Why Young Men Are Turning to Orthodoxy: A Clinical Look at Masculinity, Ritual, and the Search for Moral Coherence

Wednesday, November 19, 2025. This is for my friends at Meraki Branding.

The movement of young men toward the Orthodox Church is not dramatic if you see it up close.

It’s quiet. Nearly invisible. Until you read about it on Drudge.

But it’s still the sort of shift that begins with a feeling someone can’t name, then eventually becomes a choice that surprises even them.

When they try to explain it later—if they explain it at all—they usually mention the chanting, or the icons, or the way the service doesn’t rush itself. But that’s not really what brought them there.

They’re tracking something deeper. Something steady. Something that doesn’t move when the rest of the world does.

I recognize the pattern. I spent 4 years in parochial school in South Boston.

I remember the whispering nuns the day Kennedy was shot, the way the building held its breath as if the walls themselves could absorb the news.

I remember a few months later, walking through the Belvedere Conflagration in May of 1964, threading between the smoke and the soaked timbers, learning in real time how institutions fracture and still try to stand. The alcoholic Polish family that bought me for $500 from my biological mother seemed bored and annoyed with my story at the dinner table that night.

He worked at Sylvania in Waltham, and she worked packing tea bags at the New England tea packing company on Bird St in Dorchester. Where there was no smoke, and therefore no fire.

Childhood impressions like that never leave you. They shape your sense of what holds and what doesn’t.

Young men today didn’t live through those moments, but they have their own—economic freefall, digital distortion, collapsing norms, ideological whiplash. A cultural landscape that redraws itself every time they look away. Their drift is not aimless. It’s adaptive.

The Orthodox Church understands itself as standing in an unbroken line from Jesus and the early apostles—a continuity not declared so much as lived.

During Christianity’s first millennium, as the faith spread across empires and languages, a slow tectonic rift opened between East and West.

By the 11th century, disputes over papal authority and the proper boundaries of ecclesial power hardened into the Great Schism, leaving Eastern Orthodoxy to grow in its own distinct shape across the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Russia.

Containment in an Uncontained Era

In clinical language, what they are seeking is containment.
Not control. Not simple answers. Containment.

The sociological literature calls it “moral thickening,” the way certain institutions provide enough symbolic weight for an identity to form around them (Perry & Whitehead, 2020). A clumsy phrase, perhaps, but good enough.

Orthodoxy, without marketing itself this way, offers that density: rituals that do not bend, liturgy that does not accelerate for convenience, beauty that does not apologize for being serious.

It’s not strictness they are seeking.It’s structure.

In an unbounded era, we’re finding that boundaries feel like oxygen.

Ritual as Nervous System Regulation

From a clinical standpoint, the Orthodox liturgy functions like a somatic container: slow pacing, sensory layering, predictable sequences, symbolic depth. It is the opposite of the algorithmic life of the Feed.

Research explains this plainly. In the Annual Review of Sociology, Chris Smith shows how ritual stabilizes emotional processing, identity formation, and interpersonal coherence—especially in young men (Smith, 2017).

Ritual is not nostalgia. Ritual is regulation.

Young men who are overstimulated into a kind of psychic numbness walk into an Orthodox liturgy and experience downshifted arousal—calm, coherence—without knowing that’s what it is.

Andrew Newberg’s neurotheological work makes this explicit: symbolic repetition, chant, and sacred imagery activate neural networks of coherence and awe that secular environments seldom reach (Newberg, 2018).

They don’t know the research. They just know they can breathe there.

The Unspoken Institutional Memory

A clinically honest piece must acknowledge the ambient context.

Institutions carry public memory, whether or not their current members deserve it.

Young men today inherited a cultural narrative about the Catholic Church—the abuse crisis, the cover-ups—not by choice, but by osmosis.

Even those with no religious upbringing internalized the same background radiation: an institution can wound, and trust can be betrayed at scale.

Young men are not angry about it. Many are not even engaged with it.
But the cultural memory sits there. Some of my close friends remain sitting there, and will not be moved. I’m thinking of you Mike, and Patrick.

Orthodoxy, by contrast, arrives with a smaller footprint. Less centralized. Less visible. Not untouched by human failure, but certainly unburdened by a globally recognized epic of betrayal trauma.

This is not superiority. It’s simply difference of scale.

Clinically, it makes Orthodoxy feel “cleaner,” not because it is, but because it is not carrying the same inherited atmosphere.

Most young men can’t articulate this. They don’t need to. The body registers what the mind does not care to name.

Ritual as Counterweight

At a distance, Orthodoxy looks like tradition. Up close, it feels like more like gravity.

The liturgy is unhurried. The symbols are unapologetic. The theology is uninterested in makeover culture. There is a sense of weight—of something older and steadier than the self—that does not accommodate the consumer’s whims.

And this is exactly the counterweight young men seem to need.

A world that constantly shapes itself around your impulses is not a world that teaches you how to stand.

Orthodoxy doesn’t shape itself around anyone. That is precisely why young men find themselves drawn toward it.

What looks like reverence is, clinically, is more like a form of psychic ballast.

A Culture Without Rites of Passage Leaves Its Youth Drifting

We pretend young men are restless by nature. But the data—and the therapy room—tell a different story. Their restlessness comes from the absence of landmarks. A culture without rites of passage produces men who must build internal structure with no external templates.

Some do. Most don’t.

Orthodoxy gives structure in the old sense:as an anchor, not a cage. There is discipline, but it is not punitive.Order, but not rigidity. Mystery, but not vagueness.

The rituals communicate something that modern life refuses to say:
You are part of a lineage. You are not improvising from scratch.

That message alone—developmentally, emotionally, spiritually—changes everything.

This Is Not About Theology. It’s About Stability.

The phenomenon is not about Orthodoxy having “the right ideas,” or Catholicism losing ground, or young men wanting to cosplay medievalism.

It is about stability in an unstable age.

Ritual creates stability.
Continuity creates stability.
Silence creates stability.
Tradition creates stability.
Structure creates stability.

Any institution that can offer these will draw young men. Orthodoxy happens, at this moment in American life, to be offering them more visibly, more unselfconsciously, and more consistently.

Young men aren’t seeking nostalgia.
They’re seeking weight in a weightless world.

Final Thoughts

If this trend feels surprising, that’s only because America has internalized the trope of deeming young men as disengaged, distracted, or drifting.

But their movement toward Orthodoxy is less about religion and more about recognition: a realization that their nervous systems, their psyches, and their developmental arcs require forms of stability the modern world has forgotten how to provide.

I learned early—walking through the smoke-blackened air of Belvedere Street in 1964, and listening to nuns whisper in the aftermath of a murdered Catholic president,—that institutions imprint the young. They always have. They always will.

Some young men today are trying to choose what imprints them. They want structures that hold, not structures that collapse.
They want a continuity they can feel, not slogans about finding community. They want ritual that carries weight, not performative banter.

Orthodoxy offers it, for some.
Other traditions can offer it too.
For that matter, any institution with morals, memory and institutional courage can.

But for now, this is where some young men are finding the their sacred ground.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Perry, S. L., & Whitehead, A. L. (2020). Religion and the moral thickening of identity: Evidence from emerging adults. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 59(3), 467–485. https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12663

Smith, C. (2017). Ritual, community, and emerging adult identity. Annual Review of Sociology, 43, 1–20. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-soc-060116-053252

Newberg, A. (2018). Neurotheology and the structure of contemplative experience. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 25(7), 146–165. https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs/2018/00000025/f0020007/art00002