As prominent clerics try to make Catholicism palatable to modernity, members of a small but important scene are turning to the ancient faith in defiance of liberal pieties. The scene is often associated with “Dimes Square,” a downtown Manhattan neighborhood popular with a pandemic-weary Generation Z — or Zoomer — crowd, but it has spread across a network of podcasts and fledgling publications. His sensitivity is more transgressive than progressive. Many of its residents claim to be apolitical. Others have strong opinions, whether sincere or as fashion statements. Reactionary motifs are chic: Trump hats and “tradwife” dresses, monarchist and anti-feminist sentiments. Perhaps the ultimate expression of this contrarian aesthetic is the embrace of Catholicism.
Urban trends can shape a culture, as millennial Brooklyn did in its heyday. The Dimes Square scene is small, but the ascent highlights a culture-wide shift. Progressive morality, formulated in response to the remnants of American Christian culture, was once a vanguard. By 2020, the year of lockdowns and Black Lives Matter protests, progressivism had become hegemonic in the social spaces occupied by young urban intellectuals. Traditional morality took on a transgressive glamour. The disaffection with the progressive moral majority — combined with Catholicism’s historic ability to accommodate cultural subversion — has led to an in-your-face style of traditionalism. This isn’t your grandmother’s church — and whether the new believers are performing a theatrical act or not, they have a chance to revive the church for young, educated Americans.
Honor Levy, the new Bennington writer who co-hosts the trendy ‘Wet Brain’ podcast, recently converted to Catholicism and lets you know when she has unconfessed mortal sins on her conscience. The podcast’s beat is pop culture, literature, politics, and religion — including practical tips for warding off demons. Dasha Nekrasova, a Catholic revert and actress with a recurring role on HBO’s “Succession,” is a co-host of the scene’s most popular podcast, “Red Scare.” On an episode during this year’s Lent, Ms. Nekrasova focused on esoteric Catholic topics such as sedevacantism, the ultra-traditionalist idea that the popes have been illegitimate since the Second Vatican Council.
The confluence of New York’s young right-wing intellectuals and thinkers like Ms. Nekrasova, who was once better known for her irreverent socialist critiques, might indicate that the rising interest in Catholicism in certain social circles is just another way to be ironic. or to hunt. a trend. Nekrasova calls herself “Catholic, like Andy Warhol.” In a scene indebted to Warhol, the self-proclaimed “deeply superficial” pop artist, is Catholicism just another provocation?
Faith may be part of a pose for these trendsetting Catholics – a “LARP” in internet slang. But as Ms. Levy explained in a recent episode of “Wet Brain,” “You just do the rituals, and then it gets real, even if you don’t. [initially] believe in it.” She added, “That’s what religion is.” Ms. Levy’s co-host, casting director Walter Pearce, agreed: “There’s no problem in the world that three Hail Marys can’t solve. “
Routinization directs the believer to prayer, warding off temptation, and directing thoughts to heaven. The idea that it is quite a religious act to observe the forms of faith, even if there is no perfect faith, most likely comes naturally to a generation raised on social media, where achievement is a constant fact of life. It also reflects the Catholic response to anti-ritual polemics dating back to the Reformation.
This isn’t the first social scene where Catholicism has been dismissed as insincere. The decadent movement of the late 1800s, led in England by figures such as Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, pursued avant-garde aesthetics and detective experience, including drug use and sexual experimentation. Converts to Catholicism became common among the decadents and were stigmatized by the Anglo-Protestant world as just another pose or experiment – or perversion.
The decadents knew that Catholicism goes well with transgression. The Metropolitan Museum of Art knows it too: in 2018 it held an exhibition titled “Heavenly Bodies,” a show that juxtaposed liturgical iconography with high fashion and BDSM paraphernalia. Catholicism embraces the give and take between sin and repentance and formalizes it in the sacrament of confession. In addition, Catholicism is sometimes seen as a threat to the civil order. As early as the 18th century, there was a link between Catholicism and homosexuality in British popular imagination, as the traditions of monasticism and priestly celibacy diverged from the civic precepts of masculinity and marriage. Protestant England also viewed submission to foreign religious authority as politically regressive. Catholicism was not only contrary to gender norms, but also to the progress of civilization. During the mid-Victorian era, the noun “pervert”—one who has turned away from the right course—denoted a convert to Catholicism. Our current meaning of the word dates back to the decadent era, when reactions to Wilde and his entourage emphasized the apparent sexual implications of religious deviance.
Today, Catholicism once again stands in the way of political progress and sex and gender norms. It violates a liberal-progressive dispensation that many young Americans find both evil and banal. By despising traditional gender roles and defining human flourishing in meritocratic terms, progressive moralism argues against the acquisition of basic goods by young people: marriage and procreation. Ms Levy has commented that she was raised to ‘get a job’. But her deeper desire was to start a family, a desire that runs counter to the requirements of meritocracy.
While progressive moralism harshly judges any failure in the pursuit of professional class or HR compliance, it neutrally or hygienically rates many of the acts that Catholicism considers to be among the deadly sins—such as missing Mass, divorcing one’s spouse, or requesting a divorce. abortion. This is his banality. Anna Khachiyan, Ms. Nekrasova’s non-Catholic co-host of “Red Scare,” has defended the traditional religion on the grounds that “it is supposed to introduce restrictions into people’s lives.” Ms. Nekrasova put it more simply: “No hell, no dignity.” My own embrace of Catholic moral teaching came about in college, seeing how it had shaped the imagination of a great apostate, James Joyce. By comparison, my liberal moral education offered nothing to deter or inspire.
Anika Jade Levy (unrelated to Honor) is a New York co-editor of the literary magazine Forever. She recently told Flaunt magazine that she was “essentially raised by Satanists” and began praying the rosary on an iPhone app as a form of youthful rebellion. She made it clear to me that she was joking about her parents and that her introduction to Catholic art during a trip to Italy was “moving and aesthetically shaping.” The rise of Catholicism reveals “a cultural hunger for everything the opposite of what we’ve just had,” she told me. But she views the preference for rigor as “mostly aesthetic” and warns, “I don’t think anyone in the city is in a state of grace.”
For substantive or stylistic reasons, it is possible to prefer a system in which our moral obligations are not exhausted by avoiding wrong thoughts about race and patriarchy. The scenesters of downtown Manhattan may find it less gloomy to shame each other for fornication than they do for wearing privileges. And, as writer Nick Burns told me in an email, rosary beads are even “underclass paraphernalia,” a way of dispelling accusations of privilege from the scene’s “fellow citizens.” The corruption of religious imagery and belief can be nothing more than a controlled use of class signifiers for the sake of political or aesthetic statements.
For those scenesters who have converted and attend the sacraments, we must hesitate to dismiss their practice as inauthentic. Avant-garde cohorts can enrich Catholicism’s cultural heritage and broaden its political imagination, as the Decadents did. The church has long embraced theatricality and welcomes converts for motives other than pure religious zeal — for example, those who want to share the faith of a future husband. “Authentic” internal conversion is not a Catholic requirement, but a Protestant one.
What Catholicism requires is adhering to disciplines and dogmas – a test of sincerity that applies to Dimes Square and beyond. In early July, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a rosary procession in NoLIta from Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral to the Planned Parenthood neighborhood (named after Margaret Sanger until 2020) drew large crowds of vociferous counter-protesters. It was a reminder, an easy walk from Dimes Square, that in every generation the church is contrary to culture. Real world events will confront young Catholics in the city with the full implications of Catholic doctrine, making it difficult to see the rosary as a fashion statement. Over time, these developments will sort the converts of the LARPers.