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Pew Research recently released a very worrying report for Catholics in America, showing a drastic decline since 2014. Many people, including Trent Horn, made videos sounding the alarms to try and raise awareness. Joe shows that the data may not be as bleak as we think…
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I want to explore the question of whether an American Catholic revival is underway, whether the American Catholic Church is dying. Because if you do something like Google Catholic Church droves, at least in my experience, the top two results are a video explaining why Catholics are leaving the church in droves and why young men are joining the Catholic Church in droves. And you might be saying, well, which of those is right? And the answer in part is both of them. So it’s not just the first two videos you pull up when you Google this, you’ll find all sorts of seemingly contradictory sources about this. So recently the New York Post had a piece on young people converting on mosques to Catholicism and told some of the personal stories, but then you also have articles like Eric Salmon’s article about how for every 100 new Catholics, 800 people are leaving the Catholic church in America, and that the numbers were actually even worse somehow than that sounds fittingly for Crisis Magazine.
And even my friend and colleague, Trent Horn did a video recently on why he says Protestantism is winning and the lesson this provides for Catholics. Now, I want to agree with everybody in part and disagree with everybody in part on this because it’s not just the headlines that can cause this confusion. It’s also when you get into the data. So Trent and Eric and people who are focusing on some of the alarming signs are largely looking at a Pew research study that came out in February of this year, and although it’s called decline of Christianity in the US has slowed, may have leveled off. Nevertheless, the article has some pretty ugly news for the state of the Catholic church in America, namely that bit about how for every 100 people who join some 840 people have left Catholicism for something else. The largest recipient of this isn’t actually Protestantism.
Mostly this is people becoming religiously unaffiliated. In fact, Protestantism is struggling as well, just not nearly as much as American Catholicism when you look at those numbers. Other numbers though, tell a somewhat different story. Now, this is tricky because it’s not systematically organized, but I know that the pillar has done, Luke Kain in particular has done good work at just gathering evidence at a diocese by diocese level about the number of adult baptisms. And what we’re seeing in many cases is that adult baptisms are way up. I’ll get more into that data in a little bit, but I just want to kind of pose the question, what do we make of all this? Are we seeing a revival? Are we seeing the death of Catholicism in America, or is it something a little more complicated? And as you might guess, I’m going to say a little more complicated, although I do think there are authentic, good reasonable grounds for hope that a real revival is happening quietly and in its early stages sort of too soon to say, sure, but we’re seeing a shift underfoot.
But to get there, we have to know how to parse through the data. And this is tricky for a few reasons. The first is that while Protestantism is divided into evangelical and mainline Christians, when you look at Pew research data and other research data, usually it’s actually mainline Protestants, evangelical Protestants, and historically black Protestants. Because these groups, even though they’re all under the broad umbrella of Protestant, are pretty different sociologically and they operate in different ways. That’s going to be really important because Catholicism doesn’t have those official distinctions. You don’t go to a Catholic church and it says we’re a mainline Catholic church, or we’re an evangelical Catholic church, but nevertheless, we can have a little bit of something similar. It’s going to be different in some important ways as well. But to get a sense, here’s Redeem Zoomer, who is himself a more conservative or evangelical Presbyterian who attends a mainline Presbyterian church, explaining from his perspective what those differences look like. And obviously this is not going to be super favorable to someone from more of a liberal perspective. Additionally, he’s a zoomer, so of course he’s doing this while playing Minecraft. So if you hear a weird clicking sound, that’s what’s going on.
RZ:
So for those of you who don’t know, I’m a Presbyterian and there are a bunch of Presbyterian denominations in America, but there’s two main ones. There’s the PC, USA Presbyterian Church, USA, which is it’s the more liberal one, and the PCA, the Presbyterian Church in America, which is the more conservative one, and I am more conservative, so it makes sense that I would be in the PCA, right? No, there’s a reason why I’m not. I’m in the P-C-U-S-A instead of the PCA. So really it’s because the P-C-U-S-A is the original one. It’s what’s called a mainline Protestant denomination because it’s, there used to just be the Presbyterian churches. There wasn’t mainline and evangelical denominations. That distinction came about. When the mainline Protestant churches in all brands, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, Baptist, Episcopal, they all started to become more theologically liberal. And that’s not quite the same as politically liberal.
As I always say. Theologically liberal means they don’t take the claims of Christianity as seriously, and they don’t really care if people actually believe in it. It’s becomes more of just like going through the motions. And the only thing they really care about is social justice. They sort of redefined the gospel as that. So when the mainline denominations became more theologically liberal, the evangelical denominations were basically a bunch of conservative outcasts who split off, who ran away and who started their own things. So it’s no exception for Presbyterians. The P-C-U-S-A Presbyterian Church, USA is the original Presbyterian denomination and the PCA, the Presbyterian Church in America is a denomination was formed by a bunch of conservatives who got frustrated with the P-C-U-S-A becoming more liberal and who split off.
Joe:
So one of the reasons this matters is that what we’re looking at in the data isn’t necessarily the death of Catholicism in America. It seems much more to be the death of mainline or liberal Christianity in America. And we see this by looking quite clearly at the trajectories of the two different groups of Protestants. So remember, the Pew research stuff from 2025 breaks out evangelicals, historically black Protestants and Mainliners, and in particular it finds that while there’s this overall downward trend, it has stabilized, it hasn’t affected everyone equally. So evangelicals went from being 26% of the population to 23% of the population. That’s a relative decline of about 11%. For those of you who don’t understand relative decline, if you go from being 2% to 1% of the population, you’ve lost half of your membership. You haven’t lost 1%. So relative decline is the better measure to use when you’re seeing how much did something grow or shrink by looking at the health of the organization.
So evangelicals are about 11% smaller now relative for overall population growth, et cetera, et cetera, than they were in 2007. But in that same time period, mainline Protestants have just bottomed out. They’ve lost just shy of 40% of their members. They were 18% of the population, they’re now 11% of the population. That is as we’re going to see a worse decline than Catholicism has experienced. So that suggests this isn’t a Catholic Protestant issue. This is much closer to a theologically liberal versus theologically conservative issue. Another way you can get there is Pew also asks people about whether they consider themselves liberal or conservative. And so just as you’ve got a clear difference in the trajectories of mainliners who are dying and evangelicals who are struggling but surviving well, similarly, you have a slight decline among conservatives in a shocking rate of decline among liberals. So in the words of the Pew study, 37% of self-described liberals today identify with Christianity 37%.
That’s down from 62% in 2007. So they call that a 25 point decline, but it’s obviously bigger than that in terms of relative decline, that in 2007, if you were to approach say three liberals, probably two of them would be Christian today, one of them would be Christian. That’s a big decline. Additionally, most liberals now report having no religion, 51% compared to 27% in 2007. So okay, now you approach four rather than if you approached four liberals and said, what’s your religious affiliation? Chances are one of them in the past would’ve said nothing. Now two of them would say that. So this is a pretty striking case that there are now more religious nuns, so unreligious or unaffiliated people than Christians among the population just of liberals. This is unprecedented. So you can see all of that in the data. In the meantime, 89% of conservatives back in 2007 described themselves as Christian today, 82%.
So you still have a decline, but it is a way smaller decline. So if you think about this, not in terms of Catholic Protestant things, but in terms of liberal conservative both politically or more importantly theologically, then you can see I think a much better explanation for the data. So the difficulty here is we don’t have just as I said before, self-proclaimed evangelical Catholics and mainline Catholics, but we do see something like this in the numbers, and I’ll get into how we can get there in just a second. But first overall numbers. Catholics went from 24% of the population to 19% of the population. Now that is a 21% decline, and actually the real relative decline is worse than that because some of that is immigrants coming in from other places where they were already Catholic, they’re not suddenly converting. So if you look at just like the native born US population, the decline is worse than 20%.
But nevertheless, that’s kind of where we’re at. We fall somewhere in between where evangelicals are and where mainline Protestants are, which makes sense because if you were to think about Catholics in those terms, you’ve got a group of Catholics who would be closer to evangelicals in their view of scripture and theological conservatism and everything else, and then you’ve got a group that are more akin to what you would call mainliners. So in the same way that if you just said Presbyterian, you’d get a kind of misleading number rather than breaking it out into which type of Presbyterian. The same thing I think is happening somewhat with Catholicism. Now, a couple months ago I did a video on liberal Catholicism specifically showing that self-identified politically liberal and theologically liberal priests have all but evaporated. I’m not going to rehash all of that. If you want to watch that, you can go watch it there.
But I will point out one data point that I think points to this in a really profound kind of shocking way coming from the polarization, generational dynamics and ongoing impact of the abuse crisis study by the Catholic project at CU UA, which found that theologically progressive and very progressive priests once made up 68% of new ordinance. So if you were to go back in the sixties and ask a newly ordained priest how he considered himself, he was going to say progressive more than two thirds of the time today, that number has dwindled to almost zero. It is the low 1%, or excuse me, low single digits in terms of the number who identify themselves today in terms of newly ordained priests as being theologically progressive. So liberal Catholic priests have simply failed to inspire a generation of liberal Catholic priests to follow in their footsteps.
That’s one enormous data point. But another one actually comes from this book here, young Catholic America, Christian Smith and his co-authors, Kyle Longs, Jonathan Hill and Kerry Christofferson. This is a little bit older of a book, so I’m hesitant to use it to describe trends in 20 24, 20 25 because the book is 10 years old, it’s from 2014, but it’s looking specifically at what they called emerging adults. So these were Catholics who at the time were 18 to 23, they’re now 28 to 33, and they provided some pretty good data looking just at Catholics in a way that I haven’t seen a lot of people do since. And unlike the Pew research stuff, they break out liberal and conservative in a more helpful way. It’s still not perfect, but it’s I think more helpful for getting a sense of the trajectory and what they found across the board. Things like church attendance, prayer, even things like self-denial.
Those teenagers and emerging adults who’d been raised in liberal Catholic homes were way less religious, way less practicing of anything like Catholicism than those raised in more moderate or traditional homes. Now, there’s a whole bit about how you define those terms, but this gives us at least an impression of a trajectory, say in the words of the authors, they say the most striking finding is the difference in mass attendance. While 27 and 29% of emergent adults do not attend mass at all, among those who survey responding parent is traditional or moderate respectively, fully 52% do not attend mass at all. Who has a teenager who as a teenager had a liberal Catholic parent? So let’s just make sure you’re getting that at least in 2014. And I think there’s good reason we’re going to see this actually stayed pretty stable across the decade. So I don’t think this is radically different today.
If you grew up in a traditional Catholic household, there’s a good chance you still go to mass at least sometime once you’re in college, once you’re on your own, maybe not as often as you should, but the odds that you’re going to mass not at all, are about one in four, maybe a little more than one in 4 27 to 29%. On the other hand, if you were raised in a liberal Catholic household, it’s slightly better than 50 50 odds that you don’t go to church at all anymore already. I mean within five years of leaving home. And in contrast, only 6% of those who grew up in a liberal Catholic house attend mass compared to 17 to 21% of those in a moderate or traditional house. Now, those are still bad numbers, don’t get me wrong. Everyone should be a hundred percent come on. But you can see there is a pretty massive disparity in terms of mass attendance, in terms of participation in anything related to the faith.
So again, you can get more into the data because it’s not just church attendance, it’s also things even like personal prayer. So all of that suggests that there is a liberal verse conservative trajectory. Again, theologically primarily is what we mean here politically. There’s going to be some overlap, but those don’t mean the exact same thing. The second thing I think is worth breaking out is something that I’ve seen almost everybody get wrong about the Pew research data, and I would put it like this. I’d say the bad news is old news, and the good news is new news. Here’s what I mean by that. When you hear these numbers about the number of people joining the Catholic church compared to leaving the Catholic church, the impression it creates is that this is how many people have just joined in the last year compared to just left in the last year. It’s often described that way even by people like my beloved colleague, Trent Horn.
Trent:
To put it another way, the study says that for every 100 people who become Protestant, 180 people leave Protestantism. However, for every 100 people who become Catholic, 840 people leave Catholicism. And for every 100 people who become religious, 590 people give up religion
Joe:
And not to make for a tense situation, but Trent’s actually technically wrong there about the tenses. And it’s not just Trent, it’s everybody I’ve seen cover this data. It’s just I like singling out Trent because I like Trent and because I rarely get to get a point over on him, and I’m happy to try to do so here, but it’s actually not the case that for every 100 people who join the Catholic church, 840 people leave, that puts it too much in the present tense. It’s that for every 100 people alive and being surveyed now who have joined the Catholic church, 840 people have left the Catholic church. That actually matters a great deal because the whole point, and actually the point Pew is making in their overall study is that we’ve seen this massive shift of people leaving Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, but that massive exodus seems to have slowed quite a bit, which is good news, but not if you think that the 8.4 to one ratio of exiting to leaving is still ongoing.
It’s not. Rather, here’s the case, the median age of people that they’re surveying among all US adults, the median age is 48. Among Christians, it’s 54. Among the religiously unaffiliated, it’s 38. So okay, if you take a 48-year-old just to take the median example, is it more likely that they grew up in a Christian home and left it or grew up in a non-religious home and became Christian? Well, obviously it’s more likely that they grew up in a Christian home and left it because historically we were more of a Christian country and you see all of that very clearly in the data. So of course you’re going to get more of an Exodus incoming convert rate to put it like this. Let’s just imagine a hypothetical, let’s say through a miracle for the next year. Not one person left the Catholic church, nobody gave up on being Catholic.
And let’s say the number of people who converted to Catholicism doubles, triples, whatever. Even in that case, which would be undeniably a revival, undeniably this incredible movement, you would still at least at first have a case where there were a lot more former Catholics than new Catholics. Why? Because there are more former Catholics over the past decades so that even if there are new signs of life, if you’re just looking at the overall number of everyone, whether they converted a week ago or 40 years ago, well then you’re not going to see that in the data, at least not at first If you want to put it like this, if you decide you’re going to get in shape, let’s say after a month you want to track your fitness goals, your best bet is to say, where was I a month ago compared to where am I now?
If you say, where was I 20 years ago compared to now, that’s probably not a very helpful rubric. And so the problem with the Pew data isn’t that it’s wrong, it’s that it’s unhelpfully broad. It actually tells us something important, but not what people think. It tells us. It doesn’t tell us the current state, it tells us the prior state. And as the rest of the Pew data shows, there has been a mass decline in Christianity overall. But as they acknowledge something has happened in the last few years, and we see this actually across demographics, across ages, that as they put it, since 2020 signs of religious stability across birth cohorts in the United States exist. If you look at the number of people who pray daily, the number of people who describe themselves as Christian and then the number of people who are religiously affiliated, we see in the last five years something kind of fascinating.
It’s stabilized. In fact, the most curious thing is that if you look at the youngest generation, those age 18 to 24, the people you would expect to be leaving Christianity in droves, they went from 45% of them self describing as Christians before to now 51%. And so you actually see among a couple of the younger cohorts, also the cohort of those age 34 to 44 like myself, they’re actually more likely to say they’re Christian now than they were in 2020, which is all the more remarkable because in there you also have things like Covid. You also have things like churches shutting down and people being cut off from church attendance and all of this stuff that we thought was going to be absolutely catastrophic in the numbers. And we don’t see catastrophe in the numbers. No, to be clear, in the long term it’s been pretty catastrophic if you say, what’s the last 50 years looked like?
But if you ask what has the last five years looked like, surprisingly good, surprisingly better than I think any of us would’ve expected. Now, this actually dovetails nicely with a point that Christian Smith and his co-authors make, which is that what we find in terms of the story of American Catholics, young Catholics, is that we’re dealing with the fallout of a lot of stuff that’s been going on since the last 50 years or so. So as they explained, when you compare Catholic young adults, again, that 18 to 23 range in 2014 compared to those in the 1970s, they found that with one huge exception, there is relatively little change in their religious beliefs, attitudes and practices. The popular narrative is the modern generation of Catholics is way less religious and the older generation or vice versa. And at least as of 2014, again before this kind of slowdown in the middle of the battle days before the religious decline stopped, young emerging Catholics were looking a lot like young emerging Catholics in the 1970s, but with an important difference, namely mass attendance.
And so this suggests that what we’re looking for shouldn’t be anything in the last couple of years. This is not, oh, this is the story of the new atheism. Taking everyone away from Christianity is not that something else has been going on. And redeem Zoomer pointed it out when he talks about this theological liberalization project that happened in the mid 20th century and all these different Protestant denominations. There’s a version of that in Catholicism as well, and it’s, I would argue, been disastrous statistically. And so the one difference that we see, as I said before, is mass attendance. So you had young Catholics in the 1970s who were so-so, and whether they believed in church teaching and they still often went to mass. And then you have a very similar looking group of young Catholics in the 2010s, and they were just less likely to go to mass.
And when you put it in that 50 year trajectory and you couple it with things, this was pew in 2014 showing the number of religious sisters and the number of priests, the number of priests went down quite a bit. The number of religious sisters plummeted from 180,000 in 1965 to under 50,000 in 2014. That’s enormous loss. And so even if we’ve stabilized, when you compare it to 1965 or even 2007, things are still going to look bad. But if you recognize in a shorter time span, the bleeding may have slowed or stopped. The other thing I would add to this kind of echoing what Christian Smith and his colleagues found is from the handbook of contemporary Christianity in the United States, which found that basically boomers, even when they dropped out of church, still called themselves Christian, whereas younger generations who might believe exactly the same things are just less likely to use the label of Christian.
So some of what we’re seeing isn’t an actual theological difference. Some of what we’re seeing is just how people respond to the theological difference that the person who become disaffected with Christianity in the past might still call themselves Christian, might still go to church. The person with those same beliefs now is less likely to have the kind of cultural social ties that keep them attached to the label after they’ve stopped believing in it. So that’s some of the bad news, but I want to couple that with the good news. And part of the good news there, by the way, is that we aren’t seeing people just overthrowing Christianity and rejecting it. They may be more honest about their self description or maybe more self-aware about their self description. But we also see, as I say, not just that the ratios kind of plateaued in a good way, but also these little signs of life.
Now, I mentioned this earlier, but Luke Coppin at the Pillar has actually admirably done the legwork of just getting different diocese to report how many converts they had at Easter this year compared to last year. And the numbers are really heartening. So for instance, the Archdiocese of Baltimore last year, they had 669 people come into the church this year. They had 778 Boston last year, 360 this year, 458 Arlington where I used to live 242 last year, 291 this year I also lived in Washington dc. They had 1350 last year, 1500 more than 1500 people this year. And my own diocese here of Kansas City, St. Joseph in Missouri, 419 people last year all the way up to 424 this year. Five extra people. I mean, look, if we’re going to rejoice over one lost sheep, five lost sheep, that’s great. So my point there is that there are actual signs of life.
It’s easy to just say, oh, the stats tell a very bad story. And then you just have this anecdotal evidence that tells a positive story. This is something more than anecdotal evidence. You at least have diocese by diocese, year to year numbers, that’s data. Now, we should caveat that data as Kain rightly does by pointing out that it might be easier to get this data from diocese where things are going well, who are happy to report year over year numbers. A few diocese do report some negative numbers, but overall this is positive and he also points out year over year the downside I’ve been talking a lot about, you don’t want to spread it out too long. You don’t want to compare 1950 to 20 24, 20 25, but on the other hand, Kain points out, well, we are looking just at the last year compared to the year before, and that might be very different from something like 10 years ago.
So it’s still an incomplete story, but I think a helpful one that shows that something might be happening. And Coppin has also pointed out along with Brendan Hodge, that we see some similar numbers in places like France and Belgium. So looking just at adult baptisms in France and adolescent baptisms in France, they’re markedly up not just from last year, but every year the reporting goes back, which is to 2015 up quite a bit. So something is happening and I think it’s really good. Now, the last way I want to kind of break the numbers apart is by referring to a popular narrative that bad Catholics become Protestants and good Protestants become Catholics. And I want to challenge it in some ways and accept it in some ways. Now, Trent is skeptical of a version of this claim, and I agree with his skepticism of the version. So here’s his argument.
Trent:
Now, some Catholics may soothe themselves by saying that smart Protestants become Catholic, whereas the larger number of not so smart or less pious Catholics become Protestant. So this is just an issue of quality over quantity. Well, that’s a grand claim with little evidence to back it up. But suppose it were true, why does that matter? A person’s worth doesn’t come from his or her intelligence. It comes from the fact that he or she was made in the image of likeness of God.
Joe:
So I agree with Trent that we don’t want to act like the soul of a really smart, well-educated person is worth more than the soul of someone who’s not as smart or educated. That’s totally true, but it is nevertheless an important part of understanding what’s going on here to recognize that it is also true that people who leave the Catholic church tend to be way less educated and less not to say that their souls matter any less, but it is to diagnose the nature of the problem and to suggest some really good news, namely that when people get a full version of the story, then they realize Catholicism is true at a much higher rate. That’s great. So in 2009, and this was revised in 2011, it’s still very old, but this is the best I could find from Pew. They looked specifically at when people leave Catholicism, and what they found is that about half 48% of Catholics who are now unaffiliated left Catholicism before reaching the age of 18 compared to a third of those who are now Protestant.
So that’s a massive drop off in the teenage years or even before, among both groups, an additional three in 10. So 30%, I don’t know why they switched from doing percent to ratios three in 10 left the Catholic church as young adults between 18 and 23. That’s the age range. Christian Smith is looking at only one fifth who are now unaffiliated and one third who are now Protestant departed after turning age 24. That’s massive. It means if you can successfully help someone stay Catholic to the age of 24, statistically they’re overwhelmingly likely to remain Catholic for life. And this is at least suggestive that the people leaving it isn’t because they’ve done some super deep dive on the issue. No offense to those of you watching who are very young, but there is a difference between the take the high profile converts who’ve spent years studying the question and then convert to Catholicism compared to the teenager who just says, I don’t want to go to mass, my parents can’t force me, and then stops going.
It’s not that one soul is more valuable than the other, but those are two very different spiritual trajectories. And sure enough, it’s not just that they’re young, the people who leave Catholicism also attended church at a lower rate as children and a much lower rate as teenagers. So this is already going to give us one clue towards how to correct the problem of people leaving Catholicism, which is just go to church with your kids every week, and statistically they’re way more likely to remain Catholic. Now, the other more recent data I could find on this is from the center for the applied research of the Apostate, and they were looking just at those aged 18 to 25 who’d left the church. So this is an imperfect data set because obviously you’re not going to get anybody older than 25 leaving, but nevertheless, among the people in that age range, which is most of the people who leave Catholicism, the median age at Disaffiliation from Catholicism was 13 years old.
So this is going to be an important part of the equation. If you say, Hey, why don’t you focus more on those leaving the Catholic church? Well, for starters, there aren’t a lot of 13 year olds who watch shameless popery, and if there are, they’re not leaving the Catholic church probably these are not the ones you have to get. And so just understanding this as part of diagnosing the problem of why people leave is just recognizing, yeah, overwhelmingly people leave because they don’t know enough about Catholicism. They don’t find the church services interesting, they don’t understand the theology, they’re not connected, they don’t pray, et cetera, and then they leave. Now, those are problems that need to be solved, but those solutions are probably not going to come from something like a YouTube channel. They’re going to come in different ways. We’re going to talk about that at the very end.
So then you say, well, don’t people go to church? And fortunately in 2018, pew asked that as well, and what they found for Catholics who don’t go to mass, these are the ones setting their kids up to not practice the faith anymore. The number one reason was they say they practice their faith in other ways. Now, I’ll mention that the Catholic church is very explicit about the need to practice it by going to mass every Sunday, and we can now see in the numbers why that matters. Practicing the faith in other ways is a pretty strong guarantee. Your kid is not going to continue to even self-describe as a Catholic Christian. The second biggest reason was I don’t have time. So an hour a week, too much to give for God in terms of going to mass. This is not a theological kind of objection. This is just this sort of shrug of the shoulder, which suggests that again, the issue here is something more like lukewarmness than a principled objection. And then third, I haven’t found a church or house of worship that I like, actually, sorry, the second and third are actually tied both 19%.
Those are the reasons. And so if you want to sum up that, I would say we have a problem of a lot of people who self-describe as Catholic, who might be affiliated institutionally, like the mainliners of old who are only loosely connected. They might send their kids to Catholic school, they might go to Catholic school, but they aren’t serious about a relationship with Jesus. They aren’t serious about living the life of a Catholic. And so what has to happen is partly to convince him, partly to stir up interest in that. Now, with that in mind, I wanted to turn to a pair of articles written to sort of speak out against the rise of successful Catholic apologetics. One of those is Andrew Vos article. You may have seen March, 2025 for the gospel coalition called Roman Catholic. Apologetics is surging online intended audience, Protestants. And then the other is from April of this year by Aaron Ren at the American Reformer.
And I like how conspiratorial the title is. He says, Rome strategic play for Protestant elites. And anytime someone says Rome to describe everything from the Vatican to an ordinary Catholic expressing their views online, it’s a certain lack of a grasp of the nuances we’ll say. But I like how Ren puts it because there’s some areas I actually agree with him on and some areas where I just think we’re in different worlds. So he says, first it’s worth noting that Catholic conversions are primarily an elite phenomenon for those without college degrees, it’s more likely that people leave Catholicism to become evangelical. So right, that’s actually part of the problem. People becoming Protestant, a lot of it is not just the uneducated, it’s literally teenagers. It’s people who have little exposure to any of the ins and outs of the theological things we’re actually talking about. So another way to put this is the less someone understands what’s going on, the more likely they are to become an evangelical.
The more they understand what’s going on, the more likely they are to become Catholic. Now, you can put that in elitist language if you want. I’d just put that in information language. The better educated a person is on these questions, the more likely they are to become Catholic, which is why I think it matters to say poorly educated and non pious Catholics are more likely to become Protestant, whereas pious educated Protestants are often drawn towards the Catholic church. This is certainly backed out by a wealth of anecdotal evidence. I mean, it’s not hard to look at high profile Protestant converts to Catholicism. I know Cameron Bert’s name often comes up in this discussion, but where is the flip side? Where is a well-known deep in his faith Catholic who became Protestant in his adult life? I would struggle to name one now, is that anecdotal?
Sure, but it’s anecdotal backed up by all the statistical evidence we’ve seen. And I think it’s quite telling. It’s telling because it means the problem isn’t that we don’t have the truth on our side. We do. And the more people take the time and the trouble to dig through the research and to look at the different claims and to actually listen to both sides, the more we find them converting to Catholicism. The problem isn’t that we don’t have the truth on our side. The problem is getting people interested in the truth in the first place, which is why you have lukewarm and disaffected Catholics who leave. We see it in the data. But I want to turn back to Ren because he says, I noticed that it’s not uncommon to see social media interactions in which evangelicals are outclassed by Catholic or orthodox counterparts. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Catholics were being strategic in their interactions, avoiding more sophisticated Protestant thinkers who might have better answers. If they are, this would be smart. And I’ll just say, as a Catholic, no, that’s not what’s happening here.
Catholic answers, I’ll speak to the existence of Catholic Answers as an organization. Catholic Answers was created when Carl Keating came out of church one day and found that a fundamentalist had papered all of the windshields in the parking lot with anti-Catholic tracks. And he thought, this is misleading, and someone who doesn’t know their faith well might be duped into error. I need to answer this. And Catholic Answers was born from this. It’s right there in the title. The point was primarily to respond to the objections Catholics were getting. And it happens that the loudest and most popular Protestant objections are often the worst and well-formed Protestants even hear these arguments and think, oh, this ridiculous. That’s stupid. There’s no Catholic conspiracy to make those the most arguments. I hear this all the time where I’ll respond to a popular Protestant argument and it’ll be dumb.
And some smart Protestant in the comments will be like, oh, that’s a straw man. It’s like, no, no, look at the view count. I’m not choosing some weird fringe view. I’m responding to the very popular views. And then the people they’re wanting me to respond to are often these very academic Protestants who have 500 views on their channel. And you’re like, well, those are not the immediate urgent needs that need to be responded to. So it’s true. Not all Protestants believe every dumb bad argument, but if you’re responding to people who do believe the dumb bad argument and you can show them no, here’s the Catholic answer to that, and this is true at good and beautiful, why would you not do that? It would be bizarre to say, well, I can’t answer the popular falsehood because it’s false. That’s why you answer it. So the fact that other Protestants may have more nuanced falsehoods that are more plausible or less egregiously wrong, that’s fine.
That’s also worth addressing. But let’s focus on the biggest kind of most obvious glaring errors that can be corrected quickly. So speaking personally, that’s what I do. I don’t think there’s any Catholic conspiracy. I think this is the kind of stuff that’s easier to do. The other thing, and I say this as a genuine nod of appreciation and approval to even anti-Catholic Protestants, is Protestants. Even those who may hate the Catholic church, I know not all Protestants hate the Catholic church, but among Protestants who are devout, you’re not lukewarm. And so we can have the conversation about what scripture says, and I don’t have to first have an hour long conversation about why you should care what scripture says. I can tell you, here’s what Jesus teaches, and show you that in the Bible. And you’ll say, okay, I believe in Jesus, I believe in the Bible, and we can move from there.
The lukewarm, I can say, Hey, look, you’re living this life of sin that is completely and explicitly forbidden in scripture, and you got to get mad with the shrug of a shoulder and the shrug of the shoulder. Speaking, very frankly is the strongest argument against Christianity because what can you possibly say to someone who does not care about the truth? So on that dark note, let’s turn to how do we cultivate a Catholic revival? Now, obviously this is the work of the Holy Spirit. We can’t do it for him, but what we can do is clear some of the objections and we can do the things we can be doing on our ends so that he can do what he’s going to do. So in that Pew research study, I just now realized it said 2005, apparently in all of the slides should have said 2025.
There you go. In the Pew research study, it says, among all respondents who were raised in a religion, whether it’s Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, or some other religion, those who are raised in highly religious homes are much more likely to have retained their childhood religious identity. That’s just a basic sociological point. If you instill the religion matters to your kids, you’re much more likely to think the religion matters than their adults. If you instill that it doesn’t by your actions, not just by your words, they’re much more likely to think that it doesn’t. Indeed, 74% of people who were raised in a religion and grew up attending weekly religious services in a family in which religion was very important, still identify with their childhood religion today compared to 15% who grew up in this environment who now say they have no religion, and 10% who’ve switched to a different religion.
So if you do two things, number one, you go to mass every week, and number two, you really instill that this is important to your kids, you get about a three out of four chance that they’re going to continue practicing the faith in adulthood. By contrast, those who were raised in a religion but grew up seldom or never attending religious services or in a family in which religion was not too important or not at all important, fewer than half still identify with their childhood religion, 40% are now nothing. 16% are now a different religion. Now there’s cause for alarm there because only 26% of parents are taking their kids to church every week. That’s pretty bad. And of that group, 54% grew up going to church weekly, another 11% at least once or twice a month. So most parents today grew up going to church.
Most parents today don’t go to church except very rarely. That’s a problem for the next generation. We can stop that problem by getting parents who care even a little bit about Christianity, to go back to mass, to go back to church. If you won’t do it for your own sake, do it for the sake of your children because we can see in the numbers that it makes a huge difference. Second, turning back to this book, we can see the importance of things like prayer and Bible reading. Now, this is one area where even traditional Catholics weren’t great. There’s clearly a lot of room, and I think this is something where Catholics could learn a lot from ordinary Protestants about just inculcating a spirit of prayer and reading of scripture with your kids. So to do things like just sit in the living room chair and read scripture in the morning, have a little time for personal meditation.
Invite your kids to come sit on your lap if they’re of an age where that’s normal, and read scripture with them. Let them at least see you reading scripture. Let this be something that they normalize and think is part of what it is to be an adult Christian, and then encourage them to do the same. Now, there’s all sorts of other ways you can do this as well. There’s a great amount of religious programming, things like formed. If you’re not familiar with formed, you can get the app. They have a bunch of programming. They’ve got a lot of stuff online. You can watch religious shows. There’s a lot of good Protestant content for kids as well. We do a whole series of Bible stories with our kids that they listen to or they used to listen to at night before they’d go to sleep. And they learned scripture that way just by hearing these stories.
And then a song at five and three, you ask them Now what happens after the exodus? They’ll tell you, Joshua. It’s like, Hey, that’s great. They know the stories. They’re familiar. The Bible isn’t daunting and unfamiliar. That’s a good first start. That’s no guarantee they’re going to stay religious their whole life. It’s no promise that your kids will stay religious their whole life. But these are concrete things we can do. If the problem is in many ways won or lost before they turn 13 in the numbers, then this means a lot of the solution is working on the family. Strikingly the story of whether they should go to Catholic school is a little more complicated. Smith and his colleagues found that it was unclear whether Catholic schooling actually made a difference. On the one hand, kids who went to Catholic school were much more religious later.
On the other hand, that seems to have been attributable to the fact that the kind of parents who send their kids to Catholic school are the kinds that are already doing all the right things. They’re instilling the importance of faith in their kids, but in a powerful way. One thing that’s an important component of this is the role of fathers. So Smith and his colleague said, our interview data, so this is by the way, they did broad level data, and then they also did interviews of some portion of the 18 to 23-year-old Catholics that they were looking at, both those who continued to practice the faith and those who stopped. And they found in their interview data is that the religious faith and practices of fathers play a particularly important role in determining the religious trajectories of both their sons and their daughters. And they said there are exceptions to this rule, but there are exceptions to a clear rule, not a single estranged emerging adult.
For example, in their research data, like in the interview data, not of anyone, not a single estranged emerging adult had a father who was an engaged Catholic. So one of the things that you see very clearly in the data is if one parent is in and the other one isn’t, that’s a problem. And this is particularly the case if mom is trying to get everyone to go to church and dad doesn’t care. So fathers especially take this very seriously. The last thing I’d point out in terms of just the research data from the book is that they looked at four different kind of trajectories for what made for a successful kind of religiously practicing Catholic later on. And it looked at things like basically if parents took the faith very seriously and then they had a social group, they took the faith seriously, some kind of peer network people they could turn to with questions of faith, spiritual support system, et cetera.
And ideally if they went to Catholic school, but it worked pretty well, even if they didn’t, then they were pretty well likely, more likely than not to still be practicing the faith five years later. So they look at these different trajectories, and so we can say, these are some of the recipes for success. But then finally, I want to actually end with some advice that Trent gave because some of you watching, of course, don’t have families of your own. This advice isn’t relevant for you yet, maybe won’t ever be relevant for you. Or you’ve got kids who they’re already out of the house, they’ve already made their decisions, and you’re dealing with the outcome of that. But as Trent points out, given the sheer number of people who are lukewarm or ex Catholics, once you diagnose a problem that way, it becomes pretty different kind of how you approach it. That in other words, what’s needed is often not the elite solution to use Rens language. We don’t need to always have the super in depth, hour long theological answer to everything sometimes is enough to just invite people to church,
Trent:
Whatever the solution is. Treating our Catholic faith as a matter of spiritual life and death and everything we do from preaching to teaching to lay people’s interactions with everyone they meet needs to be a part of our response to this crisis. And it has to be done in real life, not just online. Since online converts and reverts need an orthodox inviting place in the real world, if they want to come home to the faith, keep in mind that one in every eight people you meet is a former Catholic one in eight. So a simple invitation to attend mass can go a long way. 25 years ago, a girl at my high school invited me to mass. It changed my life, and consequently it changed the lives of countless other people.
Joe:
So I close with that frequently when you ask people who do become Catholic, why they became Catholic, they’ll point to the experience of somebody in their life. And if you run in a really intellectual circle, it may be that a lot of intellectual converts to Catholicism, but there are both many, and there’s a need for many more people who have different journeys who just need someone to be there for them spiritually, who need someone to just invite them to church. The way that young woman invited Trent to church, who just needs someone to accompany them on a spiritual search, maybe you’re not even aware they’re going on. So whether you consider yourself well-equipped Catholic apologist or not, I would impart that, that take care of your family, help instill the faith in them, and take care of those god’s put in your life by inviting them to share in the riches and wonder of Jesus Christ in his Catholic church. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.