For several years now, people orbiting around The Symbolic World have observed a return to religion and tradition. In intellectual circles as well as in culture at large, we’ve seen atheistic materialism run its course. Unable to make sense of recent advances in cognitive science and biology, and also unable to provide meaning to modern people, materialists are forced to reconsider ancient ways of framing the world, such as traditional religion.

Until recently, it was hard to be sure that we were observing a real pattern, or if we were the victims of an online echo chamber. However, the data is now in, and the pattern is indeed real.¹ Younger people especially are going back to church more and more. This rise seems to have started in the wake of the Covid pandemic, which left a lot of younger people disappointed by what secular, materialistic culture can offer, and the trend seems to be only accelerating.

Now, what I want to do in this article is twofold. First I want to use the Flood narrative in Genesis to frame the current situation. Not only is religion making a comeback in culture, I want to point out that like in Noah’s story, atheistic genes are currently getting washed out of the gene pool, as the religious reproduce exponentially faster.

However, as a second point, I want to highlight a related and concerning trend, namely that of younger people being more inclined to authoritarianism.² Commentators often explain the phenomenon at the cultural layer, explaining that younger people want some order in the chaotic world left by their parents and grandparents, but this trend is also to be expected in genetic terms, since authoritarian inclinations currently correlate even more highly to high birth rates than religiousness.³ Therefore, like the descendants of Noah, what the faithful will have to deal with as liberalism fades is a Babel-like tyranny.

The Antediluvian Fall: Enoch’s Warning

“And it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied that in those days were born unto them beautiful and comely daughters. And the angels, the children of the heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another: ‘Come, let us choose us wives from among the children of men and beget us children.’” (1 Enoch 3:1–2)

“And Azazel taught men to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates, and made known to them the metals of the earth and the art of working them, and bracelets, and ornaments, and the use of antimony, and the beautifying of the eyelids, and all kinds of costly stones, and all colouring tinctures.” (1 Enoch 3:11)

The Book of Enoch, ascribed to Noah’s great-grandfather, reveals why God sent the flood. The Watchers, angels meant to guard humanity, rebelled in two intermeshed ways. On the one hand, by lusting after human women, they produced the Nephilim: giants who fed on mankind and filled the earth with chaos (1 Enoch 7:3–5). On the other hand, their leader, Azazel, taught humanity to forge weapons, craft ornaments, and wield sorcery, technologies that fueled war, vanity, and rebellion against divine order.

Hence, the Watchers’ sin was not just sexual but technological. Their forbidden arts — cosmetics, swords, sorcery — lead humanity away from fruitful relationships. Today, we face a similar seduction. We have much more effective weapons, but more importantly for this article, our sexuality is misled by contraception, pornography, hookup apps, and IVF. These are Azazel’s tinctures reborn.

Think therefore of the Watchers as all the human and technological patterns that are involved in pornography, contraception, IVF, and the like. This might seem odd for readers not already familiar with this blog, but in general we know patterns by their activities. For instance, it’s impossible to know a person’s mind (an invisible pattern) directly. To know the patterns that live in someone’s mind, one has to see physically how the person reacts to X or Y, how their face moves, what their story is, etc.

Or, to give a higher-level example, it’s impossible to know the United States directly. One can’t simply point to a piece of land and say, “that’s the United States of America,” because the land could change. In fact, at the physical levels of atoms and molecules, there’s constant change in that land. One can’t simply point to the people either, nor to the Constitution. The US is a higher-level pattern that moves through all of those things, and many more. No individual fully represents the US, nor can anyone simply stop the US. It’s a higher-level pattern that needs humans and physical infrastructure to incarnate, but that isn’t fully reducible to those humans or infrastructure. The US is a kind of angel that ancients called a principality.

Similarly for the patterns behind pornography, contraception, IVF, and the like. Those are patterns that no individual represents, nor that any individual can simply stop. They are memes that run through culture, eating men and women. They are higher-level entities; in that case, demons.

Indeed, enabled by technologies like pornography and contraception, the sexual revolution promised freedom through sexual autonomy, untethered from marriage or procreation. In doing so, it created weird hybrids — giants — that are part technology and part human.

Note for the skeptical reader: if we wanted to convey our current predicament to a civilization in 3000 years from now, I struggle to think of a better way we could put it.

For instance, the Watchers of the sexual revolution turned normal women into pornstars that embody the succubus, a kind of fallen angel that steals men’s seed. No woman, not even a prostitute, can steal the seed of hundreds, or thousands of men at the same time. But with the internet, some succubi-women do.

These succubi-women took men who used to be ready to marry and found families in their 20s, and turned them into basement dwellers who feed on pornography and video games, lacking the drive to attract real women. And even if some do manage to claw their way out of their proverbial basement and attract real women, contraception-fuelled hookup culture often delays marriage and child-bearing until too late. Large are the numbers of couples who must involve technology like IVF into their most intimate connection, and even then birthrates are plummeting.

Much more could be said, and Louise Perry and Mary Harrington have put it far better than I could.⁴ Both grew up in the sexual revolution of classical feminism, later to realize its grave errors and become reactionary feminists. They argue very persuasively that women have become commodified by the revolution. Contraception turned them into technological objects of pleasure for irresponsible men, and left them far fewer men worth marrying. And at the same time, it’s turning an alarming number of poor women into surrogates for rich women who have either been turned infertile by contraception, or who simply decided to opt out of child-bearing.

Simply put: women are being preyed on by technologically-enabled patterns we can’t seem to stop.

Turning Technology into an Ark

While I’ve spoken negatively of technology so far in this article, technology isn’t all bad. Noah himself uses technology to build the ark.

It’s pretty simple, really: Is technology used to follow God, or to rebel against him? Is it used as a tool to do the good, or is it blinding us to what is good? Details will vary, but it’s still the same basic questions, to be discerned in prayer. Of course, people who don’t pray will use technology in a haphazard way, often for ill. But I know quite a bit of people who use technology well. Most of those people pray for at least an hour a day though; probably 2–3 is typical.

If you don’t take a lot of time in your normal life to practice remembering God in prayer, of course you won’t be able to remember him when you need to make technological decisions. It’s like attempting to run a marathon without proper training. Most people simply are not in good enough spiritual and moral shape to notice the evils they fall into due to technology.

For instance, because of our new technical knowledge of the female hormonal cycle, we can create highly effective contraceptives, which has led a lot of people to redefine the purposes of sexuality, often unconsciously, with the negative consequences explained above. At the same time as this happened though, a number of Catholic thinkers, clerical and lay, studied the issue from a spiritually informed standpoint and discerned a good way to use the same technical knowledge: detecting periods of fertility and infertility with newfound accuracy, both to favor conception, or abstain when gravely needed.⁵

As I said, technical knowledge isn’t to be avoided in itself, we must simply discern what can be used for good, and what would just trap us into sin. In fact, with the coming Flood, complete luddism simply won’t work. Like Noah, we will have to make use of the technology of our age to protect ourselves against the consequences of our age. Like Adam and Eve did before us, we will need garments of death to protect ourselves against death.

To give a recent example, Christian social media content creators have been doing exactly this, with great impact. Anecdotally, I’ve been hearing countless stories of conversions from young people that follow this exact pattern: A Gen Z or millennial sees the bankruptcy of their culture. They look for alternatives, eventually stumbling onto Christian content creators, who are often very articulate and impressive. After roughly one year of such online catechesis, they are finally ready to step foot into an actual church. At this stage, the experience is often disappointing, because many churches have been shrinking due to real pastoral problems, such as poor liturgical or catechetical standards. However, after all the impressive online content previously consumed, the Gen Z or millennial is ready to continue on their journey and do their part in reviving their local church. As more and more join, this is easier and easier, compounding successfully.

Now, my goal here isn’t to explain how to use technology exactly to grow churches — as I said, I think it’s a case by case thing to discern through frequent prayer — but just to give a recent example for skeptical readers. Like Noah, we really can use technology positively, in a successful collaboration with God to renew the world.

Parasites, Sterility, and Collapse

“Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked faithfully with God.” (Genesis 6:9)

“Go into the ark, you and your whole family, because I have found you righteous in this generation. [...] Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature I have made.” (Genesis 7:1–4)

Thankfully, evil has no being of its own, being merely a parasite on the good; a privatio boni. Think therefore of the demons of the sexual revolution as parasitic on normal human sexuality, between married men and women open to life.

And parasites cannot bear fruit and survive on their own. Eventually, they dwindle out and die.

Noah’s ark was a divine commission, a cradle for creation’s renewal while such evil dwindles out. Modern science unveils a parallel: belief is partly genetic. Twin studies show that genes explain around 40% of the variance in religious and political beliefs.⁶

I’ll spare you the math, but if you know whether a twin prays and goes to church for instance, you have significantly better odds of guessing whether their identical twin does, compared to a non-identical twin. In both cases, there is a correlation between the twins, but it’s stronger in identical twins that share 100% the same genes, compared with non-identical twins that share only 50% of their genes. If you run the numbers, you can calculate how much of the variance is accounted for by genes — or, to put it in layman’s terms, you can calculate the extent to which political and religious beliefs are genetic. So far in the literature, that number comes out at around 40%, which is quite significant.

The upshot is that conservative religious parents pass on to their children not only cultural practices that favor faith, tradition, and community, but even genes that do the same. With each generation, high-fertility religious communities amplify these traits, while the sexual revolution’s low birth rates erase its ideological heirs.

Strikingly, secular nations like South Korea (0.7 fertility rate) and Japan (1.2) languish far below the replacement rate of 2.1, and the entire West is heading in the same direction as it secularizes.⁷ Italy, Spain, Greece, and Canada have already fallen to levels similar to Japan, for instance. In the US specifically, weekly church attendees have been holding a fairly steady birth rate just around replacement, whereas less than weekly attendees have fallen below, and those who don't attend at all are already at 1.3.⁸ The difference becomes even more salient if you consider hyper-traditional religious groups such as Hasidic Jews (6–7 children per family) or Amish Christians (6–8).⁹ As Louise Perry put it well on Chris Williamson’s podcast, progressivism is self-limiting; it gets selected out of the gene pool.¹⁰ The legacy of the sexual revolution thus dissolves like the antediluvian world.

Symbolically, this is the Flood playing out. By prioritizing pleasure over purpose, the revolution defies God’s command to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28). Its technologies — pills, apps, surgeries — mirror Azazel’s corrupting arts, commodifying intimacy and severing sex from life. Enoch’s warning is clear: when humanity loses the plot, it is washed away.

Bear in mind that the math is exponential. A religious couple with six children, each inheriting a predisposition for faith, could yield 36 grandchildren and over 200 great-grandchildren in a century. A secular couple with one child might produce two or three descendants in the same timeframe. Pronatalists Malcolm and Simone Collins call this a “great replacement” of ideologies, where traditionalists outbreed progressives, reshaping society.¹¹

To complete the Flood analogy, let me point out, as others have before me,¹² that the demographic collapse currently underway will likely lead to a worldwide socioeconomic collapse due to the several ways in which industrialized nations rely on exponential growth. The pension systems, public infrastructure funding, public and private investments, etc., all depend on exponential population growth, which is declining too sharply to be offset by religious believers.

Further, as the socioeconomic systems of countries start to fail due to demographic collapse, this makes their citizens pessimistic and less likely to have many children, and it also accelerates the emigration to other countries of younger people capable of leaving. The demographic spiral downwards thus accelerates until those countries collapse and something new can emerge.

This collapse has arguably already started to happen in several countries such as China, Japan, South Korea, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Canada, which are unlikely to get back on their feet in their current form given the demographic death spiral they’ve fallen into. The image of a Biblical Flood is therefore very apt to the situation our civilization is currently facing. Yet, like Noah’s ark, the faithful stand as vessels of life, their families defying the flood of sterility, ready to seed the next world.

Living in Babel

That being said, Noah didn’t only have faithful descendants; some of them built Babel. Thus, even more predictive of high birth rates than religiosity are “(1) a hatred of outgroups (xenophobia) and (2) a tendency to favor extremely hierarchical, traditional, power structures (authoritarianism).”¹³ This means that as progressive liberalism fades due to its abysmal reproduction rate, what will be left on the other side of the Flood aren’t just the faithful, but even more so the xenophobic and authoritarian. In other words, all three groups are in Noah’s ark right now: the faithful, the xenophobic, and the authoritarian.

Let that be a warning: religiousness doesn’t always come from pure motives, and if we jump aboard the Ark that is the Church due to authoritarian or xenophobic leanings, it will be revealed — perhaps in our children.

“Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” (Genesis 11:4) (authoritarianism)

“And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.” (Genesis 11:6–7) (xenophobia)

The flood was the natural consequence of the Watchers’ and humans’ sins. God didn’t have to enter miraculously into 21st century history to make unbelievers sterile or to wipe out their socioeconomic systems with a flood. The consequence of their own sins is that unbelievers get wiped out within a few generations. And also naturally, the only ones left to restart the world are those who resisted the Watchers by staying firm to their life-giving tradition, whether for good reasons (genuine faith) or bad ones (authoritarian attachment or hatred of alternatives).

Similarly, when the Flood will end and authoritarians will try to build a Babel-like perfect and all-encompassing system in rebellion against God, they will set up a structure that will naturally fall into fragmentation. If you try to reach too high, you inevitably fall. If an authoritarian doesn’t bow to a higher principle, why would their subjects not also decide to become their own highest principle? No matter what the authoritarian attempts, if they rebel against something that is higher, eventually they will also be brought down by people who rebel against what is higher. The result will be fragmentation, groups that cannot understand each other, and that therefore fight.

As written earlier, it’s striking that xenophobia is currently a better predictor of fertility than religiousness, together with authoritarian leanings.¹⁴ It’s therefore not surprising that we see statistics currently showing a return to religion and authoritarianism in Gen Z and millennials, and while I’m not currently aware of recent data on xenophobia in those generations, I wouldn’t be surprised if the trend was starting to pick up. Or... maybe it will have to wait until Babel collapses.

Audio version

1.  See Barna Group, “New Barna Data: Young Adults Lead a Resurgence in Church Attendance,” Barna, September 2, 2025; and Hazel Southam, “The Quiet Revival: Gen Z leads rise in church attendance,” Bible Society UK, April 7, 2025.

2.  James Bickerton, “Gen Z is Embracing Dictatorships,” Newsweek, April 5, 2024.

3.  Malcolm and Simone Collins, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion (Omniscion Press, 2023), p. 380.

4.  Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution (Polity, 2022) and Mary Harrington, Feminism Against Progress (Regnery Publishing, 2023).

5.  See Jean-Philippe Marceau, “The Symbolism of Contraception and Natural Family Planning,” The Symbolic World, August 28, 2021.

6.  See Maggie Mckee, “Genes contribute to religious inclination,” NewScientist, March 16, 2005; Thomas B. Edsall, “How Much Do Your Genes Shape Your Politics?,” The New York Times, June 1, 2022; and Christopher T. Dawes and Aaron C. Weinschenk, “On the genetic basis of political orientation,” Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 34, August 2020, pp. 173–78.

7.  See World Bank Group, “Fertility rate, total (births per woman),” 2023.

8.  Lyman Stone, “America's Growing Religious-Secular Fertility Divide,”  Institute for family studies, August 8, 2022.

9.  See Lyman Stone, “Fertility and nuptiality of Ultra-Orthodox Jews in the United States,” N-IUSSP, January 15, 2024; and Lyman Stone, Cory Anderson, and Stephanie Thiehoff, “Amish fertility in the United States,” Demographic Research, Volume 52, April 29, 2025, pp. 869–86.

10 Chris Williamson, “Why So Many Women Feel Lost in Their 30's - Louise Perry,” at 57:21, YouTube, March 6, 2025.

11.  Sunday Morning, “Simone and Malcolm Collins: the pro-birthers trying to grow populations,” RNZ, December 10, 2023.

12.  Collins and Collins, pp. 5–11.

13.  Ibid., p. 380.

14.  Ibid.