“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”
This is, I believe, a common experience, and causes confusion for a number of would-be converts. As a convert to Catholicism myself, I believe it comes down to this: unreservedly affirming, understanding, and being able to fully explain the Church’s propositions is not what makes you a Catholic. Of course it’s better for a Catholic to be zealous, knowledgeable, and articulate. But you don’t just cease to be Catholic if you’re not too sure exactly why the church insists on certain things about Mary, that would be a crazy thing to say! And if propositional uncertainty is a bad reason for a Catholic not to be Catholic, well then maybe it’s a bad reason for a non-Catholic not to be Catholic, too.
Put differently, having been both, the activity of affirming propositions just takes up a smaller percentage of the experience of being a Catholic than the experience (at an equivalent level of fervor, all else being equal, etc.) of being a (confessional) Protestant.
In my experience, Catholic apologetics are very lame. I may not be dealing with the best perhaps, but all I hear is a relentless "defend the guild" mentality that repeats talking points with little to no effort at genuinely convincing someone.
Your experience seems very odd to me, which makes me ask, who do you think is doing good Protestant apologetics?
I found Catholic apologetics to be far more wholistic and robust than Protestant apologetics. I've found Protestant apologetics to be overly reliant on not just Scripture but a priori assumptions of Scriptural interpretation that don't hold up to scrutiny. Throw in ahistorical assertions about the development of Christianity and pseudoscientific defenses that repel people with a modicum of scientific acumen (looking at you, Ken Ham), and I didn't see any comparison between the two. It really makes me wonder whom you were listening to on both sides of that equation?
I would hold that Roman Catholic vs. Protestant apologetics have tended to be pretty bad in general. The mid-century critiques lost most of their fire when both camps became primarily focused on conservative vs. liberal conflicts, and so we Millennials were barely exposed to the old lines of attack. Especially for Mainline Protestants, who lost 100% of their once potent interest in attacking the RCC.
The 90s - to early 00s Internet was dominated by Christian vs. atheist debates, Millennials grew up in this environment. But again, I never saw RC vs. Protestant really hashed out.
More recently, Ortlund has been working to fill this niche for a good Protestant apologia to some degree. Someone recommended his book "What It Means to be Protestant" in a prior comment section. I would concur that it's a good read.
But again, I didn't encounter this stuff when I was searching back in my 20s. The only real anti-RC talking point I heard back then was that priests tend to be homosexuals and pederasts. I heard this even from a nominal Cradle Catholic friend who still goes to Mass but tried to talk me out of converting.
I don't think this is an entirely illegitimate line of critique, but for me it isn't sufficient to disprove the RCC's claims. So when I was considering RC in my 20s, I mostly felt I had to reach conclusions for myself, without much guidance.
Now, I'll note that I'm in the unusual position of having attended an RC high school despite growing up Mainline Protestant. The only real anti-Protestant, or pro-RC apologetic I experienced from my teachers there was that Protestants are anti-science literalist fundie grape juice drinkers (the Mainline was of course invisible in this critique; then and now, not a threat). The Left Behind series was prominent at the time, understand, and so the main apologetic line was, "That is not us."
Interestingly, in my conversations with Gen Z Christians, none of them have even heard of Left Behind.
And I don't think you are dealing with the best, but the best Catholic apologetics doesn't really present itself as apologetics. Balthasar isn't doing apologetics, but reading Balthasar as a theologically interested protestant made me long for all that he was able to partake in
Catholic apologetics are frequently very lame! In part maybe because [take your pick of: history/beauty/the sacraments/being the one church that didn't compromise on birth control] provides a kind of 'handicap' whereby Catholics can win converts with more haphazard apologetics
For what it's worth, I'm a Protestant who explored RCIA in my 20s, some 15-20 years ago. My sense was that the old ladies teaching the class (I didn't even get so far as to meet a priest) mainly regarded the prospect of converting to RC as something one does because of marriage. They didn't really know how to make sense of me.
To me, it reinforced the notion that converting to RC is something that a lot of intellectuals do but it's Very Online; it's very possible to be on the front lines of bringing people into the RCC and have never encountered an intellectual would-be convert.
This is very different from the non-denom world, which is used to taking people in from a very wide range of backgrounds. Though it might not be so different from, say, the Lutheran world.
Spouting Thomas, Your experience regarding RCIA is quite common. Most Catholic parishes are moribund and dying because such church ladies run things. However, there are many notable exceptions, and it is easy to take a statement like the following too far, "it's very possible to be on the front lines of bringing people into the RCC and have never encountered an intellectual would-be convert." Ignorant people are everywhere. It isn't that intellectuals like you are super uncommon in RCIA programs, but it is true that many people running RCIA programs are often poorly formed themselves and unprepared to handle deep questions. One would need to find an RCIA program run by an intellectual. In my journey, I found Protestant pastors of several denominations to be equally incompetent, for what it's worth, and I didn't stop at the local youth/young adult pastor. I talked to several pastors of various denominations, and even spoke to a pastor who was a former Irish Catholic priest to steel man the Protestant position vis-à-vis Catholicism (that took some asking around and a bit of driving to meet up). If you had persisted, I'm sure you could have found someone who could talk to you rationally and answer your questions. It isn't easy, though, to find such a person when one is an outsider to the community and doesn't know whom to talk to. God promises that if we seek him with all our heart that we will find him: he doesn't say that is an easy task or that it can be accomplished in a few visits to a random local parish.
Once I was in a meeting with Catholic school leaders reading a Vatican document about Catholic education, and one said that she had no idea what it means to "renew our commitment to knowledge that is as intellectually responsible and rigorous as it is deeply human." She had no idea how knowledge could be "deeply human" and she is on paper a successful leader in the local Catholic school community. However, there are people who do understand what it means to have a Catholic anthropology of the human person and how that affects the education of children. The key is to figure out how to plug into the network of intellectuals in whatever group you want to learn about and get information from their best and brightest and not merely the average John Doe.
What I do find flabbergasting is your assertion that "the non-denom world... is used to taking people in from a very wide range of backgrounds." Sure, to an extent, but a non-denom who understand history and science and can answer deep questions about apologetics, those people are rare as hen's teeth. A non-denom pastor who can handle inquiries from a senior scientist or fellow from a national lab? Your average non-denom pastor is a literal 6-day creationist! One that can handle questions from a guy like JD Vance? I've never found one, and I've looked around an awful lot. Most couldn't tell you the first thing about how the canon of Scripture came to be. They know next to nothing about Church history and have never read any of the Church fathers, except out-of-context passages of Augustine, whom they ignorantly claim as their own because Calvin or Tim Keller cited him a few times. If you mention Stanley Jaki's books on the history of science as it relates to faith and culture, their eyes glaze over with the dull look of incomprehension. Their interpretations of Biblical books like Genesis and the Apocalypse contain none of the depth and nuance that one finds in the vast repository of the faith throughout the centuries. Jordan Peterson's series on Genesis contains far more depth than the average non-denom's. I honestly can't imagine where you are coming from to make such an assertion.
I think you misunderstood in some sense what I was saying. In that comment, I wasn't even making an observation about who is better. I wasn't saying that RCIA church ladies are significantly less educated than average non-denom pastors, or much less-equipped in theology or apologetics (though they might be). I was saying that, in my now slightly dated experience -- and this at the largest RC parish in a city with a good-sized population of college students -- the ladies were simply unaccustomed to the idea that someone might convert to the RCC after a process of intellectual investigation. It wasn't about being outmatched, it was about being unfamiliar with the very idea.
The pastors at a successful non-denom church are familiar with growth. "Seeker sensitive" is a common phrase here, maybe a notorious one by now. In probably the majority of non-denoms, the current pastors were involved in building that church from the ground up. They don't have the equivalent of Cradle Catholics to fall back on. That means they have taken in a variety of people. Ex-Mainliners, ex-Catholics, people leaving other evangelical churches, people who were raised outside the church. It's also pretty common for non-denom pastors to have spent some time in the mission field and been exposed to other parts of the world, other religions.
So that just means they're accustomed to questions. But if the questions are coming from someone that outmatches them intellectually -- then sure, they're going to be outmatched. The best they can probably do is point you to some better resources or someone who knows more about a specific topic.
I converted in Utah, which probably goes a long way to explaining why most of the people in RCIA with me were pretty intellectually motivated; they were really making a sacrifice.
The World article could have used a little more thought. This quote in particular shows a striking lack of awareness and highlights a huge blind spot for Protestants. "Littlejohn points out that today Christians have to answer questions like, “What is a human being in an age of transhumanism?” When placed within that context, he argues, “The differences between Protestants and Catholics are not actually relevant to most of the cultural battles that we’re facing.”"
I think Protestantism is uniquely compromised and unable to deal with the coming wave of transhumanist technology. As evidence, just look at the fact that Protestants have formally embraced the first widespread, effective transhumanist technology (contraception) and no denomination condemns the buying and selling of babies through IVF. Sure, individuals like Katy Faust do, but denominations are silent on this topic.
It is looking into topics like transhumanism that drives people like Mary Harrington into the arms of Catholics. I predict that transhumanism will become as big a magnet to Catholicism as abortion has been, since Catholics were so far out ahead of Protestants in opposing abortion (something the Baptists initially supported), many, many pro-life leaders converted to Catholicism. Catholic leadership in the area of transhumanism, especially in fleshing out an intellectual framework to understand the difference between normative health and "improving" on human design, will attract many Protestant converts from those most committed to human flourishing and opposed to transhumanism.
It is also curious that the Orthodox are growing in spite of them have almost no political influence in Washington, and certainly a lot less than elite Protestants. Who is the Orthodox version of Ted Cruz or Mike Huckabee? It definitely undermines the idea that people are leaving Protestantism to make elite connections. Personally, I think Francis was in no small way responsible for the huge growth in Orthodox conversions in a negative sense, while people like Jonathan Pageau (with Jordan Peterson's imprimatur) were big magnets legitimizing Orthodoxy as intellectually sound.
Re: It is also curious that the Orthodox are growing in spite of them have almost no political influence in Washington
What does the one thing have to do with the other? That a church may be growing (or not) has no connection to mere secular politics. Christianity in the Roman Empire grew for 300 years with no influence on the imperial establishment in Rome-- quite the opposite usually.
Your point is well taken. I only brought it up because the lack of mentors and Evangelical social circles in Washington DC was given as a primary reason for elite evangelical conversions to Catholicism. However, if that was truly a primary driver, then why do you see so many elite Evangelical conversions to Orthodoxy?
Personally, I'm skeptical that people are converting primarily to advance their career. I think they are converting for the same reasons that they do at Evangelical colleges like Wheaton and Hillsdale with Great Books programs: they find the Catholic faith to ring more true, and the intellectual tradition much more robust, historically grounded, and capable of addressing the pressing moral questions of the day than they ever dreamed possible. People in DC know that Western culture is under sustained attack and that survival is not guaranteed. If we are to have a chance at preserving even small pockets of Christian culture, we need to pull from the best of our tradition to find effective ways to preserve space to raise our kids in the faith in order to outlast our enemies that want to crush our communities.
Plus, once people read deeply in history or get to know well formed Catholics, they discover that most of what they were taught by their pastors about Catholic beliefs were misrepresentations and calumnies. It really is a shock to the system to read about Christian history and the writings of the Church fathers when your only previous exposure has been through your local Calvary Chapel or Calvinist pastor and church guest speakers.
So, I agree. Elites aren't converting to Catholicism and Orthodoxy in order to advance their careers, at least not consciously.
Agreed on all points. I am rooting for a Protestant remnant who can carve out a niche. Some people like to continue as they are used to doing and there is room to accept that as mysterious. I am a convert to Catholicism because I believe it is true, and personally I probably have less status from doing so.
In addition to denominations not taking a stand and making it too hard for a remnant to get together, Protestant parachurch organizations have not been able to keep to orthodoxy at colleges. How many articles in the past decade have we seen about splits between official takes, new directives toward mushy faith, and long time workers who leave in tears and disgust? National promises are not necessarily held out at the local level.
If regular college parachurch organizations can't hold the line on good teaching, how on earth does anyone expect to do more?
"I am a convert to Catholicism because I believe it is true, and personally I probably have less status from doing so."
I'm in the same boat. I definitely lost status and friends by converting to Catholicism. In the short term I gained some status by moving away from 6-day Creationism, but I then lost status because Catholics oppose contraception and think the Eucharist is truly the body and blood of Christ. Plus, my conversion alienated family and close childhood friends. Your experience and mine seem far more typical than what Aaron asserts about people gaining status.
If I squint, I can kind of see what he is saying about gaining status 25 years later, now that I have achieved some measure of career success and work at a national lab. There is no Protestant Union of Scientists giving talks about science and faith: there is a Catholic Union of Scientists. However, this doesn't really confer status in the broader community. It mostly offers a respite from the attacks of modern leftists and provides a community of friends in the same boat, weathering the same storm, but doing so in a joyful, confidently assertive manner. Even then, I don't see that conferring status would be a major reason to convert, especially compared to the opportunity to integrate the scientific and spiritual aspects of oneself into a harmonious whole.
But no Protestant church will start offering daily worship still. My Presbyterian pastor looked at me baffled when I asked if the Eucharist would be served at the Christmas Eve service this year. Devotion is all week, not just on Sundays.
“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”
This is, I believe, a common experience, and causes confusion for a number of would-be converts. As a convert to Catholicism myself, I believe it comes down to this: unreservedly affirming, understanding, and being able to fully explain the Church’s propositions is not what makes you a Catholic. Of course it’s better for a Catholic to be zealous, knowledgeable, and articulate. But you don’t just cease to be Catholic if you’re not too sure exactly why the church insists on certain things about Mary, that would be a crazy thing to say! And if propositional uncertainty is a bad reason for a Catholic not to be Catholic, well then maybe it’s a bad reason for a non-Catholic not to be Catholic, too.
Put differently, having been both, the activity of affirming propositions just takes up a smaller percentage of the experience of being a Catholic than the experience (at an equivalent level of fervor, all else being equal, etc.) of being a (confessional) Protestant.
In my experience, Catholic apologetics are very lame. I may not be dealing with the best perhaps, but all I hear is a relentless "defend the guild" mentality that repeats talking points with little to no effort at genuinely convincing someone.
Your experience seems very odd to me, which makes me ask, who do you think is doing good Protestant apologetics?
I found Catholic apologetics to be far more wholistic and robust than Protestant apologetics. I've found Protestant apologetics to be overly reliant on not just Scripture but a priori assumptions of Scriptural interpretation that don't hold up to scrutiny. Throw in ahistorical assertions about the development of Christianity and pseudoscientific defenses that repel people with a modicum of scientific acumen (looking at you, Ken Ham), and I didn't see any comparison between the two. It really makes me wonder whom you were listening to on both sides of that equation?
I would hold that Roman Catholic vs. Protestant apologetics have tended to be pretty bad in general. The mid-century critiques lost most of their fire when both camps became primarily focused on conservative vs. liberal conflicts, and so we Millennials were barely exposed to the old lines of attack. Especially for Mainline Protestants, who lost 100% of their once potent interest in attacking the RCC.
The 90s - to early 00s Internet was dominated by Christian vs. atheist debates, Millennials grew up in this environment. But again, I never saw RC vs. Protestant really hashed out.
More recently, Ortlund has been working to fill this niche for a good Protestant apologia to some degree. Someone recommended his book "What It Means to be Protestant" in a prior comment section. I would concur that it's a good read.
But again, I didn't encounter this stuff when I was searching back in my 20s. The only real anti-RC talking point I heard back then was that priests tend to be homosexuals and pederasts. I heard this even from a nominal Cradle Catholic friend who still goes to Mass but tried to talk me out of converting.
I don't think this is an entirely illegitimate line of critique, but for me it isn't sufficient to disprove the RCC's claims. So when I was considering RC in my 20s, I mostly felt I had to reach conclusions for myself, without much guidance.
Now, I'll note that I'm in the unusual position of having attended an RC high school despite growing up Mainline Protestant. The only real anti-Protestant, or pro-RC apologetic I experienced from my teachers there was that Protestants are anti-science literalist fundie grape juice drinkers (the Mainline was of course invisible in this critique; then and now, not a threat). The Left Behind series was prominent at the time, understand, and so the main apologetic line was, "That is not us."
Interestingly, in my conversations with Gen Z Christians, none of them have even heard of Left Behind.
And I don't think you are dealing with the best, but the best Catholic apologetics doesn't really present itself as apologetics. Balthasar isn't doing apologetics, but reading Balthasar as a theologically interested protestant made me long for all that he was able to partake in
Catholic apologetics are frequently very lame! In part maybe because [take your pick of: history/beauty/the sacraments/being the one church that didn't compromise on birth control] provides a kind of 'handicap' whereby Catholics can win converts with more haphazard apologetics
Appreciate the perspective.
For what it's worth, I'm a Protestant who explored RCIA in my 20s, some 15-20 years ago. My sense was that the old ladies teaching the class (I didn't even get so far as to meet a priest) mainly regarded the prospect of converting to RC as something one does because of marriage. They didn't really know how to make sense of me.
To me, it reinforced the notion that converting to RC is something that a lot of intellectuals do but it's Very Online; it's very possible to be on the front lines of bringing people into the RCC and have never encountered an intellectual would-be convert.
This is very different from the non-denom world, which is used to taking people in from a very wide range of backgrounds. Though it might not be so different from, say, the Lutheran world.
Spouting Thomas, Your experience regarding RCIA is quite common. Most Catholic parishes are moribund and dying because such church ladies run things. However, there are many notable exceptions, and it is easy to take a statement like the following too far, "it's very possible to be on the front lines of bringing people into the RCC and have never encountered an intellectual would-be convert." Ignorant people are everywhere. It isn't that intellectuals like you are super uncommon in RCIA programs, but it is true that many people running RCIA programs are often poorly formed themselves and unprepared to handle deep questions. One would need to find an RCIA program run by an intellectual. In my journey, I found Protestant pastors of several denominations to be equally incompetent, for what it's worth, and I didn't stop at the local youth/young adult pastor. I talked to several pastors of various denominations, and even spoke to a pastor who was a former Irish Catholic priest to steel man the Protestant position vis-à-vis Catholicism (that took some asking around and a bit of driving to meet up). If you had persisted, I'm sure you could have found someone who could talk to you rationally and answer your questions. It isn't easy, though, to find such a person when one is an outsider to the community and doesn't know whom to talk to. God promises that if we seek him with all our heart that we will find him: he doesn't say that is an easy task or that it can be accomplished in a few visits to a random local parish.
Once I was in a meeting with Catholic school leaders reading a Vatican document about Catholic education, and one said that she had no idea what it means to "renew our commitment to knowledge that is as intellectually responsible and rigorous as it is deeply human." She had no idea how knowledge could be "deeply human" and she is on paper a successful leader in the local Catholic school community. However, there are people who do understand what it means to have a Catholic anthropology of the human person and how that affects the education of children. The key is to figure out how to plug into the network of intellectuals in whatever group you want to learn about and get information from their best and brightest and not merely the average John Doe.
What I do find flabbergasting is your assertion that "the non-denom world... is used to taking people in from a very wide range of backgrounds." Sure, to an extent, but a non-denom who understand history and science and can answer deep questions about apologetics, those people are rare as hen's teeth. A non-denom pastor who can handle inquiries from a senior scientist or fellow from a national lab? Your average non-denom pastor is a literal 6-day creationist! One that can handle questions from a guy like JD Vance? I've never found one, and I've looked around an awful lot. Most couldn't tell you the first thing about how the canon of Scripture came to be. They know next to nothing about Church history and have never read any of the Church fathers, except out-of-context passages of Augustine, whom they ignorantly claim as their own because Calvin or Tim Keller cited him a few times. If you mention Stanley Jaki's books on the history of science as it relates to faith and culture, their eyes glaze over with the dull look of incomprehension. Their interpretations of Biblical books like Genesis and the Apocalypse contain none of the depth and nuance that one finds in the vast repository of the faith throughout the centuries. Jordan Peterson's series on Genesis contains far more depth than the average non-denom's. I honestly can't imagine where you are coming from to make such an assertion.
Thanks for the perspective.
I think you misunderstood in some sense what I was saying. In that comment, I wasn't even making an observation about who is better. I wasn't saying that RCIA church ladies are significantly less educated than average non-denom pastors, or much less-equipped in theology or apologetics (though they might be). I was saying that, in my now slightly dated experience -- and this at the largest RC parish in a city with a good-sized population of college students -- the ladies were simply unaccustomed to the idea that someone might convert to the RCC after a process of intellectual investigation. It wasn't about being outmatched, it was about being unfamiliar with the very idea.
The pastors at a successful non-denom church are familiar with growth. "Seeker sensitive" is a common phrase here, maybe a notorious one by now. In probably the majority of non-denoms, the current pastors were involved in building that church from the ground up. They don't have the equivalent of Cradle Catholics to fall back on. That means they have taken in a variety of people. Ex-Mainliners, ex-Catholics, people leaving other evangelical churches, people who were raised outside the church. It's also pretty common for non-denom pastors to have spent some time in the mission field and been exposed to other parts of the world, other religions.
So that just means they're accustomed to questions. But if the questions are coming from someone that outmatches them intellectually -- then sure, they're going to be outmatched. The best they can probably do is point you to some better resources or someone who knows more about a specific topic.
I converted in Utah, which probably goes a long way to explaining why most of the people in RCIA with me were pretty intellectually motivated; they were really making a sacrifice.
The World article could have used a little more thought. This quote in particular shows a striking lack of awareness and highlights a huge blind spot for Protestants. "Littlejohn points out that today Christians have to answer questions like, “What is a human being in an age of transhumanism?” When placed within that context, he argues, “The differences between Protestants and Catholics are not actually relevant to most of the cultural battles that we’re facing.”"
I think Protestantism is uniquely compromised and unable to deal with the coming wave of transhumanist technology. As evidence, just look at the fact that Protestants have formally embraced the first widespread, effective transhumanist technology (contraception) and no denomination condemns the buying and selling of babies through IVF. Sure, individuals like Katy Faust do, but denominations are silent on this topic.
It is looking into topics like transhumanism that drives people like Mary Harrington into the arms of Catholics. I predict that transhumanism will become as big a magnet to Catholicism as abortion has been, since Catholics were so far out ahead of Protestants in opposing abortion (something the Baptists initially supported), many, many pro-life leaders converted to Catholicism. Catholic leadership in the area of transhumanism, especially in fleshing out an intellectual framework to understand the difference between normative health and "improving" on human design, will attract many Protestant converts from those most committed to human flourishing and opposed to transhumanism.
https://www.maryharrington.co.uk/p/feminism-and-identity-in-the-transhuman
It is also curious that the Orthodox are growing in spite of them have almost no political influence in Washington, and certainly a lot less than elite Protestants. Who is the Orthodox version of Ted Cruz or Mike Huckabee? It definitely undermines the idea that people are leaving Protestantism to make elite connections. Personally, I think Francis was in no small way responsible for the huge growth in Orthodox conversions in a negative sense, while people like Jonathan Pageau (with Jordan Peterson's imprimatur) were big magnets legitimizing Orthodoxy as intellectually sound.
Re: It is also curious that the Orthodox are growing in spite of them have almost no political influence in Washington
What does the one thing have to do with the other? That a church may be growing (or not) has no connection to mere secular politics. Christianity in the Roman Empire grew for 300 years with no influence on the imperial establishment in Rome-- quite the opposite usually.
Your point is well taken. I only brought it up because the lack of mentors and Evangelical social circles in Washington DC was given as a primary reason for elite evangelical conversions to Catholicism. However, if that was truly a primary driver, then why do you see so many elite Evangelical conversions to Orthodoxy?
Personally, I'm skeptical that people are converting primarily to advance their career. I think they are converting for the same reasons that they do at Evangelical colleges like Wheaton and Hillsdale with Great Books programs: they find the Catholic faith to ring more true, and the intellectual tradition much more robust, historically grounded, and capable of addressing the pressing moral questions of the day than they ever dreamed possible. People in DC know that Western culture is under sustained attack and that survival is not guaranteed. If we are to have a chance at preserving even small pockets of Christian culture, we need to pull from the best of our tradition to find effective ways to preserve space to raise our kids in the faith in order to outlast our enemies that want to crush our communities.
Plus, once people read deeply in history or get to know well formed Catholics, they discover that most of what they were taught by their pastors about Catholic beliefs were misrepresentations and calumnies. It really is a shock to the system to read about Christian history and the writings of the Church fathers when your only previous exposure has been through your local Calvary Chapel or Calvinist pastor and church guest speakers.
So, I agree. Elites aren't converting to Catholicism and Orthodoxy in order to advance their careers, at least not consciously.
Agreed on all points. I am rooting for a Protestant remnant who can carve out a niche. Some people like to continue as they are used to doing and there is room to accept that as mysterious. I am a convert to Catholicism because I believe it is true, and personally I probably have less status from doing so.
In addition to denominations not taking a stand and making it too hard for a remnant to get together, Protestant parachurch organizations have not been able to keep to orthodoxy at colleges. How many articles in the past decade have we seen about splits between official takes, new directives toward mushy faith, and long time workers who leave in tears and disgust? National promises are not necessarily held out at the local level.
If regular college parachurch organizations can't hold the line on good teaching, how on earth does anyone expect to do more?
"I am a convert to Catholicism because I believe it is true, and personally I probably have less status from doing so."
I'm in the same boat. I definitely lost status and friends by converting to Catholicism. In the short term I gained some status by moving away from 6-day Creationism, but I then lost status because Catholics oppose contraception and think the Eucharist is truly the body and blood of Christ. Plus, my conversion alienated family and close childhood friends. Your experience and mine seem far more typical than what Aaron asserts about people gaining status.
If I squint, I can kind of see what he is saying about gaining status 25 years later, now that I have achieved some measure of career success and work at a national lab. There is no Protestant Union of Scientists giving talks about science and faith: there is a Catholic Union of Scientists. However, this doesn't really confer status in the broader community. It mostly offers a respite from the attacks of modern leftists and provides a community of friends in the same boat, weathering the same storm, but doing so in a joyful, confidently assertive manner. Even then, I don't see that conferring status would be a major reason to convert, especially compared to the opportunity to integrate the scientific and spiritual aspects of oneself into a harmonious whole.
But no Protestant church will start offering daily worship still. My Presbyterian pastor looked at me baffled when I asked if the Eucharist would be served at the Christmas Eve service this year. Devotion is all week, not just on Sundays.