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Now that I am a (functional) atheist, my position is that if someone thinks their life will improve by becoming Christian (or anything else), go for it. Why not? But I find the trend of people heading towards traditional Christianity because they feel it will improve their lives and communities interesting, because it is just about the exact opposite of what I was taught. Granted I grew up Protestant and not Catholic, but what I was made to understand was that you should expect Christianity to make your life worse. "You will be hated by all men for my name's sake." Now yes there was talk about finding peace and meaning in Jesus, and of course there was the fellowship of believers, but the expectation was that when it came to friends, money, love, happiness, even sometimes family, Christians will do worse than unbelievers, since the world is a hellbound, fallen place that rewards the wicked. Christianity was one big exercise in delayed gratification. Suffer now, redeem your suffering points in Heaven (or at the Rapture, if you're lucky).
I remember a tweet a few months ago, I can't find it now, but it said something like, "Jesus doesn't offer heroism, adventure, wives, or children in this life; he offers pain, service, trial, and tears." It circulated on RW twitter and occasioned a lot of blowback along the lines of calling OP a leftist, modernist, soy, etc. and "good luck attracting young men to the church with a message like this." It was sort of baffling to me because while I would have understood if it was something like "Jesus would be pro-LGBT" or "Jesus was a socialist," which I would agree are reading into the Bible things that are absolutely not there, the tweet as it stood was simply what I was told Christianity was by my very Christian and very-not liberal relatives. And of course we were taught that our job as Christians was not to make Christianity attractive to anyone, whether it was conservatives looking for patriotism and tradition or liberals looking for inclusion and egalitarianism, but simply to preach the gospel as it was, and if you didn't like it, well too bad.
Pain, service, trial and tears specifically attract young men. Like, not all young men, but a certain category of young men? Very much so.
I'm paraphrasing, but the gist of it was "don't expect worldly glory or success from Christ." Absolutely though there are plenty of people who are attracted to such a calling, including many young men. I think it was specifically some kind of in-house snipe at the whole "be like Achilles, put cities to the sword" side of RW twitter.
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This is very interesting, and I hadn't thought about it before. Yes, there's the persecution and all that, but I think there's some kind of "don't defect" at play here: teaching people to delay gratification until even after their death means that their communities can have very low time preference, and if you have few defectors you can possibly even get better immediate results than if you actively sacrificed the future for today.
I read an article a few months back about the cult popularity of Master and Commander, and how many young men love that movie. Not because they want to be Capt. Aubrey, but because they want to be in his crew and to sacrifice for each other and for a great cause. I'm also reminded of a video by Bishop Barron where he talks about how he thinks the interest in traditional liturgies has been specifically because it's hard: it's the call to sacrifice and spiritual challenge which seems to make people interested. (There's probably a big diversion about Vatican II here too that I'm not qualified to write.)
The people who did the most to attract me to Christianity never proselytized; they quietly lived their lives of faith, and I happened to notice. Whether that's because the Christian life does better in this world because God looks after his own, or because there are good memes baked into the religion, I don't know.
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