Men are looking for religious rituals
How rituals drive growth for modern faith based groups
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Is Christianity back?
Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Russel Brand, and Red Scare podcast host Dasha Nekrasova are praising Christianity.
Meanwhile, one of the leaders of the New Atheists movement, Richard Dawkins, calls himself a "cultural Christian." Another leader, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, now identifies as a Christian convert.
It’s been a minute since Christianity has felt edgy, but here we are.
And it has spurred a lot of intellectual debates about Christianity beliefs in the modern world. Are they regressive? Or serving needs the secular world has overlooked? Are we seeing a mini revival or an anti-woke fad?
I think this debate is boring. We’ve been debating religious morals since the Enlightenment, and know how this plays out. It amounts to people pointing out each others’ hypocrisies. It has pundits-debating-on-cable-TV energy.
More interesting to me are what is driving the popularity of new faith based groups. If we look at the fastest growing faith-based groups across America and the world, they aren’t doing new things on the belief front. What they tend to focus on are rituals. They all have daily or weekly routines that meet people’s needs and create personal zeal.
This newsletter is about the role of rituals in modern faith based groups and their impact on men. More and more, I think we’re going to see groups leverage ritual for cultural power.
Back the hell up what’s going on?
Despite me feeling meh about the majority of his book, Jamie Wheal’s Recapture the Rapture summarizes 3 key elements of religion in a useful way:
Morals: Guidelines or rules for how to live
Scripture: The stories that provide context for followers
Rituals: Activities to connect people to each other, the divine, and to ourselves.
Since the Enlightenment, we’ve endlessly debated the Morals bit, and sometimes the Scripture.
In the early 2000s, the New Atheists turned this debate into a whole ethos. Religion was morally wrong, they claimed. We need different rules.
But those new rules never really came. The closest we got was a list of how to avoid getting canceled. The list felt more like HR rules than moral guideposts.
What if this debate on morals is no longer moving us forward? What if, and hear me out, the morals and scripture bits were never the most impactful parts of religion?
What if, for the vast majority of history, the most impactful part was the rituals: the meals, the fasts, the songs and prayers, the greetings and goodbyes, the small group meetings, the ceremonies marking births and weddings and funerals.
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What’s actually working
Despite the growth of secularism today, three faith based groups come to mind that are wildly popular: F3 Nation, Falun Gong, and Pentecostalism. I think they show what works in 2024.
F3 Nation is a free workout group for men. F3 stands for Fitness, Fellowship, and Faith. Men get together once a week, often at 5:30 in the morning, and do a 45 minute workout together. This is followed by a short prayer.
And that’s it.
It started in 2011 and now has ~90,000 members. F3 Nation addresses what it calls the "sad clown syndrome" of middle aged men. This refers to men who are trying to be a good guy to family and friends, but inside they know they're out of shape, have few close friends, and have lost their purpose. If you’re interested in reading more about it, you can read my interview with its outgoing CEO John Lambert here.
Falun Gong is a controversial religious movement that started in China in 1992. It has an estimated 10 million members today. It’s anti-Communist, anti-feminist, and its founder has claimed aliens are responsible for various scientific inventions. I ignored it as a crazy cult, but then I read Peter Hessler’s book Country Driving where he details rural life in China in the 90s. He notes that in the small village he was staying in, middle aged folks were getting into Falun Gong because it provided group qigong exercises for free.
Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religious group in the world. It’s adding 13 million new members a year and has ~600 million adherents today. It is a branch of evangelical Christianity, is perhaps best known to outsiders for folks speaking in tongues during services, and has large footholds in the US, Brazil, China, and Nigeria.
While Pentecostal services and rituals differ between communities, they emphasize health and wealth (much like male focused podcasts do today) with a socially conservative lens: no drinking, no gambling, no womanizing. In many communities where Pentecostalism is growing such as Guatemala, Brazil, and South Africa, it’s the only source of addiction treatment. Church members often meet in smaller cell groups of 6 - 12 members during the week to discuss personal issues and needs.
So what?
All three of these groups enroll new members through rituals and services that are immediately useful: workouts, qigong, and small group accountability support. These rituals eventually lead to personal transformation. I think for all the high and mighty debate around religious belief, there’s no secular answer to the needs these groups fill.
I find that men especially crave ritual. The amount of podcasts I’ve consumed in the pursuit of more productive morning routines, gym routines, and mental health schemes is…a lot. All of these are in the spirit of personal transformation, and yet they don’t quite deliver it.
Secular wellness culture tops out at self-acceptance. This is better than hating one’s self, but it doesn’t provide the kind of zeal many of us look for in life. Meanwhile physical health culture tops out at looking good naked. This can also be life changing! But many are looking for more holistic transformations.
Sooner or later, the intellectuals will catch on. The focus on “who is right?” will shift to “who is useful?” And the debate about which morals to adopt will shift to which rituals to adopt. I look forward to that shift.
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Loved this post, but one quick mention for F3: as a dedicated member, I can tell you most of our colleagues will beat down (work out) three or more times per week. This has a snowball effect for overall fitness as you know. In the Houston area where I live, there are places to work out every day of the week. In fact, there is a disproportionate percentage of us that use this as a jumping off point for other activities such as rucks, marathons, triathlons, you name it. Thanks again for the post!
My working theory is these symptoms are all part of a meta meaning crisis in the West.
I think all 3 of religious tenets (moral, scripture and ritual) have a role to play in addressing it but I’m personally finding ritual the most useful (perhaps a metric of growing importance as you end with).
I do appreciate your reminder that traditional monotheistic religion has to compete in a modern marketplace of alternatives including spiritual (Buddhism, yoga, meditation), secular (nature worship, secular wellness) and techno optimist (quantified self and machine worship one might call it, both very popular in the Bay Area) variants.