On one of his livestreams in February, the popular influencer Braden Peters discussed his interest in the Catholic faith while at the gym.

“I really liked…the order that followed, having some sort of authority that I believed to be…virtuous,” the 20-year-old Mr. Peters, who goes by the name Clavicular, said, emphasizing that he did not come to faith for “spiritual reasons.”

“I don’t think that the average person is very smart,” he said, explaining that religion is necessary for “keeping people in line” in his view. “I don’t think the average person is very capable, from what I’ve seen.”

Clavicular has become internet famous for the extreme lengths he will go to perfect his physical appearance in a practice known as “looksmaxxing.” These efforts have included his own admission of using crystal methamphetamine to suppress his appetite and engaging in “bonesmashing”—breaking the bones in one’s face with a hammer to create a sharper facial structure. He has also streamed with notorious alt-right personalities like Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes and was arrested for battery on March 27 for instigating a viral fight between two women.

Clavicular is not unique in his attraction to Catholicism. Across apparently disconnected corners of the internet, there is a surge of interest in the church. Young men with crusader avatars and Vatican flags in their bios post about the Latin Mass alongside racist memes; influencers share inspiration boards full of pictures of veils, incense and stone chapels mixed with traditional images of white femininity and homemade bread; tech billionaires talk about the coming of the Antichrist and the importance of the Christian West while racing toward a post-human, artificial intelligence-led future.

A strange coalition of “tradwives,” “groypers,” transhumanists and now looksmaxxers has converged on the Roman Catholic Church as a source of order and beauty in a fallen world. These groups differ widely in their politics and self-presentation, but their online expressions suggest a shared motivation: a desire to impose form on perceived chaos, to perfect and control the self and to locate authority outside the instability of modern life. 

Of course, it may seem unfair to lump tradwives in with groypers—the followers of white Christian nationalist Nick Fuentes—and these groups have differing motivations behind their attraction to and expressions of Catholicism, to say nothing of the diversity of motivation and expression within these groups. But while their distortions of Catholicism differ in degree and tone, their underlying desires for meaning and community are real, and understanding them together reveals a broader trend in the internet age’s relationship with religion. 

Behind the interest in more rigid and traditional forms of Christianity is a deep anxiety about the emptiness of an alienated, significantly online modern existence. And it is the same anxiety that motivates these subcultures’ other communal interests.

In Clavicular’s case, that anxiety results in a relentless pursuit to physically perfect the body. For tradwives, it is seen through the curation of a perfectly aesthetic domestic life. For the groypers, the anxiety fuels the construction of a rigid political ideology. In each case, the self becomes a project of optimization.

Here, a recent Vatican document offers a valuable diagnosis: “Quo Vadis, Humanitas?” The document, released by the International Theological Commission and approved by Pope Leo XIV, addresses transhumanism, cosmetic surgery, artificial intelligence and “digital religions.” It situates these phenomena within a broader tension of modern life: namely, the simultaneous growth of technological possibility and the persistent fragility of the human condition. Humanity, the commission observes, is caught between the temptation to rely “blindly on the results of technological progress” and the temptation to “resign ourselves to all the limitations and fragilities of life.” Instead, humanity must “try to come to terms with finitude” and “inhabit the tension between finitude and infinity.”

In some places, the document’s disapproval is rather explicit, including in a direct rebuke to the logic of looksmaxxing. The commission ties advances in biotechnology, cosmetic surgery and pharmacology to a “widespread ‘cult of the body.’” The document states that this cult “tends towards a frantic search for a perfect figure that is always fit, young and beautiful. Once modified, often with relentless frenzy, the body becomes a body-object in which the person-subject mirrors themselves, creating a relationship in which the person is no longer his or her body but ‘owns’ a body, from which arises the search for a ‘borrowed’ identity.”

The document also takes explicit aim at transhumanism, an ideology embraced by figures on the tech right like Peter Thiel who have engaged with traditional forms of Christianity. Transhumanism, described as “naive and arrogant” by the commission, “imagines a future in which human beings will perfect the current biological form that defines human nature, in order to achieve the goal of individual immortality, supported by technology.” It spends significant time systematically critiquing this ideology and the ways it justifies concerning developments in artificial intelligence.

The commission goes beyond critiquing individual subcultures and ideologies to address how the digital age can structurally distort religion. It warns that “there is a risk that a wide variety of digital religions will fill the internet like a giant ‘religious market,’ offering à la carte choices according to individual interests.” The commission explains:

These are religious offerings without real ties or community belonging, closer to the emotional tastes of individuals than to a shared experience. One may also doubt the authentically ecclesial character of certain Christian communication on social networks, especially when used to fuel controversy, create divisions and even destroy the good reputation of other people. Furthermore, some of these new online spiritual practices end up producing a metamorphosis in the mode of believing, since digital technology has a very strong hold on the religious imagination. Not infrequently, the result is a new paradigm that redefines religious identities: technology itself also acts as a spiritual guide and mediator of the sacred.

In short, these subcultures’ understanding of religion is mediated through the consumption-driven algorithms of the platforms they occupy. They consume Catholicism as one would a self-help challenge or lifestyle trend, a new fad workout routine or internet fandom. Absent sincere practice, their religious identification becomes ephemeral, curated and sometimes actively harmful—less interested in a personal faith in God or a worship community than in instrumentalizing the aesthetics of the Catholic Church.

Taken together, these critiques point toward the core impulse pulling seemingly disparate subcultures into orbit around Catholicism online: an underlying desire to overcome the limits of the given self through control and aesthetic perfection as well as an attempt to appropriate the church’s authority and beauty as tools for self-construction. The church cautions that, instead, faith requires surrender to divine mystery and the humble embrace of our finitude as a gift.

But the Catholic Church offers more than castigation here. For all its painful and cringeworthy distortions, this online religious revival actually provides reason for hope. The subcultures’ desire for order and beauty in a fractured modern world is not misguided in itself, and it reflects a real hunger for meaning. But unless that desire is directed beyond the self, it risks collapsing into yet another form of self-absorption. 

The challenge for the church will be to break through the memes and greet these searchers with grace. “Quo Vadis, Humanitas?” suggests that the church will try to do just that.

Edward Desciak is an O'Hare Fellow at America Media.