Yahoo Life spent a whole essay last week wondering why a generation that skipped Sunday school still talks like a revival tent. Contestants on Love Island USA spent a season accusing one another of being “lustful.” TikTok is full of kids calling a double Big Mac “weaponized gluttony” and labeling some rich fool “the type of greed they warned us about in the Bible.”
They rebuke demons between smoothie reviews. Then the writers scratch their heads and ask how this can be, given that Gen Z is supposed to be the least religious cohort in living memory.
It is not a puzzle. It is a confession.
The words came back because the things they name never left. Lust still wrecks people. Greed still hollows them out. Gluttony is not a cute caption when a culture is drowning in appetite. A generation raised on porn, delivery apps, and infinite scroll discovered that the old vocabulary still fits. They just refuse the Person who coined it.
Hellfire Language on a Fornication Show
Steffi Cao’s Yahoo piece is useful because it cannot help documenting the contradiction. Love Island exists to put twenty-somethings in a villa and film the coupling. This season the same villa filled with sermons about lust. Gabriel got dumped for being too lustful. Kenzie swore she was not. KC asked the only honest question in the building. “Are we not all lustful in this motherfucker?”
Yes. That is the point of the show. And of the age.
Online, the same cadence took over the feed. “Biblical levels of greed” dates back at least to 2013, but it caught fire on TikTok and X around 2021. Pets stealing lunch. Friends hoarding snacks on game night. Celebrities dating other celebrities.
Then the joke hardened. Dating influencers started treating lust as a red flag. Masculinity accounts told men to control it. Women posted that male lust is not a compliment. Suddenly a reality franchise built on heat was using church words as a weapon.
Christian creator Joelle Park told Yahoo she sees the darker edge. People got comfortable publicly sentencing strangers with morally loaded language. Call a man lustful, farm the engagement, never mention pride, never mention grace. Park is right about that part. The internet loves a hanging and hates a cross.
“Biblical language used to shame people without any of the redemption, grace or forgiveness that the Bible also talks about feels like the short end of the stick.”
That is not a media studies observation. That is the difference between the Law and the Gospel. One accuses. The other saves. Gen Z has rediscovered the first and left the second on read.
They Are Not as Godless as the Headline Needs Them to Be
The “least religious generation” line is getting harder to repeat without footnotes. Fox News has been tracking the reversal among young men. Gallup’s 2024-2025 numbers put 42 percent of men 18 to 29 saying religion is very important, up from 28 percent two years earlier. Monthly attendance among those men climbed to 40 percent. For the first time in a generation, young men are outpacing young women on that measure.
Barna found Gen Z and Millennial churchgoers now attending more often than the older pews that used to carry the load. Typical Gen Z churchgoers are near two weekends a month, double the pandemic trough. Bible sales jumped. Young men are even reading Scripture more than young women in some of the new tracking. Catholic parishes in blue cities are reporting conversion spikes and standing-room Masses.
That is not the whole story, and anyone pretending otherwise is selling tickets. George Barna’s worldview work still finds only about 1 percent of Gen Z adults holding a biblical worldview.
They will use the words. They will not submit to the Book. They want the charge of “sin” when a man on television behaves like a goat. They do not want a holy God who has a claim on their own beds, phones, and appetites.
Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.
The Left Calls It Puritanism Because It Cannot Say the Word Sin
Dazed and the usual lifestyle desks treat the slang as “conservative rhetoric around morality” leaking into the mainstream. Laura Pitcher wrote that the word lust showing up on a big stage means right-wing talking points are getting louder.
That is how a secular magazine processes a conscience. If young people are having less sex, wanting less sex on their screens, and young men are warmer to traditional roles, the approved explanation is a sinister purity revival, not a hangover from a decade of hookup wreckage.
Some of the abstinence is not holiness. Faithwire has noted the ugly twin of the trend. A lot of young people are not saving themselves for a covenant. They are opting out because they no longer believe sex, marriage, or children are worth the trouble. That is not revival. That is despair in a modest outfit.
Still, the vocabulary is not random. You do not reach for “lust,” “gluttony,” “greed,” and “rebuke” because a focus group told you to. You reach for them because every other word is too small. “Problematic” does not describe a man who cannot stop.
“Toxic” does not describe a culture that eats its seed corn. The seven deadly sins were catalogued by the church because pastors were looking at the same human heart TikTok is looking at now. The list did not start in the Bible as a numbered chart. The reality did.
What the platforms cannot do is finish the sentence. They can crowd-source a verdict. They cannot offer pardon. Public shame is back, and the comments under every cheating scandal sound like a psalm written by people who have never opened one. “So glad we’re bringing back public shame.” Half a million likes. Fine. Shame is a mercy when it drives a man to repent. Shame that never leads to a Savior just trains a generation of little inquisitors.
The Words Are a Door, Not the House
If Gen Z is going to keep talking like the Bible, somebody has to hand them the Bible. Not the slang edition that turns Gabriel into a vibe check. Not a meme about a dog and a sandwich. The actual indictment, and the actual mercy.
They already know, in their bones, that lust is not a compliment and greed is not a personality. The law is still written where Paul said it would be. Their conscience is bearing witness while they film themselves in a villa built for sin. The tragedy is not that they sound biblical. The tragedy is that they will use the language of hell to dunk on a stranger and never ask who can pull them out.
The words came home. The Redeemer is still waiting for the rest of them to follow.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.