The Lure of Rome

Converting to Catholicism, theses on the WASPs and more in this week's digest.

I had planned to put up a post yesterday, but was feeling unwell. I still am, but it requires less mental focus to put up a link roundup than an original piece.

The Lure of Rome

Emma Freire at World has an interesting article about why so many evangelicals in America’s power centers are converting to Catholicism.

Smith moved to Washington for a job in the conservative movement. That same month she was invited to a big party at the home of a Catholic friend. “It was really fun and sweet,” she said. But Smith noticed that, as a Protestant, she was in the minority. That was her first taste of the city’s vibrant Catholic social scene. Several years later, she enrolled in law school at the Catholic University of America. She continued attending Church of the Advent but also went to Mass. “I would just duck into daily Mass because I loved it,” she said.

When young Protestants move to Washington, it’s usually not long before they start meeting smart, influential conservatives who believe Rome is the one true church. Like many of her peers, Smith began to ask herself: Should I swim the Tiber?

Roman Catholics exiting their church are disproportionately driving declining rates of Christianity in America. And far more Catholics convert to Protestant denominations than vice versa. But you wouldn’t know it if you looked only at places like Washington and some influential university campuses. A small but vocal group of Protestants is converting to Catholicism—and in even smaller numbers to Eastern Orthodoxy. They tend to be ambitious, highly educated, and well connected. Catholics now provide much of the conservative movement’s intellectual horsepower—and they are picking up Protestant converts along the way.

…

Adam Nicholson, a member of Church of the Resurrection, listened attentively. He had answered the question “Should I convert to Rome?” in the negative several years before. Nicholson was raised Baptist and began attending an Anglican church in college. When he moved to Washington in the mid-2000s, he found himself immersed in a Catholic community.

“I dated several Catholic girls, was always going to Catholic parties, lived in a house with a bunch of Roman Catholic guys,” he said.

Nicholson eventually enrolled in the Catholic Church’s membership classes, called the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, but later dropped out. He realized the classes were for people who had definitely decided to convert, and he still had fundamental questions.

Nicholson met several times with a priest recommended by a friend who said he was good at providing answers. Before the meetings, Nicholson researched Catholic doctrine about Mary, the mother of Jesus, and came prepared with some challenging questions. He was unimpressed with the priest’s lack of answers. “He didn’t blow up in anger, but he basically acted like it was crazy that I could be raising any of those things,” Nicholson said.

Click over to read the whole thing.

35 Theses on the WASPs

Tanner Greer, whom I just had on the podcast, is out with his list of 35 theses on the old White Anglo-Saxon Protestant upper class. I would say I’m broadly aligned with Greer’s takes, though might have some different emphases and some additions. Maybe I’ll engage with these in more depth at some point, but for now I can simple commend them to you as good reading.

7. The “fusion” of the new class was not only ideological, economic, and political, but biological. The marriage of the different wings of the Eastern Establishment was literally consummated on hundreds of Northeastern bridal beds.

8. The cultural, political, and economic sway of the Civil War generation had unusual longevity. The young officers, politicos, and financiers who gave their youth to Union victory would dominate the American scene through the first decade of the 20th-century. Their children and grandchildren would exert similar influence through the 1930s (and more limited but still significant influence several decades past that).

9. The origins of this class imprinted it with certain ideological priorities: above all else, an ironclad commitment to the integration and greatness of the American nation.

10. This class was also committed to technological acceleration. The Second Industrial Revolution was the primary source of the Eastern Establishment’s wealth. Their greatest accomplishment may have been the creation of the legal, financial, and administrative systems that made this revolution possible.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Best of the Web

James Wood: Beyond the Manosphere

NYT: Dramas Keep Showing Us Hapless Men — and Hypercompetent Women (gift link) - Shouldn’t be surprising to anyone

Chris Arnade: Walking, Wittgenstein, and God

WSJ: The Rise and Fall of the American Monoculture (gift link) - For most of the 20th century, pop culture was the glue that held the U.S. together. But what will it mean now that everything has splintered?

Ryan Burge: Money and Leadership in the Presbyterian Church in America - This is an interesting one in that it allows you to calculate how much congregational giving you should be taking in based on your church size.

WSJ: Elite Colleges Are Back at the Top of the List for Company Recruiters - As white-collar hiring slows down and corporate DEI goals vanish, where you went to college matters again

New Content and Media Mentions

I got links this week from American Reformer, Titus Techera, Terry Mattingly, Mere Orthodoxy, the Washington Examiner and from Conor Friedersdorf.

Here’s a video of me giving a talk about my evangelical elite article at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Battle Ground, Washington.

New this week:

• Dying to Give - Why parents should financially bless their children now, not after the funeral - this is a very popular piece that’s getting a lot of readership and already has one major republication request

• My podcast this week is with Tanner Greer on his essay about the making of America’s techno-nationalist elite.

Cover image: Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC by eVanNicole/Wikiemedia, CC BY-SA 4.0