Reconfiguring Religious Masculinities: Young Men’s Christian Orientations in a Nordic Context

Recent research in Finland suggests a growing interest in Christianity among young men, challenging assumptions about linear religious decline and the feminization of religiosity. This paper examines young men’s engagements with Christianity through a typological analysis of religious orientations, based on in-depth interviews with 30 young Christian men conducted in 2024–2025. Rather than interpreting young men’s religiosity as either reactionary or aligned with hegemonic masculinity, the analysis highlights diverse ways in which Christian commitment becomes intertwined with meaning-making, moral agency, and identity construction in a highly secularized Nordic context. Drawing on scholarship on plural masculinities and individualized religious engagement, the paper proposes a typology that complicates dominant frameworks for studying religious masculinities. The typology is offered as an analytic provocation, inviting comparative discussion on how religious masculinities are negotiated beyond hegemonic and oppositional models in contemporary societies.