Not me, nor my grandson Sam. He was just baptized into Christ in his United Methodist Church in Charlotte, and I am still preaching every Sunday at my Baptist church in Hendersonville.
Not us, but lots of people, including some I know.
But I start with JD Vance, currently running for Vice President of the United States. He grew up Christian, nominally, which he writes about in his best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy. His Evnagelical Christianity wasn’t enough to prevent his slide into atheism during his university years. But marriage, children, and a political career pushed him in another direction, to the Catholic Church, and the Eucharist, and a full-throated confession of faith. That was 2019.
He is not the only one. Conversions to the Roman Catholic way of being Christian are up—way up. The Diocese of Des Moines received 339 converts this year, many of them during the traditional Easter Vigil. Others include Trenton NJ, 347; Galveston/Houston, 2,364; Los Angeles, 3,596; New Orleans, 436; Knoxville, 388; Little Rock, 685; and Ft. Worth, 1,544. To name a few.
Many of these are students, scholars tracking these trends say. At conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan, a student survey documented Catholic profession at 672 (or 43% of the student body) including 23 who entered the church this Easter.
Some are famous people, like the Harvard legal scholar Adrian Vermeule, who is an intellectual leader of the Christian Nationalist movement (known in Catholic circles as Catholic Integralism). Or like conservative TV host Laura Ingraham. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is an adult convert to Roman Catholicism. The late Thomas Merton became famous with the story of his conversion, The Seven Story Mountain (which I read as a teenager),
How to explain this surge in conversions?
Ironically, perhaps, the loss of religion in the wider American culture is to blame (or gets the credit) for this response: a search for values, traditions, rituals, mystery, or certainty. And the social upheaval triggered by the MAGA movement and the COVID pandemic must not be overlooked.
The implosion of Evangelical Christianity and especially the Southern Baptist Convention has, no doubt, played a part. And here I tell the short stories of two of my friends, long term friends, who left their life-long attachment to the Evangelical world to take their place in the Catholic Church.
Tory sought me out when he was running from southern fundamentalism in Dallas and Memphis. I was a pastor in Pittsburgh, and he came there to do student ministry. I listened to his story and recommended Trinity Seminary, a conversative school of The Episcopal Church. He enrolled, graduated, and was ordained into the Episcopal priesthood. He later came to Asbury Seminary to pursue a doctorate in missiology, but while there was drawn to the American Anglican movement that was protesting liberalism in the big church. He took a prominent pastorate and stayed there for 15 years.
But something happened to him and in him, something that disrupted his ministry at the church. His tenure ended abruptly and within months he had been received into the Roman Catholic Church. Today, he directs a family life center at a small Catholic college.
Terry is about the same age as Tory, and his journey is similar. Raised in conversative Baptist culture, he graduated from the university and the seminary, ending up with a doctorate in scripture and preaching. His callings led him to my home church in Kentucky where our paths crossed. They have stayed intertwined for three decades, through his subsequent congregational work in Alabama and Louisiana.
But then, something happened to him and in him, something that disrupted his ministry at the church. He found solace and spirituality in the Roman Catholic Church, following his daughter down the Roman Road to salvation.
Both of these men have found a new way to affirm the conservative Christian values of their Baptist upbringing; and in so doing, they join a veritable wave of students and priests, scholars and activists, homemakers and businessmen who are re-energizing the once-declining bastion of tradition and orthodoxy with fresh enthusiasm and attention.
In so doing, these Catholic converts are challenging Evangelical Christianity for leadership in the meta-movement of cultural conservatism that is ascendant all around us. Who knows where this will lead!
Not me, nor my grandson Sam. He was just baptized into Christ in his United Methodist Church in Charlotte, and I am still preaching every Sunday at my Baptist church in Hendersonville.
Not us, but lots of people, including some I know.
But I start with JD Vance, currently running for Vice President of the United States. He grew up Christian, nominally, which he writes about in his best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy. His Evnagelical Christianity wasn’t enough to prevent his slide into atheism during his university years. But marriage, children, and a political career pushed him in another direction, to the Catholic Church, and the Eucharist, and a full-throated confession of faith. That was 2019.
He is not the only one. Conversions to the Roman Catholic way of being Christian are up—way up. The Diocese of Des Moines received 339 converts this year, many of them during the traditional Easter Vigil. Others include Trenton NJ, 347; Galveston/Houston, 2,364; Los Angeles, 3,596; New Orleans, 436; Knoxville, 388; Little Rock, 685; and Ft. Worth, 1,544. To name a few.
Many of these are students, scholars tracking these trends say. At conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan, a student survey documented Catholic profession at 672 (or 43% of the student body) including 23 who entered the church this Easter.
Some are famous people, like the Harvard legal scholar Adrian Vermeule, who is an intellectual leader of the Christian Nationalist movement (known in Catholic circles as Catholic Integralism). Or like conservative TV host Laura Ingraham. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is an adult convert to Roman Catholicism. The late Thomas Merton became famous with the story of his conversion, The Seven Story Mountain (which I read as a teenager),
How to explain this surge in conversions?
Ironically, perhaps, the loss of religion in the wider American culture is to blame (or gets the credit) for this response: a search for values, traditions, rituals, mystery, or certainty. And the social upheaval triggered by the MAGA movement and the COVID pandemic must not be overlooked.
The implosion of Evangelical Christianity and especially the Southern Baptist Convention has, no doubt, played a part. And here I tell the short stories of two of my friends, long term friends, who left their life-long attachment to the Evangelical world to take their place in the Catholic Church.
Tory sought me out when he was running from southern fundamentalism in Dallas and Memphis. I was a pastor in Pittsburgh, and he came there to do student ministry. I listened to his story and recommended Trinity Seminary, a conversative school of The Episcopal Church. He enrolled, graduated, and was ordained into the Episcopal priesthood. He later came to Asbury Seminary to pursue a doctorate in missiology, but while there was drawn to the American Anglican movement that was protesting liberalism in the big church. He took a prominent pastorate and stayed there for 15 years.
But something happened to him and in him, something that disrupted his ministry at the church. His tenure ended abruptly and within months he had been received into the Roman Catholic Church. Today, he directs a family life center at a small Catholic college.
Terry is about the same age as Tory, and his journey is similar. Raised in conversative Baptist culture, he graduated from the university and the seminary, ending up with a doctorate in scripture and preaching. His callings led him to my home church in Kentucky where our paths crossed. They have stayed intertwined for three decades, through his subsequent congregational work in Alabama and Louisiana.
But then, something happened to him and in him, something that disrupted his ministry at the church. He found solace and spirituality in the Roman Catholic Church, following his daughter down the Roman Road to salvation.
Both of these men have found a new way to affirm the conservative Christian values of their Baptist upbringing; and in so doing, they join a veritable wave of students and priests, scholars and activists, homemakers and businessmen who are re-energizing the once-declining bastion of tradition and orthodoxy with fresh enthusiasm and attention.
In so doing, these Catholic converts are challenging Evangelical Christianity for leadership in the meta-movement of cultural conservatism that is ascendant all around us. Who knows where this will lead!
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