The Dangers of the TLM Fight Club

I did not discover the Latin Mass until seven years ago, so my Catholic upbringing as an adult convert for the past twenty-plus years was in the New Mass. The hymns were embarrassing to sing, throngs of self-appointed church ladies seemed to run the parish, and nothing of substance was ever preached from the pulpit. Despite this, at the core, I knew I had found the Truth, the Gospel mustard seed, and I was willing to endure it all if it meant being united to Jesus Christ in His one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. 

Writer Joseph Campbell wrote about the idea of the secondary father, the “father you choose” essentially, who stands in contrast to the biological father you do not choose and must ultimately reject. In many ways, I think this encapsulates the draw of the Latin Mass for many Catholic men like me. When we discover it, we think to ourselves, “Where has this been all my life? Why did no one ever tell me about it?” For many, it reignites their faith and gives them something to live—and die—for as a Catholic man.

Tangential to that notion of Campbell’s “secondary father” are the models of masculinity in David Fincher’s 1999 cult classic Fight Club. It’s a hard movie to give a synopsis for, but I’ll try: the unnamed Narrator (played by Edward Norton) leads a life of emasculated, quiet desperation as a cog in the corporate wheel (a “consumer” as evidenced by his obsession with IKEA décor for his condo and soul-sucking business trips replete with “single serving” encounters). He’s alive, but he’s dead inside. His generation has no flag to rally behind, nothing to fight for.

The Narrator’s alter ego—the confident, virile, and violent hyper-masculine Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt)—is everything the narrator is not but also everything he desires to be. The Narrator likes control; Tyler admonishes him to “stop trying to control everything.” Tyler teaches him “rock bottom” lessons like letting go of the steering wheel in the car while flooring the gas to show him you can survive more than you think after the car flips a median; blowing up the Narrator’s condo; and pouring lye on his hands as a pain-tolerance test. As Tyler notes, “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.”

Fight Club starts out as an underground after-hours movement for a generation of emasculated men “raised by women” to come together and get out their repressed aggression via brutal, bare-knuckle fighting in basements. For the first time in their lives, they feel pain not numbness—they feel alive. Tyler, however, sees Fight Club as a stepping-stone to liberate men from the drudgery of consumerism.

He takes it up a notch with the nihilistic “Project Mayhem,” an offshoot domestic-terror group that enlists Fight Club members to blow up the credit card companies, erasing consumer debt and ushering in global anarchy. The movement grows—male recruits stand outside the dilapidated mansion, which serves as home base in the sketchy outskirts of the city, without food or water and subject to hazing for three days to prove their mettle. Tyler becomes not only a secondary father figure (“the father you choose”) but also a kind of charismatic, fascist dictator in the process of taking things, well, a little too far. 

What does any of this have to do with the Traditional Latin Mass and the growing movement toward Traditionalism in the Church, especially among young men? I’ll grant that it might be an unorthodox way of developing parallelism, but I see a cautionary point worth considering.

One: The post-conciliar Church is largely feminized and emasculated. This was my experience in the Novus Ordo, one I couldn’t put my finger on for a long time. You can cite female lectors and Eucharistic Ministers, or overbearing Music Directors, or a ceding of paternal control to a largely female lay parish committee, or the hymns, or the hand-holding; the list goes on. What it boils down to is that, from my observations, the Novus Ordo does not appeal to male sensibilities. 

Two: The vacuum will be filled one way or another. Either people leave the Church, with men leading the way out, or they will be brought back in by what appeals to those primal sensibilities. The rise of figures like Jordan Peterson and Fr. Ripperger are mobilizers in a way, to bring things back into right order and out of the chaos of the rubble when the Natural Law has been eschewed and inverted for decades.

At the TLM, the focus is not anthropocentric but theocentric. The physicality and precision with which the sacrifice (the immolation of the Lamb, not a “shared meal”) is offered has a kind of military precision to it. It is unapologetic and uncompromising. In Tyler’s words to recruits, “You are not special.” In essence: the Mass is not about you. And that is, I think, appealing to men looking for a sense of purpose and meaning in worship—something hard to devote themselves to and a cause worth fighting for.

Three: It has the potential to go too far, when not tempered by virtue. When I used to attend a monthly holy hour at the FSSP parish near us, fifty guys were praying the Rosary and worshiping Christ. We gathered in the basement afterward for wings and beer and a talk by the priest. It had a “Fight Club” type feel (without the bare-knuckle brawling, of course). But this is because the priest was a sensible and level-headed shepherd who encouraged virtue and discouraged fringe-extremism. I think this is important. A charismatic but reckless priest has as much potential to lead men astray (by capitalizing on point #2, above) when his vision of the Church and holiness conflicts with the laws of the Church, prudence, temperance, and the other virtues, and/or ignores human freedom in favor of a kind of cult-like following. 

Younger men, especially those without temperance, wisdom, or good formation from their fathers, may be more susceptible to extremism. One young man who attended the Latin Mass at our diocesan parish a few years ago spray-painted Deus Vult on the exterior of a Planned Parenthood before hurling a Molotov cocktail at the building in an attempt to burn it down. He was sentenced to two years in prison. I don’t know what motivated him, and of course this is not representative of our parish nor our holy pastor at the time. Rather, it is indicative of an unstable kind of individual zeal when it’s not tempered or checked.

There’s a way that men can get together and build one another up—even if it’s in underground fashion in church basements in the sketchy part of town—without going completely Fight Club. Right Order equals Right Worship, which is why I have hope that the traditionalist movement has the potential to renew at least some elements of the Church, provided it doesn’t devolve into something antithetical to Christian charity and the true manhood of Christ—and as long as it doesn’t sabotage itself first. 

We don’t need Fight Clubs, nor does one need to watch the movie (please don’t); we need wisdom, prayer, and virtue, as well as priests to guide us without becoming cult leaders. Then we can step into our roles as men, husbands, and fathers to lead our domestic churches in the home and renew the Church from the bottom up.