Consumer Catholicism
The Religion of western civilisation is consumerism, and we all bow down at the altar
Sinead Campbell
During one of my routine scrolls through Twitter, I came across a recommended tweet of a Depop post. The listing was reminiscent of a Brandy Melville ad, a faceless girl on-the-go, dressed in cropped top and denim mini skirt, carrying a printed canvas tote bag. But what immediately caught my attention was the text overlay decorated with an array of pink bow emojis, which read: ‘catholic confession readings’.
The caption generously listed her qualifications:
Baptised and confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church.
Attended Catholic private school
Taught by her uncle, a certified priest.
All for $5. Tempting.
The user rounded off the listing with the hashtags: catholic, angelcore, dollette, coquette, Lolita and many more. I momentarily laughed, shared the tweet with my friends and continued scrolling as usual. Nevertheless, it stuck with me, partly because it was so obviously absurd but also because it was an extreme example of a broader trend floating around the Internet as of late.
Whether one is on Pinterest or TikTok, there are girls—often white, strikingly thin and notably young—who douse themselves in cross-chain necklaces and rosary beads. They quote bible verses and pledge their unadulterated belief to the Catholic church.
There is no doubt that the internet has wound itself into a never-ending ball of chaos. With Gen-Zers now dictating the online trend cycles of twee dance challenges to sinister tide pod cravings, each viral sensation proves to be as absurd and unpredictable as the last. The breezeblocks of Tiktok are built on its users' dumbfounded humour and dwindling attention spans. Still, the app also offers a new format in which fashion, religion, aesthetics, and virtually anything else can merge, reproduce and fester in a digital petri dish. Through its virality, Tiktok appears to obscure the pattern of past internet subcultures that thrived on sites like Reddit, Tumblr and even LiveJournal, where users connected based on niche mutual interests. Instead, what would have once succeeded in the outskirts of the digital abyss is now democratised into hyper-visible categories of identity that anyone can pick up, put on and eventually throw away.
Appearing nonsensical to anyone fortunate enough not to suffer from a case of internet brain, these categories represent the alarming conundrum that apps such as Tiktok self-perpetuate—the desire to differentiate oneself in an online atmosphere enclosed in its homogeneity. There is something about the 'Catholic girl' aesthetic that appeals to teenage angst, which naturally gravitates towards more subversive types of subculture. This trend illustrates the way such behaviour is acted out, sometimes whimsically, like a child playing dress up in a costume store. It falls adjacent to other trends such as ‘cottage-core’, ‘nepotism-baby’ or ‘dark academia’, which showcase how young girls are embedded online through an element of escapism into aesthetic realms that seem far from their existence. This amalgamation of vaguely related cultural signifiers shows up in an erratic spread of hashtags that read like an algorithmic malfunction. A pick and mix of identity categories which are prescribed rather than organically cultivated. Catholic girl, trad wife, ballerina Slavic coquette aesthetic, fairycore, bimbocore, whatevercore. My mind begins to buffer.
However, it’s worth noting that these girls aren’t necessarily concerned with religious doctrine like the trad-cath milieu who populate the under-world of ‘religious twitter’ and certainly cannot be conflated with the church-going, button-downed Christian youth types. Instead, their fascination is more with style, beauty, and a lifestyle characterised by Catholicism and its 'charms' rather than religion itself. But, of course, this is hardly a revelation, religion and aesthetics are historically intertwined, and even the link between Catholicism and girlhood is often explored in media such as The Craft and Lady Bird. Even assessing popular shows such as the second season of BBC’s Fleabag sees Catholicism thrown into the pop culture spotlight, highlighting it as a pathway of self-discovery and redemption for even the most unassuming protagonists.
In this sense, religion isn't considered an institution—its relevance can be seen more through the way it serves as a cultural prop. Look at alternative fashion brand Praying, for example. The Insta-brand popularised their Father, Son, Holy Spirit bikini set, which reached peak infamy after being worn by Tik-Tok starlet Addison Rae in their collaboration campaign with Adidas. It appears that the allusion to, or even the appropriation of Catholic symbolism now carries cultural capital. Like some twisted Middle-Age renaissance, Catholicism is Coca-Cola. It’s cool, it’s sexy, and it’s desirable. In this online realm, the translation of ideas and aesthetics is irony-poisoned, controversy is the ultimate aim, and the new it-girl can be found lounging around in a holy Trinity bikini, bible and gun in hand. The adoption of Catholicism in this sense rests on the desire for provocation, the need to transgress for transgressions' sake.
But what is this perceived social boundary that probes such a performance? Regardless of what corner of the internet you choose to occupy (or vacate), the digital sphere is filled with a noise that suffocates. In some respects, the trend marks the rejection of the pressure to be on the ‘right’ side of the culture war. It aligns with the ‘reject modernity’, ‘embrace tradition’ ethos, a phrase that has been inevitably memeified online. This new trend of cosplaying Catholicism is stuck somewhere between online polarity. It simultaneously trolls puritanical values whilst embracing them to provoke the hyper-PC. But beyond this display of online acrobatics, it could indicate something deeper.
Without sounding like a cog in the broken cultural record, yes, we live in a soulless society where the search for purpose feels futile and unattainable. The Religion© of western civilisation is consumerism, and we all bow down at the altar. Maybe Catholicism emerges as the imagined antidote. Especially amongst an online generation downtrodden with social alienation, there is a desire for meaningful social bonds that is often ill-expressed. Both religion and the recent trend of micro-labels signify a need to understand oneself through external institutional markers where your identity and expression of such are governed by something beyond your being. This is comforting, but in the online world where trends are emerging and reemerging at an impossible speed, it is also fraught and unstable.
But why, of all religions, is it Catholicism that young girls flock to? Part of me doubts a deeper analysis is even necessary here. Catholic imagery is rich in beauty, and girls online are hardly the first to admire it. I can recall the tactics I used as a child to pass the hour by during Sunday mass, staring into the eyes of Virgin Mary statues and following the lines of elaborate stained glass windows. The interiors of my local Franciscan Church, which sat disjunctively on the high road of my London suburb, are ingrained in my mind forever. For those raised Catholic, it inspires an element of nostalgia. But amongst the Tiktok locale, where the value of appearance increases engagement and thus reaps the highest reward, Catholic imagery probes the default mode to fetishise absolutely anything. So it seems (and this is not to discredit the integrity of belief regarding the few who fall into this subsect) that the migration to religious aestheticism is more of a practice of modern values than it is a rejection of them.
'Catholic aesthetic' encompasses several things at once. It's an attempt to commodify religious signifiers and a quest for spiritual engagement. Furthermore, it's a practice in the online tradition of ironic trolling. Despite subverting the notion that the young generation of today is spiritually barren and void of tradition, those who invoke Catholicism in their alternative fashion branding and online personas still demonstrate perhaps the most prevalent tradition of today: nothing, not even the divine and sacred, is off limits when it comes to enticing the interests of the consumer.
