fault, but are instead the result of postmodern social engineering aimed at upending traditional gender roles. Men, they insist, are owed something that they have been denied.

At a moment in which grievance is a particularly lucrative kind of political currency, it is not difficult to pinpoint the allure—or the already disastrous consequences—of this narrative. As we witness the rise of far-right movements worldwide, we should recall with necessary alarm the role of right-wing Catholicism in facilitating the rise of 20th-century fascism. The church must stop allowing itself to be used as a tool in the extremist resurgence in the United States today.

Correction: A previous version of this essay stated that Bishop Robert Barron interviewed Russell Brand in July 2024 for the Word On Fire media ministry and that the interview had been removed from Word on Fire’s site; that interview was conducted by Mr. Brand for his own program, “Stay Free with Russell Brand,” and was never published at Word on Fire.

This article appears in July/August 2026.

Susan Bigelow Reynolds is associate professor of Catholic Studies at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology.