In the coming decades we are going to see a boom in religious orders. It will part of a greater trend towards religion and spirituality, one that will also include lots of new age and occult practices as well, and unfortunately some cults that follow their trajectories to the usual nasty endings.
But we are used to this last type of spiritual "awakening." The Sixties and Seventies were all about this type of personal and society transformation. The most uncool thing back then was Christianity, and the most uncool of uncool things was traditional Christianity.
Guess what is going to be at the forefront this time?
The trends will be Christianity over other religions. It will be towards Catholic over Protestant, and towards traditional expressions of Catholicism over the Novus Ordo, that is, the Catholicism since the reforms of the 1960s. This is the loose, friendly, semiformal, bright-color-banner guitar-sing-along Christianity which is embraced by older Catholics as a relief from the oppressive Catholicism of their childhoods, but which is increasingly rejected by the young, who have craving the refuge of stability amidst the broken-glass world into which they have been thrust.
This is all despite the fact that there is a massive brewing civil war within the Catholic Church right now, largely between traditionalists and modernists, once that will have an enormous showdown this fall in Brazil, where some are anticipating that the Church will endorse reforms that may liberalize it beyond even the magnitude of Vatican II.
In that case, it is almost certain that the Catholic Church would split in two, since the modernists are likely to advance changes that the traditionalist simply cannot abide. The traditionalists saw what happened after Vactican II, and there is absolutely no spirit of compromise in the name "accommodating the trends of society and the world and entering the modern era."
Ironically this is all playing out in the Catholic Church just at the hour when, after almost exactly 500 years), Protestantism is collapsing from dying membership in Europe and the Americas, having gone all-in into wokeness, with even many Evangelical churches embracing progressivism*.
In the end it will be moot to argue which side of the Catholic schism should win, because that will be decided entirely by the feet of youth when they walk into one of the traditional or modern progressive churches.
The growth in Catholic (and to a lesser extend Orthodox) religious orders will occur in both sexes. Some women will seek convents either to purify and heal after a life of brokenness and being passed around by bad boys (all while being told that to do so is to be "empowered," the cruelest concept that has been proffered to young women in recent decades). Others, more perhaps, will opt to young convents in their youth, having seen the buzz-saw that awaits them being thrust into the world in order to serve out the agenda of other people for their lives.
Meanwhile many men will seek out lives as brothers in a community making wine or growing crops. So many young men are simply giving up on ever having a long-term girlfriend, let alone a wife and family. They have been stunted with little or no avenue of advancement in the masculine (all of which has now been placed on the shoulders of little girls).
* Among the forms of Protestantism that will thrive in the new era is the Amish community. I predict that soon they will have to address in a broad way the fact that many non-Amish will be seeking to marry into the community.
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