I don't have much experience with Catholicism outside of America, but I wonder if Catholicism thrives and nourishes society when embedded in a protestant culture, in a way that it can't when it is the sole basic cultural framework.
Catholicism has a firm intellectual structure. Some of its greatest minds are freely on offer in any public library. It has is a tradition of disputation and a foundation.
Thus, for people adrift in this sea of "any-thing-goes-if-it feels-good-why-not?" the various forms of Protestantism are a weaker tea.
This is a rich piece. The Emmanuel Todd framework is genuinely illuminating -- the zombie state to zero state progression helps make sense of a cultural unraveling that otherwise seems both sudden and gradual simultaneously.
The bundling of credit card debt, obesity, out-of-wedlock births, and drug use alongside literacy decline is suggestive but the causal links feel distinct enough to deserve separate treatment. Some of those pathologies connect to the decline of thrift and sexual continence as Protestant cultural values, which is a real mechanism -- but a different one from literacy decline specifically. Conflating them risks making the argument feel less precise than it deserves to be.
On video versus reading -- I think video represents a different kind of literacy rather than simply its absence. Someone who engages seriously with long-form documentary, follows complex analytical argument in video form, and watches critically is doing something cognitively meaningful. But the distinction you're pointing at is real: reading requires you to construct the world entirely in your own mind. Video does that work for you. The cognitive demand genuinely differs even when the content is equivalent.
What Protestantism cultivated at its best wasn't just functional literacy but a culture of being well-read -- wrestling seriously with difficult texts over time, holding complex arguments in mind, following reasoning across long stretches. That's a higher and more specific capacity than simply being able to decode text. Whether a video-native culture could develop an equivalent -- being genuinely well-watched in a serious and cumulative way -- is the question I'd want to see explored.
Video's superpower is emotional engagement. That's real and valuable -- humans change through emotional experience, not just argument. But emotional engagement without the cognitive scaffolding of serious reading is also more vulnerable to manipulation. The gap between feeling strongly that something is true and having good reasons to believe it is where a lot of cultural damage can accumulate.
I'm not sure if "Protestant" means the same thing today as it did 50-100 years ago, when it was dominated by mainline denominations that were more open to critical inquiry, debate, and study. The mainline churches undermined the faith by going too far down this path, but it's hard to say they were anti-intellectual.
The energy and growth in Protestant circles today is often in pentecostal and fundamentalist churches. Part of their appeal is the "spectacle" of live bands, emotional altar calls and speaking in tongues, as well as heresies like the Prosperity Gospel. But the biggest draw may be the certainty offered to those who dislike critical inquiry. By definition these people aren't readers.
I see the rise of educated young men joining the Orthodox and Catholic faith as a positive. They are stepping into the gap created by the decline in mainline Protestantism and growth of fundamentalist/pentecostal churches. But I hope there is a renewal of the more traditional Protestantism of our forefathers. Competition benefits all parties!
With this said, I suspect that the decline in reading is more the result of a shorter attention span due to changes in media consumption that require less work and focus.
A century ago, Dreiser wrote "An American Tragedy," which sold well in spite of being nearly 900 pages. Do you think people would line up to buy such a long book today?
This quote summarizes the theological underpinning of medieval spirituality that is still prevalent in Roman Catholic spirituality.
“How did the absence of justification lead to dysfunction in medieval spirituality? Catholics believed that they were justified in the process of being sanctified. Since sanctification is never perfect and always in peril during our lifetime, they were imperfectly assured of their salvation. Serious believers could cure this uneasiness by martyrdom, or by the bloodless martyrdom of ascetic spirituality.
Sanctification, bearing an unnatural weight because it was expected to pacify the believer's conscience, was a subject of extraordinary concern. But the ascetic method of sanctification was by amputation, not by healing. If the believer is having trouble with sex, give up sexual relations. If he or she is having difficulty with covetousness, give up private property. If he or she is tempted by power, give up independence. The monastery and the nunnery are sanctification machines that guarantee the surest victory over the sinful use of money, sex and power."
- Richard F. Lovelace, EVANGELICAL SPIRITUALITY: A CHURCH HISTORIAN'S PERSPECTIVE, JETS 31/1 (March 1998)
"Trying to set the bar too high leads to Calvin’s Geneva or Puritan Massachusetts, creating what were arguably repressive societies that contained their own injustices."
This is completely false. That the Puritans or Geneva were repressive is just the narrative that the left spins about them.
I wonder if Jewish culture can be used as a comparison here. Jewish communities in Europe usually had considerably higher male literary rates than their neighbors, and this high literacy made Jews particularly adapted for modernity, even though modernity itself is largely a Protestant invention.
Is Catholicism for young conservative elites or is it for post-literate zoomers? The solution is that there are multiple distinct pathways into Catholicism. I’ve seen 2 main paths in my experience (b. 1996, Ivy League, New England) and will paint a composite portrait of each:
Path 1, Conservative Elite: A young man from Texas goes to Dartmouth. He’s grown up in private Christian schools which are interdenominational and his family hopped churches as they moved around: first a small baptist church, then a mega-church and last a nice PCA church in the suburbs. In college he wants to go deeper than C.S. Lewis and checks out various flavors of Christianity. One year, he looks into Reformed Theology, next year Anglicanism, and of course you can’t not encounter Catholic Theology too. He likes the Catholic stuff, and unlike Reformed Theology or Anglicanism, there are more than 3 other people on campus who are into it. Soon he’s invited to events at a Catholic Study Center; it’s much nicer than the evangelical group’s rented space and he’s actually heard of the speaker (“Ross Douthat’s coming?”). In a semester, his primary social group becomes Catholic and then it’s over. As the evangelicals who study conversion can tell you, the best predictor of coming to/changing one’s faith is your social group. After a year of waffling he crosses the Tiber.
But you won’t go down this path if you are embedded in a particular Protestant tradition on a more than intellectual level. A Korean Presbyterian whose whole family and ethnic identity is tied up in that church, will not do the same searching and experimenting as the mere-Christian product of interdenominational private school and church-hopping. Likewise the Episcopalian product of Episcopal private school and the 4th generation “Baptist born, Baptist bred, and when I die Baptist dead” will not cross the Tiber.
Path 2, all algorithms lead to Rome: A young man from suburban Connecticut grows up going to church once or twice a year, but in high school his uncle dies and he starts having spiritual questions. He goes online for the answers and finds generic Protestant content. He starts watching sermons and gets hypnotized by John MacArthur. He watches stuff online until he gets his license, and then he drives to a Reformed Baptist church occaisonally. The algorithm however pushes fresh content to keep him engaged. From Reformed Baptist sermons come Reformed Baptist debates, debates with Presbyterians, debates with Catholics, debates with Catholic apologists who have their own videos which then slip into his feed. Then like the women who start seeing ads for diapers online before they even know they’re pregnant, his autoplay queue on YouTube becomes a picture of his future. And around the same time he’s “chosen” to start buying the potato chips fried in tallow instead of seed oil, he “chooses” to become Catholic.
But you won’t go down this path if you aren’t addicted to the algorithms. It’s that simple.
So the advice for Protestant parents is: be careful with your kids’ technology and plant yourself in a particular tradition.
Last caveat: these are general trends based on a couple dozen people I know who have considered or converted to Catholicism. Your individual experience may vary, but as we see from Yost’s column and other articles, the general trends are real.
Amusingly, I gave social media just a little bit of Catholic input and eventually I looped around to C. R. Wiley, who occasionally comments here, along with other Protestant content. Shoutout to him and his enjoyment of genealogy.
I basically agree, but do you see any connection to the 20th century giants of conservatism being Catholic? I’m thinking Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley, Pat Buchanan.
I'm not sure. I think for those of us who don't remember 9/11, they are more historical figures than role models. Maybe in that conservatism value have been shaped by these Catholics, but I've never known someone who read a lot of Kirk/Buckley/Buchanan and then converted.
Capitalism began in the cities of Renaissance Italy and the still-Catholic towns of the Low Countries. Apart from loosening the Church's ban on interest (which was already becoming honored mainly in the breach even in Catholic Europe) the Reformation had nothing to do with it.
Re: This in practice produced an extremely literate, sophisticated, disciplined elite, combined with a largely degraded peasantry.
Well, before printing books were very expensive and most people would never hold one in their hands. Printing enabled people to become literate, at least those living in towns and cities who had sufficient leisure for reading.
Re: There’s definitely something to the shift from blogs to Tik Tok.
Also, blogs to podcasts, which are still verbal of course, but do not involve reading.
JonF311. You're correct Catholicism did give birth to Modernity. However, Catholicism has an internal "contradiction", largely reinforced as a consequence of the Reformation where it acts against its own insights. Modernity is a "practical" thing, where as peak Catholicism is an "ascetic" thing. There lies the contradiction.
And gunpowder began in China. And the Ancient Greeks developed an early form of steam-power. And man's first flight took place in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. It's interesting where things start, but the important part is where they're perfected.
Not just "perfected" but that they are birthed into a culture where the ideas can be developed. In many ways Catholicism is only as good as the leadership it has. Reactionary Papal authority, in many ways can work to stifle legitimate forms of Christian expression. Protestantism may appear as a free for all, theologically, but in reality, Christian practice isn't too much different from Catholicism in the main. The main difference is that Protestants can legitimately innovate religious practices that take the clergy forever to recognise as legitimate. i.e Religious tolerance.
Two historical accidents turbo-charged capitalism: the immense death toll of the Black Death, which nonetheless left capital untouched (other than losses of livestock), released a great deal of wealth that previously had been tied up in survival needs. And the Columbian Exchange lit a fire under international trade while also adding vast quantities of precious metals to the world economy. Dutch bankers, who had generations of experience in managing money well before Columbus or Luther, managed to tame the money flow while too many other nations (e.g., Spain) squandered the new wealth on empire-building and gaudy projects for the powerful.
So Catholic Spain squandered the empire for the benefit of the few, leaving a legacy of corruption, inefficiency and graft in their former colonies? While Protestant Britain left behind stable, developed democracies that uplift the common man and lead the world in scientific advancement?
Let's not whitewash the British record. When Britain was about take over Barbados (which had resisted the Europeans until then) the Garifuna natives chose to migrate to Central America and become Spanish subjects rather than chance their luck with the British,.And likewise when Florida came under British rule in 1763 the surviving Timucua accompanied the Spanish to Cuba. There are reasons Native people preferred Spain to Britain as an imperial master.
Overall I suspect the Industrial Revolution would have taken off in Britain initially absent some manner of catastrophe. Location, location, location (and the right mineral resources). By the way the reason the Greek steam engine was not transformative was because it was horribly inefficient. Wind, water, animal power even human muscle were better sources of power. Almost two millennia of successive improvements in metallurgy had to happen before James Watt could give the world efficient steam power.
I don't have much experience with Catholicism outside of America, but I wonder if Catholicism thrives and nourishes society when embedded in a protestant culture, in a way that it can't when it is the sole basic cultural framework.
This is pretty simple.
Catholicism has a firm intellectual structure. Some of its greatest minds are freely on offer in any public library. It has is a tradition of disputation and a foundation.
Thus, for people adrift in this sea of "any-thing-goes-if-it feels-good-why-not?" the various forms of Protestantism are a weaker tea.
Too firm. Liked by tidy minds but very inflexible to responding to new developments.
Maybe, I don't find Catholics much more adherent than Protestants in terms of the rules or shall we say - spiritual/emotional hygiene of living life.
But Catholics, due to their tradition, keep a better north star to return to.
This is a rich piece. The Emmanuel Todd framework is genuinely illuminating -- the zombie state to zero state progression helps make sense of a cultural unraveling that otherwise seems both sudden and gradual simultaneously.
The bundling of credit card debt, obesity, out-of-wedlock births, and drug use alongside literacy decline is suggestive but the causal links feel distinct enough to deserve separate treatment. Some of those pathologies connect to the decline of thrift and sexual continence as Protestant cultural values, which is a real mechanism -- but a different one from literacy decline specifically. Conflating them risks making the argument feel less precise than it deserves to be.
On video versus reading -- I think video represents a different kind of literacy rather than simply its absence. Someone who engages seriously with long-form documentary, follows complex analytical argument in video form, and watches critically is doing something cognitively meaningful. But the distinction you're pointing at is real: reading requires you to construct the world entirely in your own mind. Video does that work for you. The cognitive demand genuinely differs even when the content is equivalent.
What Protestantism cultivated at its best wasn't just functional literacy but a culture of being well-read -- wrestling seriously with difficult texts over time, holding complex arguments in mind, following reasoning across long stretches. That's a higher and more specific capacity than simply being able to decode text. Whether a video-native culture could develop an equivalent -- being genuinely well-watched in a serious and cumulative way -- is the question I'd want to see explored.
Video's superpower is emotional engagement. That's real and valuable -- humans change through emotional experience, not just argument. But emotional engagement without the cognitive scaffolding of serious reading is also more vulnerable to manipulation. The gap between feeling strongly that something is true and having good reasons to believe it is where a lot of cultural damage can accumulate.
I'm not sure if "Protestant" means the same thing today as it did 50-100 years ago, when it was dominated by mainline denominations that were more open to critical inquiry, debate, and study. The mainline churches undermined the faith by going too far down this path, but it's hard to say they were anti-intellectual.
The energy and growth in Protestant circles today is often in pentecostal and fundamentalist churches. Part of their appeal is the "spectacle" of live bands, emotional altar calls and speaking in tongues, as well as heresies like the Prosperity Gospel. But the biggest draw may be the certainty offered to those who dislike critical inquiry. By definition these people aren't readers.
I see the rise of educated young men joining the Orthodox and Catholic faith as a positive. They are stepping into the gap created by the decline in mainline Protestantism and growth of fundamentalist/pentecostal churches. But I hope there is a renewal of the more traditional Protestantism of our forefathers. Competition benefits all parties!
With this said, I suspect that the decline in reading is more the result of a shorter attention span due to changes in media consumption that require less work and focus.
A century ago, Dreiser wrote "An American Tragedy," which sold well in spite of being nearly 900 pages. Do you think people would line up to buy such a long book today?
This quote summarizes the theological underpinning of medieval spirituality that is still prevalent in Roman Catholic spirituality.
“How did the absence of justification lead to dysfunction in medieval spirituality? Catholics believed that they were justified in the process of being sanctified. Since sanctification is never perfect and always in peril during our lifetime, they were imperfectly assured of their salvation. Serious believers could cure this uneasiness by martyrdom, or by the bloodless martyrdom of ascetic spirituality.
Sanctification, bearing an unnatural weight because it was expected to pacify the believer's conscience, was a subject of extraordinary concern. But the ascetic method of sanctification was by amputation, not by healing. If the believer is having trouble with sex, give up sexual relations. If he or she is having difficulty with covetousness, give up private property. If he or she is tempted by power, give up independence. The monastery and the nunnery are sanctification machines that guarantee the surest victory over the sinful use of money, sex and power."
- Richard F. Lovelace, EVANGELICAL SPIRITUALITY: A CHURCH HISTORIAN'S PERSPECTIVE, JETS 31/1 (March 1998)
"Trying to set the bar too high leads to Calvin’s Geneva or Puritan Massachusetts, creating what were arguably repressive societies that contained their own injustices."
This is completely false. That the Puritans or Geneva were repressive is just the narrative that the left spins about them.
I wonder if Jewish culture can be used as a comparison here. Jewish communities in Europe usually had considerably higher male literary rates than their neighbors, and this high literacy made Jews particularly adapted for modernity, even though modernity itself is largely a Protestant invention.
Is Catholicism for young conservative elites or is it for post-literate zoomers? The solution is that there are multiple distinct pathways into Catholicism. I’ve seen 2 main paths in my experience (b. 1996, Ivy League, New England) and will paint a composite portrait of each:
Path 1, Conservative Elite: A young man from Texas goes to Dartmouth. He’s grown up in private Christian schools which are interdenominational and his family hopped churches as they moved around: first a small baptist church, then a mega-church and last a nice PCA church in the suburbs. In college he wants to go deeper than C.S. Lewis and checks out various flavors of Christianity. One year, he looks into Reformed Theology, next year Anglicanism, and of course you can’t not encounter Catholic Theology too. He likes the Catholic stuff, and unlike Reformed Theology or Anglicanism, there are more than 3 other people on campus who are into it. Soon he’s invited to events at a Catholic Study Center; it’s much nicer than the evangelical group’s rented space and he’s actually heard of the speaker (“Ross Douthat’s coming?”). In a semester, his primary social group becomes Catholic and then it’s over. As the evangelicals who study conversion can tell you, the best predictor of coming to/changing one’s faith is your social group. After a year of waffling he crosses the Tiber.
But you won’t go down this path if you are embedded in a particular Protestant tradition on a more than intellectual level. A Korean Presbyterian whose whole family and ethnic identity is tied up in that church, will not do the same searching and experimenting as the mere-Christian product of interdenominational private school and church-hopping. Likewise the Episcopalian product of Episcopal private school and the 4th generation “Baptist born, Baptist bred, and when I die Baptist dead” will not cross the Tiber.
Path 2, all algorithms lead to Rome: A young man from suburban Connecticut grows up going to church once or twice a year, but in high school his uncle dies and he starts having spiritual questions. He goes online for the answers and finds generic Protestant content. He starts watching sermons and gets hypnotized by John MacArthur. He watches stuff online until he gets his license, and then he drives to a Reformed Baptist church occaisonally. The algorithm however pushes fresh content to keep him engaged. From Reformed Baptist sermons come Reformed Baptist debates, debates with Presbyterians, debates with Catholics, debates with Catholic apologists who have their own videos which then slip into his feed. Then like the women who start seeing ads for diapers online before they even know they’re pregnant, his autoplay queue on YouTube becomes a picture of his future. And around the same time he’s “chosen” to start buying the potato chips fried in tallow instead of seed oil, he “chooses” to become Catholic.
But you won’t go down this path if you aren’t addicted to the algorithms. It’s that simple.
So the advice for Protestant parents is: be careful with your kids’ technology and plant yourself in a particular tradition.
Last caveat: these are general trends based on a couple dozen people I know who have considered or converted to Catholicism. Your individual experience may vary, but as we see from Yost’s column and other articles, the general trends are real.
Amusingly, I gave social media just a little bit of Catholic input and eventually I looped around to C. R. Wiley, who occasionally comments here, along with other Protestant content. Shoutout to him and his enjoyment of genealogy.
I basically agree, but do you see any connection to the 20th century giants of conservatism being Catholic? I’m thinking Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley, Pat Buchanan.
Those writers were additional context on my way to becoming Catholic, but not the main persuasion.
I'm not sure. I think for those of us who don't remember 9/11, they are more historical figures than role models. Maybe in that conservatism value have been shaped by these Catholics, but I've never known someone who read a lot of Kirk/Buckley/Buchanan and then converted.
Capitalism began in the cities of Renaissance Italy and the still-Catholic towns of the Low Countries. Apart from loosening the Church's ban on interest (which was already becoming honored mainly in the breach even in Catholic Europe) the Reformation had nothing to do with it.
Re: This in practice produced an extremely literate, sophisticated, disciplined elite, combined with a largely degraded peasantry.
Well, before printing books were very expensive and most people would never hold one in their hands. Printing enabled people to become literate, at least those living in towns and cities who had sufficient leisure for reading.
Re: There’s definitely something to the shift from blogs to Tik Tok.
Also, blogs to podcasts, which are still verbal of course, but do not involve reading.
JonF311. You're correct Catholicism did give birth to Modernity. However, Catholicism has an internal "contradiction", largely reinforced as a consequence of the Reformation where it acts against its own insights. Modernity is a "practical" thing, where as peak Catholicism is an "ascetic" thing. There lies the contradiction.
And gunpowder began in China. And the Ancient Greeks developed an early form of steam-power. And man's first flight took place in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. It's interesting where things start, but the important part is where they're perfected.
Not just "perfected" but that they are birthed into a culture where the ideas can be developed. In many ways Catholicism is only as good as the leadership it has. Reactionary Papal authority, in many ways can work to stifle legitimate forms of Christian expression. Protestantism may appear as a free for all, theologically, but in reality, Christian practice isn't too much different from Catholicism in the main. The main difference is that Protestants can legitimately innovate religious practices that take the clergy forever to recognise as legitimate. i.e Religious tolerance.
Two historical accidents turbo-charged capitalism: the immense death toll of the Black Death, which nonetheless left capital untouched (other than losses of livestock), released a great deal of wealth that previously had been tied up in survival needs. And the Columbian Exchange lit a fire under international trade while also adding vast quantities of precious metals to the world economy. Dutch bankers, who had generations of experience in managing money well before Columbus or Luther, managed to tame the money flow while too many other nations (e.g., Spain) squandered the new wealth on empire-building and gaudy projects for the powerful.
So Catholic Spain squandered the empire for the benefit of the few, leaving a legacy of corruption, inefficiency and graft in their former colonies? While Protestant Britain left behind stable, developed democracies that uplift the common man and lead the world in scientific advancement?
Let's not whitewash the British record. When Britain was about take over Barbados (which had resisted the Europeans until then) the Garifuna natives chose to migrate to Central America and become Spanish subjects rather than chance their luck with the British,.And likewise when Florida came under British rule in 1763 the surviving Timucua accompanied the Spanish to Cuba. There are reasons Native people preferred Spain to Britain as an imperial master.
Overall I suspect the Industrial Revolution would have taken off in Britain initially absent some manner of catastrophe. Location, location, location (and the right mineral resources). By the way the reason the Greek steam engine was not transformative was because it was horribly inefficient. Wind, water, animal power even human muscle were better sources of power. Almost two millennia of successive improvements in metallurgy had to happen before James Watt could give the world efficient steam power.
Great essay, Aaron. Five stars.