We are witnessing a boom of young people manifesting themselves in Catholic concentrations promoted by movements like Hakuna, Effetá, or Alpha Youngsters, which manage to unite young people around the Christian faith. Talking about the God of Jesus is a trend that is visualized in films like Los domingos or singers like Rosalía dressed as a nun, who visualize this trend. During the presentation of Rosalía’s latest album, for example, several artists debated about the influence of spirituality and Christian values in pop culture. Would you say that religion is a fashion? To the extent that young people are publicly manifesting their faith on their social networks or through meetings and concerts, yes.
To which influencers and social networks, both Catholic and Protestant, are joining, growing in followers.
This reality is confirmed by data. Media outlets such as *El País* point out that the percentage of young people between 18 and 24 who identify as Catholic rose from 33.9% in 2021 to 38.5% in 2025. The 25 to 34 age group experiences a similar growth, reaching 37.9% in 2025, which slows down the trend observed so far. Young people show less reluctance to declare themselves believers. The basis seems to be supported by a reaction to the crisis of values and of our liquid society: superficial and materialist. Nevertheless, I am concerned about the fundamentalist religious wave that flows in the same channel.
This spiritual reaction to the Gospel against social existential banality should not be based on fundamentalist stances for being anti-evangelical, precisely.
To understand each other, “fundamentalist” is to place emphasis on the institutional model of the Church, so that the Kingdom of God is identified with the ecclesial institution, rather than with the attitude that marks the Message of the Gospel; it is the preference for maintaining a clericalist model of Church in which the institution is more important than the Message (power, vainglory, religious securities…). It is maintaining sectarian attitudes of resistance to dialogue and collaboration with the different, immigrants, and other groups. It is not believing in synodality in favor of one’s own position where doctrine is more important than humble, supportive, and loving experience.
All these points carry the danger of a correct (orthodox) belief, whose defensive and self-referential attitude distorts the orthopraxis that Jesus invites us to every day. In the words of the Jesuit Víctor Codina, Jesus was not a fundamentalist, an integrationist, or a fascist. His kingdom remains love, the place of the marginalized for being so. That is why he was rejected by religious power. The truth is that Catholic fundamentalism grows as a reaction to Modernity, secularization, and the loss of cultural references, but it does so by offering absolute certainties, especially among young people (Generation Z) who are looking for meaning in life.
The problem is that the spiritual revival is drifting towards political and religious projects that link faith with an apocalyptic vision of reality, alien to the hope of the Gospel.
These movements gather many young people around this model of Catholicism detached from the Vatican Council II, from Francis and from Leo XIV, with the objective of regaining the power of the Church in social life -clericalism-, rather than focusing on the attitude of that “look how they love one another” that Tertullian said, who thanks to the example became a Christian. Example draws.
That connection between the Catholic and conservative or far-right formations, such as El Yunque and Vox, in my opinion nothing Christian, is accompanied by supports and calls from some bishops to vote in recent electoral appointments. We’ve already had enough with the Franco regime’s dictatorial regime centered on the National Movement and the Catholic Church, legitimizing Francoism from the first moment. The institution served to climb to the top of the social ladder it had lost after its rejection of modernity. Since then, most of the Church institution has remained on the side of conservatism, seeing openness as a problem, as if social power were the solution.
Negationist and supremacist discourses of the far-right around the world claim to hold a Catholic religious position, but reject the denunciation of structural injustice on which the current world is based. More than a proselytizing of young people in this direction, what is urgent is to regain the testimonial dimension, living the Good News that another part of the believing youth, although minority, is betting on from the Christian faith to defend the weakest, the disposable, even at the cost of provoking rejection even within the Church. Blessed young people.
Gabriel Mª Otalora
English version translated with AI