Catholic Conversionism
More on why people convert to Catholicism, the Baby Boomer high life and more in this week's digest.
Following up on my piece about J. D. Vance rejecting evangelicalism, someone sent me his 2020 writeup in the Lamp about his Catholic conversion story. He writes:
The second insight is that my abandonment of religion was more cultural than intellectual. There were ways in which I found my religion difficult to square with science as it came to me. I’ve never been a classical Darwinist, for instance, for reasons David Gelerntner has outlined in his excellent new book. But evolutionary theory in some form struck me as plausible, and though I consumed Tornado in a Junkyard and every other work of Young Earth Creationism, I eventually got to the point where I couldn’t square my understanding of biology with what my church told me I had to believe. I was never so committed to Young Earth Creationism that I felt I had to choose between biology and Genesis. But the tension between a scientific account of our origin and the biblical account I’d absorbed made it easier to discard my faith.
And he directly acknowledges the subtle cultural pressures that led him to initially abandon Christianity.
And if I can say something in my defense: it wasn’t exactly conscious. I didn’t think to myself, “I am not going to be a Christian because Christians are rubes and I want to plant myself firmly in the meritocratic master class.” Socialization operates in more subtle, but more powerful ways….In college, very few of my friends and even fewer of my professors had any sort of religious faith. Secularism may not have been a prerequisite to join the elites, but it sure made things easier.
A reader emailed me with his experience in college at NYU:
This was two decades ago, but I still remember being actively recruited to Catholicism while a student at NYU, first through invitations to the Newman Club and then the regional Opus Dei headquarters. There was flattery and various promises of becoming part of a structured organization with a clear role to play. Unlike my other peers, the Catholics at these institutions were very open to discussions with Protestants and atheists--a strongly male-coded environment of inquiry and debate. All this was extremely tempting for a young man with no real meaningful background, no career direction, and no religious tradition to fall back on, but eventually I said no and was baptized into the Reformed tradition through Timothy Keller's ministry. One of my friends at the time, a diehard political conservative from the South with a squishy low-church Evangelical background, did end up converting through the Newman Club and Opus Dei outreach, but it was transparently because it afforded him more social status. Interestingly, like JD Vance, he was on an elite professional track through the Stern business school. And although he had converted to Catholicism, my friend still routinely attended Keller's church because he found the preaching to be so insightful.
I think your observation about cultural confidence has helped me make sense of this experience. The Catholics who tried to convert me were very confident in their beliefs and institutions. Keller's preaching was also confident because it directly wrestled with secular culture.
And sharing his own story about Catholic intellectual support networks, Presbyterian pastor C. R. Wiley wrote in the comments:
I lived in Cambridge for a decade and went to Harvard Divinity School--people who know me know that much. What they don't know is that some of my biggest supporters are Catholics like Patrick Deneen. Speaking of Harvard and Patrick I recall a time when Patrick was lecturing at Harvard to an audience of about 500 people; he spotted me in the crowd. He stopped his lecture, pointed at me and said, "That's C. R. Wiley over there. You need to get his latest book, 'Man of the House'." That's the support I get from Catholic intellectuals like Deneen, Tony Esolen, Brad Birzer, and Mark Bauerlein. Know how many people in my denomination do that sort of thing? A couple--and that's about it. Most people in the PCA are middle-brow, middle-management. They're people who don't take risks intellectually or otherwise. If all there was to it is intellectual kinship I would have left evangelicalism long ago. [emphasis added]
An interesting article on this topic that I’ve shared before is Onis Kamel’s article on the power of the Catholic intellectual ecosystem.
And for those who didn’t watch it, I recorded a podcast with Brad Littlejohn and Chris Castaldo about the topics of why evangelicals convert to Catholicism.
It’s worth noting that although intellectuals often convert from evangelicalism to Catholicism, a lot more people over all convert the other direction, from Catholicism to evangelicalism.
Related from the NYT: America’s New Catholic Priests: Young, Confident and Conservative
The Boomer High Life
The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about how a lot of Boomers are living it up, partying like it’s 1999.
Georgetown Mayor Josh Schroeder couldn’t be more pleased. The seniors moving into Sun City are active and eager to spend.
“It’s like they’re at college except they don’t have to go to class and they have $3 million in the bank,” said Schroeder, who at a spry 47 isn’t eligible for Sun City. “It’s almost like a cruise ship on land.”
Older Americans are emerging as major drivers of the economy. Their stock portfolios, retirement savings and paid-off homes have swelled in value over decades of growth. Hours once spent raising young children and working can now be devoted to golf, concerts and brunch.
Today, Americans 55 and over control nearly 70% of U.S. household wealth, according to the Federal Reserve. In 1989, the first year of available data, they controlled just 50%. Their dollars amount to 45% of U.S. personal spending, according to Moody’s Analytics, up from 29% three decades ago.
There are certainly many Boomers who are financially stressed, but this is objectively America’s wealthiest and most prosperous generation. At the same time, seniors benefit from an array of special benefits regardless of need. In some places, people over the age of 65 get special property tax breaks, for example. There are senior discounts everywhere.
It’s interesting how many Boomers are simply spending their money on themselves in an idle retirement rather than trying to preserve an inheritance for their children. Again, this isn’t all of them. It’s the same as helping out with grandchildren. Some are actually almost full time caregivers while others basically do nothing to help their children out in the child rearing category. But it’s certainly a major trend.
Best of the Web
The Atlantic: Why Parents Don’t Mind If Their Kids Don’t Marry
WSJ: More Women Are Working Than Ever. But They’re Doing Two Jobs - Interesting to read this after I linked to a piece a couple weeks ago showing that according to the American Time Use Survey, men and women actually do about the same total amount of work when you sum up job, housework, and childcare.
Harpers: The Demon Slayers: The new age of American exorcisms - This article is a look at the ministry of Greg Locke. It seems pretty clear that Locke loves media attention. A lot of what he does seems tailor made to attract it.
Michael Foster had an interesting post on X about what he calls the “Age of Micro-Cults” An excerpt:
Adult fatherless men tend to be attracted to exaggerated masculinity and, like all men, desire the approval of a powerful father figure. There is something similar in women, but it seems to take a slightly different form. Anyhow, fatherless men are especially vulnerable to the influence of charismatic narcissists. They mistake this personality type for the powerful masculine figure they crave. Why? Men who grow up in a disordered home without a good example to emulate look for a pattern in life. Hence, they are attracted to the authoritarian, obedience-demanding nature of charismatic narcissists. They want a formula. And, despite what they say, they want to be told what to do. Whereas a normal person would push these men to take responsibility for themselves, the charismatic narcissist has little regard for social boundaries and is happy to exploit them for his purposes.
New Content and Media Mentions
I was mentioned this week by First Things and Rod Dreher. I was also a guest on Jonathan Van Maren’s podcast. And I participated in a Braver Angels debate on populism in the Republican Party in Milwaukee last weekend.
New this week:
I have a guest post at Theopolis looking at patterns of evangelical rhetoric on gender.
My podcast this week was with Hillsdale professor Miles Smith on what he learned reading ex-vangelical memoires.
And I wrote about how J.D. Vance rejected evangelicalism.
You can subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.
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.
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.