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Notes -
Articles like this can be really interesting windows into small subcommunities, but they aren't really a replacement for broader data, which does show that faithful religious attendance does correlate with a lot of modernity-resistant behaviors. (For instance, Haidt found that practicing religious teens handled the onset of smart phones well compared to irreligious ones, even if they were still negatively affected.) So reading this and drawing the conclusion that religion doesn't in fact have good effects that protect against modernity is wrong.
I don't think it's all that original of an insight to say that in real life the modernity-resisting "trad wives" aren't wearing long dresses and posting shots of themselves in fields on social media, right now if they aren't asleep, they are probably wearing jeans and a t-shirt and cleaning up some sort of bodily excrement or cooking food. They may not conceive of themselves as "trad wives" at all, they go to an nondenominational, Baptist, or Catholic church and probably not a particularly "trad' one, listen to podcasts and contemporary music, have an iPhone, enjoy watching Marvel movies, and probably do not live on a farm. They might not particularly feel like they are winning the battle against modernity now, but over the long run they are having more kids, longer, happier marriages, and a more satisfying life precisely because they aren't posting glamor shots or snippy Substack posts.
However, I do think this post highlights a potentially real problem: people turning to "trad Christianity" (or any other religious practice) because they want to post about it on Twitter or Substack or because they want to find a hot wife/tolerable husband and not because it's true, looking to get something out of it for themselves first, probably aren't going to find what they are looking for, and they're likely going to undermine whatever community they are going to be a part of. I'm not saying religious groups can't work with these types: they can and they should. But it makes one wonder if the future of religion is more gatekeeping, not less.
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