Conversions, Protestantism, and a new mainline
Why do people convert to Christianity? Why do intellectuals and other public figures convert so often to Catholicism (or Eastern Orthodoxy) and so rarely to Protestantism? And what is the fate of both Catholicism and Protestantism among American elites and their institutions, given the decimation of the liberal mainline? Could a new mainline arise to take its place, and if so, who would it be and what would it look like?
Dozens of writers have taken up these questions in recent weeks, some (not all) prompted by Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion and her written explanation for it. Here’s Douthat and Freddie and Tyler Cowen and Alan Jacobs (and Alan again). Here’s Justin Smith-Ruiu. Here are two reflections about why Catholicism instead of Protestantism. And here is a series of pieces by Jake Meador on both the “new mainline” question and the “why Catholicism” question—with a useful corrective by Onsi Kamel.
I’ve got some belated thoughts; in my mind they connect to all of the above.
It’s worth making clear at the outset that countless people defect annually from Catholicism and Orthodoxy, whether into unbelief or into some Protestant sect. So the question isn’t about who’s winning or which group people in general prefer or comparing overall numbers. The question is about public figures and intellectuals and their conversions, as adults, from unbelief to faith. Why does that type of person always seem to be joining “catholic” traditions (defined, for now, as Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and perhaps also the Anglican Communion)?
Summed up in a single sentence, the reason as I see it is that Catholicism is a living tradition embodied in a global institution that stretches back millennia, claims divine authority, and contains both a storehouse of intellectual resources and a panoply of powerful devotional and liturgical practices. Let’s unpack that.
Catholicism is a world. Protestantism is not. Protestantism is not anything particular at all. It’s an umbrella or genus term that encompasses numerous unconnected or at best half-related Christian traditions, the oldest of which goes back five hundred years and the newest of which is barely older than a generation. There are not “Protestants,” somewhere out there. No ordinary layperson says, “I’m Protestant.” What he or she says is, “I’m Presbyterian” or “I’m Methodist” or “I’m Pentecostal” or “I’m Evangelical” or “I’m Lutheran” or “I’m Church of Christ” or “I’m Moravian” or “I’m Calvinist” or “I’m Baptist” or some other name. And the thing about midlife conversions on the part of public intellectuals is that they aren’t looking for a sub-culture. They’re looking for a moral and spiritual universe. They don’t want a branch of the tree; they want the tree itself—the trunk, the very root. “Protestantism” makes no exclusive claims to be the trunk as such. Its trunkness is never even in view. The question, therefore, is almost always whether Catholicism East or West is, properly speaking, the Christian trunk. Folks already in the West typically, though far from always, opt for the West’s claim of primacy.
Note well that this observation isn’t per se a critique of Protestants or a presumption against them. The fundamental feature of Protestantism is an ecumenical evangelicalism in the strict sense: a Christian whole created and sustained and defined by nothing else than the gospel itself. So that second-order sub-gospel confessional identities are subsumed in and comprehended by God’s singular work in Christ, which is the sovereign word proclaimed by the good news. In this way, according to Protestants, any and all attempts to be, or searches to find, “the trunk” is a distortion of true catholicity.
Be that as it may, the catholicity of Catholicism tends to be what wayward, agnostic, restless public intellectuals are after. And so they find it elsewhere than in Protestantism.
There is a reason why so many evangelical and Protestant graduate students in theology move toward “higher church” traditions. Intellectually, they discover thinkers and writings their own “lower church” traditions either ignore or lack; liturgically, they discover practices handed down century after century that function like a lifeline in a storm. Reading Saint Ignatius or Saint Justin or Saint Irenaeus or Saint Augustine, it occurs to them that they don’t have to imagine what the church’s ancient liturgy looked and felt like; they can simply visit a church down the street.
Speaking only anecdotally, I have never known students of Christian theology to move “down” the ecclesial ladder. I have only known them (a) to move “up,” (b) to move “left,” or (c) to move “out.” That is, relative to where they started, they go catholic, they go liberal, or they go away, leaving the faith behind. This remains true even of those who do not shift from one tradition or denomination to another: Baptists start reading Aquinas, evangelicals start celebrating Ash Wednesday, non-denom-ers start reciting the Creed. Or, if the move is lateral instead of vertical, one retains inherited beliefs and practices but changes on moral and social questions. Either way, “down” is not an option in practice.
Once again this fact, or observation, need not mean anything in itself. The populist or evangelical criticism might well be apt: Theological education places obstacles between students and the plain gospel. A student of theology “classes up,” thereby rendered unable to join “lower” classes in the purity of normal believers’ unadorned worship. Perhaps, then, this is an argument against the sort of theological education dominant today!
All this applies, mutatis mutandis, to public intellectuals. Put another way, suppose you are an atheist or agnostic exposed, over time, to the desert fathers, or to the pro-Nicene fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries, or to Saint Maximus Confessor or Saint John of Damascus, or to Benedictine monks, or to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, or to Julian of Norwich, or to Saint Francis or Saint Bernard or Saint Anselm. It would simply never occur to you that what you find in these authors is what you’d find in the Methodist congregation on the corner, or the Baptist church around the block, or the non-denom start-up across town. Not only do the devotional and liturgical, spiritual and theological worlds conjured by these writers and texts not exist in such spaces. The traditions themselves do not claim the figures in question. You go, therefore, to the people and the places who are bold enough to say, “Those names are our names; those saints are our saints; those books are our books. We nurture and preserve and pass them on. Come learn them from us; indeed, come learn from us what they learned themselves, in their own time.”
In sum: What intellectuals, especially agnostic intellectuals in midlife, are restlessly searching for is something not man-made, but divine; not provisional, but final; not a question, but an answer. They are looking for rest, however penultimate in this life, not more open-ended restlessness. Something that lasts. Something that can plausibly make a claim both to antiquity and to permanency. A bulwark that will not fail. Something to defer to, submit to, bow one’s head in surrender to; something to embrace and be embraced by: a teacher but also a mother. And the truth is that Rome plausibly presents itself as both mater et magistra, the pillar and bulwark of the truth. Orthodoxy does as well. The plausibility explains why so many intellectuals find port of harbor with each of them. The reverse, in turn, explains why so few of those sorts of people convert from rudderless adult atheism to Protestantism with a capital-p.
As for motives, if what I’ve outlined so far is true, then it makes perfect emotional sense for restless brainy seekers whose spiritual midlife crisis is prompted by perceived civilizational decline, torpor, and decadence to turn to catholic Christianity, East or West, as a haven in a heartless, spiritless, lifeless world. They aren’t making a category error, nor are they (necessarily) joining the church in a merely instrumental sense. For all we know, their search for capital-t Truth in a culture that refuses the concept altogether may be wise rather than self-serving. As Alan remarked, “what matters is not where you start but where you end up.” Doubtless there are people who join Christianity as a cultural project; must they remain there forever? I see no reason why we must, as a matter of necessity, say yes, for all people, always, in every circumstance. No adult is baptized without a confession of faith; if a new convert makes an honest confession and receives the grace of Christ’s saving waters, then he or she is a new creation, God’s own child, whatever the mixed motives involved. To say this isn’t to worship the God-shaped hole in our hearts instead of God himself. It’s to acknowledge, from the side of faith, that the hole is real. Because the hole is real, different people will find themselves knocking on Christ’s door—which is to say, on the doors of the church—for every manner of reason in every manner of situation. What Christ promises is that, to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. He does not lay down conditions for what counts as a good reason for knocking. Nor should we.
See here the opening paragraph of Christian Wiman’s new book, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair (from entry 1, page 5):
Thirty years ago, watching some television report about depression and religion—I forget the relationship but apparently there was one—a friend who was entirely secular asked me with genuine curiosity and concern: “Why do they believe in something that doesn’t make them happy?” I was an ambivalent atheist at that point, beset with an inchoate loneliness and endless anxieties, contemptuous of Christianity but addicted to its aspirations and art. I was also chained fast to the rock of poetry, having my liver pecked out by the bird of a harrowing and apparently absurd ambition—and thus had some sense of what to say. One doesn’t follow God in hope of happiness but because one senses—miserable flimsy little word for that beak in your bowels—a truth that renders ordinary contentment irrelevant. There are some hungers that only an endless commitment to emptiness can feed, and the only true antidote to the plague of modern despair is an absolute—and perhaps even annihilating—awe. “I prayed for wonders instead of happiness,” writes the great Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, “and You gave them to me.”Now: Given this apparent movement among once-secular intellectuals toward faith, or at least a renewed openness toward the claims of faith, what about a parallel movement toward a kind of Christian establishment—and in America, a “new Protestant mainline”? Any answer here is always subject to the ironies of divine providence. Christ’s promise to Saint Peter stands, which means that the forces arrayed against Christ’s body will never finally succeed. That doesn’t mean all or even any of our local or parochial ecclesial projects will succeed. But some of them might, against the odds. That’s God’s business, though, not ours. For now, then, some earthbound comments and fallible predictions.
I can’t speak to the situation in Europe or Great Britain, though my two cents, for what little it’s worth, is that we will not be seeing anything like a renaissance of established religion among elites and their institutions in our or our children’s lifetimes. In the U.S., I likewise think anything like a renewed liberal mainline is impossible. The once-dominant mainline—mainly comprising Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Methodists—is on life support where it isn’t already dead and buried. As a coherent civic bloc, much less a motive force among elites, it is undeniably a thing of the past. I take that as read.
So the only viable question in the American context, if there were ever to be a “new” mainline, is whether it would be Catholic, magisterial Protestant, or evangelical. There was a moment, as many others have written, when American Catholicism was in process of making a bid to function like a new mainline. That period runs basically from the birth of Richard John Neuhaus in 1936 (the height of the Great Depression, the end of FDR’s first term, with World War II imminent) to his passing in 2009 (Bush in disgrace, Obama triumphant, the Great Recession, in the sixth year of the Iraq War). Catholics were well represented in elite universities, in think tanks, in D.C., in presidential administrations, in magazines that fed and fueled all of the above. But between the priest sex abuse scandals, Iraq, the divisiveness of abortion, and rolling political losses on social issues (above all gay marriage), the dream of an American Catholic Mainline proved not to be.
As for conservative Protestants and evangelicals, the former lack in numbers what the latter lack in everything else. Here’s what I mean. A genuine mainline or unofficially established church has to possess the following features: (a) so many millions of adherents that they’re “just there,” since some of them are invariably “around,” no matter one’s context; (b) powerful centralized institutions; (c) an internal logic that drives its laypeople to seek and acquire powerful roles in elite institutional contexts; (d) a strong emphasis on education in law, politics, and the liberal arts and their various expressions in careers and professions; (e) an investment in and sense of responsibility for the governing order, both its status quo and its ongoing reform; (f) a suspicion of populism and a rejection of revolution; (g) a taste for prestige, a desire for excellence, and an affinity for establishment; (h) wealth; (i) the ears of cultural and political elites; (j) networks of institutions, churches, and neighborhoods filled with civic-minded laypeople who can reliably be organized as a voting bloc or interest group; (k) groups of credentialed intellectuals who participate at the highest levels of their respective disciplines, whether religious or secular; (l) a loose but real shared moral and theological orthodoxy that is relatively stable and common across class and educational lines; (m) an ecclesial and spiritual culture of thick religious identity alongside popular tacit membership, such that not only “committed believers” but mediocre Christians and even finger-crossing public figures can say, with a straight face, that they are members in good standing of said established tradition.
If even part of my (surely incomplete) list here is accurate, it should be self-evident why neither evangelicals nor conservative Protestants could possibly compose a new American mainline. It’s hard to put into words just how tiny “traditional” or “orthodox” magisterial Protestantism is in the U.S. It would be unkind but not unfair to call it a rump. Its size has been demolished by a quadruple defection over the past three generations: to secularism, to liberalism, to evangelicalism, to Rome. It’s arguable whether there ever even was any meaningful presence of magisterial Protestantism in America of the sort one could find in Europe. The four-headed monster just mentioned is a ravenous beast, and old-school Lutherans and Wesleyans and Reformed have been the victims. You need numbers to have power, not to mention institutions and prestige, and the numbers just aren’t there; nor is there a path to reaching them. It’s not in the cards.
Evangelicals still have the numbers, even if they’re waning, but as I said before, they lack just about everything else: the institutionalism, the intellectualism, the elite ethos, the prestige and excellence, the allergy to populism—nearly all of it. Evangelicalism is Protestant populism. This is why evangelicals who enter elite spaces slowly, or sometimes not so slowly, lose the identifying marks of evangelicalism. It isn’t strange to learn that Prestigious Scholar X on the law/econ/poli-sci faculty at Ivy League School Y is Roman Catholic. It is a bit of a surprise to learn that he’s an evangelical. The moment you hear it, though, you wonder (or ask) whether he’s an evangelical Anglican or some such. Consider high-rank Protestant universities with large evangelical faculties, like Wheaton or Baylor or George Fox. Ask the religion, theology, and humanities professors where they go to church. Chances are it’s an Anglican parish. Chances are that not a few of them, if they left, or if the university permits it, have transitioned from evangelical to Anglican to Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. This is just the way of things in higher-ed as well as other elite institutions.
Here’s one way to think about it. An evangelical who climbs the elite ladder is more or less required, by the nature of the case, to shed vital elements of her evangelical identity. But a Catholic is not. And a Catholic is not for the same reason that, once upon a time, a liberal Protestant was not. A high-church Episcopalian wasn’t working against the grain by earning a law degree from Princeton or Yale a century ago. That’s what Episcopalians do. It’s what Episcopalianism is. Moreover, if said Episcopalian began as a wide-eyed conservative and ended a enlightened liberal, he would remain Episcopalian the whole time. There’d be no need to leave for some other tradition; the tradition encompassed both identities, indeed encouraged passage from one to the other. Whereas an evangelical who becomes liberal becomes a self-contradiction. A liberal evangelical is an oxymoron. He lacks any reason to exist. Evangelicalism isn’t liberal, in any sense. It is axiomatically and essentially illiberal. To become liberal, therefore, is to cease to be evangelical. That’s not what evangelicalism is for. Evangelicals who become liberal remain evangelical only for a time; they eventually exit faith, or swim the Tiber, or become actual liberal Protestants, where they feel right at home. Which means, for the purposes of this discussion, that every single time evangelicals send their best and brightest to elite institutions to be “faithfully present” there, only for them to become liberal in the process, evangelicalism loses one of its own. The same goes, obviously, for a rising-star evangelical who loses faith or becomes Catholic or Orthodox.
The other thing to note is that the “moral” part of “moral and theological orthodoxy” is absolutely up for grabs right now, in every single Christian tradition and denomination in America. No church has successfully avoided being roiled and split in two by arguments over gender and sexuality. Nor is there some happy middle ground where everybody agrees to disagree. One or another normative view is going to win out, in each and every local community and global communion. We just don’t know, at this point in time, where the cards are going to fall. In that light, any ambition for conservative Protestants (or Catholics, for that matter) to form an established religious backdrop for elite cultural and political organs in America is a pipe dream, given what “conservative” means regarding sexual ethics. Whoever is still standing, Christianly speaking, at the end of this century, the wider culture is not going to welcome new overlords who oppose the legality of abortion, same-sex marriage, no-fault divorce, and artificial contraception. I mean, come on. Most Protestants I know take for granted the legality (and usually the morality, too) of all but the first, and are politically ambivalent about the first as well. Protestants are in numerical decline anyway, a fact I’ve bracketed for these reflections. Put it all together, and the reasons why public intellectuals don’t convert to Protestantism are inseparable from, and sometimes identical to, the reasons why magisterial Protestantism is not poised to become a new American mainline. Do with that what you will.
