Tradical Radicalism: Conservatism is Countercultural and ‘Cool’

American  Thinker 

The 60s free-love revolution proclaimed love and peace as primary values, and especially embraced freedom from social and economic constraints.  Epitomized by Timothy Leary’s call to “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” the movement’s essence was countercultural. Six decades later, the pendulum is swinging back.

In the 1960s, protests erupted against The Beatles over their hair being just two inches below the collar.  Teens got thrown out of the house for slightly long hair.  Five years on, young men’s hair was draped over their shoulders, and rock music had become rebellious, not just against the Vietnam War but against “signs, signs, everywhere are signs”; later, songs like “Lola” by the Kinks and Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” popularized transsexuality.  It was “cool” to rebel against social, economic, and political norms.

By the 1980s, men with long hair were normalized, so tattoos and ear piercings took the rebellious front.  The goal of the young was to “be different,” “find oneself,” but most of all, to shock the “establishment” and strive for nonconformity.

That impulse overshot its bounds in the 21st century. Gauged ears through which one could loop a garden hose became the rage, as did face tattoos — for maximum shock, a skull or New Age symbol was preferred, and there’s nothing like a giant spider or a scary bat tattooed up the neck to rattle the bank tellers or fast-food servers.  The piercings now include eyebrows, lips, tongues, and nether regions. And let’s not forget the nose ring — better yet, a nose tusk, or a length of bone, Fred Flintstone style.

But now the spider tattoos and nose rings greet us in bank tellers, store cashiers, and grocery store clerks.  Add to that blue, purple, or rainbow hair, Mohawks, and willy-nilly genders, and it is becoming hard to shock anyone anymore.

Unless one becomes a clean-bodied, morally upright, non-cursing Christian.  When the culture of propriety, politeness, and decency has been subsumed by a culture of debauchery, violence, and rudeness, the only way to be nonconformist is to become radically proper.

This extends beyond physical appearances.  Young people are rejecting alcohol, and many are embracing celibacy or monogamy. Having promiscuous sex and praising bisexuality or polyamory as “prideworthy” pursuits no longer gets attention, and is simply not satisfying.  (Neither are STDs). Gaining overnight popularity for “coming out” as another gender is also passé: polls show the percentage of young people “identifying” as trans has dropped precipitously (though no one told Tim Waltz and the virtue-signaling Left).

Being conservatively cool, it turns out, is also easier and cheaper.  Tattoos are ridiculously expensive for a generation striving to buy a house.  They don’t age well, require touch-ups, and hurt like hell.  Cigarette smoking is down, though prices are up. Vaping is unhealthy and costly, and the young are waking up to that scam, too.  Piercings are unpleasant, especially when they get infected.  Paying money to attract attention masochistically is just less cool today — who really wants a vaginoplasty if it doesn’t get any dates for the prom?

In this counter-counter-culturalism, perhaps nothing is more nonconformist in rebellion against erstwhile nonconformity than becoming an orthodox Christian.  Wanna really shock your peers and blue-haired former-hippie parents?  Go to church on your knees every Sunday, pray from the Missal in the early morning, and refuse to date anyone not worthy of lifetime matrimonial bliss.  Wear rosary beads or a crucifix, or perhaps a prominent medallion featuring the Virgin Mary.  That may get you sneered at or spit at — the ultimate affirmation that you are pushing against the cultural tides.

Within Catholicism, a theological battle that has been simmering for decades is breaking out in force between those who seek to “liberalize” the Holy Church and those who seek to embrace and preserve orthodoxy, particularly via the traditional Latin Mass.  The reverence, history, and respectfulness of Latin Mass services (in which men usually wear suits and women wear veils) is attracting large numbers of young men and women.

Often called “trads,” these young people want high-protein meat diets of spirituality, not the watered-down rainbow sermons of liberal churches that have rewritten scripture to appease the social justice alphabet-soup-identities crowd.  Young trads don’t want what C.S. Lewis labeled “scotch-and-water” Christianity and A.W. Tozer dubbed “marshmallow” Christianity — they want it unadulterated by modern permissive “free-love” ideologies.

To be trad is to be rad, not just against the Vatican and its recent succession of liberal, globalist, social-justice popes, but against the broader societal schlock that tells young people they should eschew hard work and embrace the party life, sexual deviance, and a lifetime glued to a screen leering at pornography.

Attending a Catholic English mass, the usual crowd is elderly, if not octogenarian, and there are few, if any, babies.  Traditional Latin masses now swarm with young families, wailing babies, and mothers sneaking out to breastfeed or change a diaper.  I call them “tradicals” because embracing traditionalism is a far more radical action than dropping LSD and skipping the barber for a few months.  It requires commitment and discipline, not laziness and barbarianism.  One gains recognition by merit, not hair color or sexual “preference.”

Greek and Catholic orthodoxy is thriving while liberal churches splinter into a rainbow of sin-affirming denominations that do not appeal to mentally well young people.  Evangelical protestant churches are similarly resurging.  The martyrdom of young hero Charlie Kirk has contributed to this trend, but it preceded his murder.

As more and more young people demonstrate that monogamy, commitment, sobriety, and self-discipline are virtues worth embracing, this counter-woke cultural shift may blossom into a proper Great Awakening.  

Let us pray….