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Bani D's avatar

Watched Bill Whittle's documentary on Apollo 11 recently. His description of the astronauts reminded me of Aaron's take on the decline of mainline protestantism. The Astronauts, he said, we're all highly intelligent, from middle America (or something like that), all Protestant. Your average Evangelical is not intellectual, but neither is your average American. Most people are just not looking for an intellectual faith. If they were, the Evangelical model would shift because to some degree it's market based. I decided to go Lutheran. I'm Latin American and don't like the Roman church very much. It is dying in Latin America because it's irrelevant at best and and harmful at worst. I do wish, however, that the Lutherans were better at absorbing the disaffected Evangelicals.

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Eric W. Cook's avatar

The movement toward Catholicism is very interesting among intellectuals. I remember arriving on my state college campus in 1994 and seeking out the Protestant youth presence, then it was Campus Crusade for Christ; they had a big event for freshmen and I attended. I grew up in a (at the time - how they've changed) small church (ASA about 150) from the rural rustbelt, but we had a very intellectual pastor, former Fuller professor who had decided he wanted to live in the country. He used to loan me copies of the early church fathers and 19th century commentaries to help me grow my faith. So, I was shocked at the shallowness of the event, the music, the preaching, the "activities", I walked away and never went back. My pastor at home retired and was replaced by a very shallow striver evangelical type and as the years went by, I found it harder and harder to find solid intellectually satisfying protestant writing, preaching, and thinking. I seriously considered Catholicism during Benedicts papacy, but then I discovered that there were conservative confessional Anglicans and Lutherans. The Reformed world was very interesting, but I found them finally unconvincing about a couple of key issues and there endless bickering over the finer points of theology were off-putting. I ended up an Anglican, but I can understand the pull of a well organized intellectual outreach from the various groups within the Catholic Church. They have something serious, masculine, and ancient - grounded in a world untethered. Until Protestants start taking classical political theory and the more modern dynamics of power seriously and promoting and organizing around the best traditional thinkers of their own tradition and using them to reach out recruit others, they will not grow the faith. In the more worldly arena they will continue to see defeats like the GOP platform and the rending of garments will do no good.

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