Shifting Boundaries and Protestant Conversions

Week of Monday, January 13, 2003

In the past two decades observers of the American evangelical landscape have noted a small but remarkable trend among its ranks. Depending upon your viewpoint you might call this phenomenon a defection or compromise of sorts, or otherwise even a homecoming. But one thing is sure: a steady stream of Protestant evangelicals are converting to Roman Catholicism and even Eastern Orthodoxy.

Conversions to Catholicism have not been too uncommon. Thomas Howard set the tone with his book Evangelical is Not Enough (1984), a book that is still in print and which has spawned its own cottage industry of stories of Protestants who have made the spiritual journey to Rome.¹ Of course, evangelicals have always had their Catholic and Anglican saints without too much apology, people like John Stott, CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, and GK Chesterton. And even for those who do not convert there have been renewed efforts to bury the hatchet and cooperate as much as is possible, as Charles Colson and Richard John Neuhaus urge in Your Word is Truth: A Project of Evangelicals and Catholics Together (2002).

More interesting still are those Christians who have converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. At least Catholicism is Latin and Western, but Eastern Orthodoxy? Many clergy, prominent lay people, and even scholars like Richard Swinburne, a philosopher at Oxford, and Jaroslav Pelikan, a noted historian at Yale, have converted to Orthodoxy. Frederica Mathewes-Green, a syndicated columnist for National Public Radio, does a winsome job of exemplifying the enthusiasm and zeal of such converts in her two books Facing East: A Pilgrim's Journey Into the Mysteries of Orthodoxy (1997) and At the Corner of East and Now: A Modern Life in Ancient Christian Orthodoxy (2000). Some recent statistics are amazing. About half of the students in the two largest Orthodox seminaries in America are converts. In the Antiochene Orthodox Church, the number of churches in America has tripled in the last few decades, due almost entirely to conversions, and the number of its priests who are converts is about 78%.

Why do these people convert from Protestantism to Catholicism and Orthodoxy? I think we can identify three reasons. On an experiential level, I think Green speaks for many believers when she writes that many Christians are looking for “the true apostolic church,” others long for more robust liturgy, others like Swinburne lament theological erosion in their own denominations and long for more theological stability that is less influenced by the zeitgeist, some appreciate the call to rigorous spiritual disciplines, and still others find Catholicism and Orthodoxy a welcoming home for their deep spiritual hunger.² Another explanation is that these conversions form part of a larger, sociological trend as documented by Colleen Carroll in her new book The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy (2002). Carroll focuses on the baby buster generation born between 1965 and 1983, and mainly upon Catholics, but she hints at a larger cultural phenomenon of a return to conventional morality among the young. A third explanation is that these conversions reflect at least in part a crisis in evangelical identity dating back twenty to thirty years and surrounding the contentious issues of biblical inerrancy, social ethics, the charismatic movement, and the growing admission among evangelicals that their sectarian spirit had cut themselves off from the broader historical, catholic and sacramental traditions of the faith.³

Enthusiasm about these conversions should be tempered with at least five observations. American Catholicism is mired in terrible controversies right now and under great pressure from a cluster of issues—declining attendance, clergy celibacy, sexual scandals, homosexuality, the ordination of women, and so forth. Rose-colored glasses are not in order. For its part, Orthodoxy is a very small part of the American religious landscape (roughly 1.3% of our population) and mainly limited to heavily ethnocentric communities (Greek, Russian, Serbian, etc.). Such ethnocentric faith communities will never have widespread appeal. Next, overall new church development has declined among Orthodox and Catholic bodies and surged among Protestant evangelicals and Mormons, according to one study.⁴ Orthodox and Catholic faiths, in other words, might be adding many converts through the front door while getting smaller overall through the old faithful leaving through the back door. Fourth, we must remember that conversions run both ways, and that many cradle Catholics and Orthodox have converted to Protestant evangelicalism, especially among the second and third generations of immigrants for whom the mother faith is alien to American culture. Finally, with a few exceptions mainly among Catholics, most of the interest between these groups is generated by and even for Protestant evangelicals; there is no comparative, reciprocal interest, for example, on the part of Orthodox people toward evangelicals.

The best lesson that these conversions teach us, I believe, is their reminder that our faith is a decidedly historic faith mediated to us down through the generations. Evangelicals have generally done a poor job in this area. The idea that we get our Christian faith only from the Bible can be maintained only by ignorance, naivete or hubris. Thank God for the communion of saints who have come before us. These converts, with their longing for a historical connection that one can trace at least proximately if not absolutely back to the times of the apostles, helps to rescue us from what E.P. Thompson once called “the enormous condescension of posterity.” C.S. Lewis called our fixation on the newest and most modern a form of “chronological snobbery.” G.K. Chesterton, for his part, urged that we must always “give votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors.”⁵

I have written elsewhere of my own admiration for these conversions to Catholicism and Orthodoxy, even though I am happy to remain Presbyterian.⁶ There are still significant differences among the three bodies, especially, we might add, between Catholics and the Orthodox. But for the most part these are differences of emphasis rather than absolute contradictions. There is no reason why we cannot gratefully learn from each other when what unites us in the central tenets of Christian faith remains far more important than the peripheral issues that divide us.

1. See Scott Hahn, Rome Sweet Rome: Our Journey to Catholicism (Ignatius Press, 1994); and Patrick Madrid, ed., Surprised By Truth: 11 Converts Give the Biblical and Historical Reasons for Becoming Catholic (Basilica Press, 1994).
2. Green, At the Corner of East and Now, p. 119.
3. Timothy Weber, “Looking for Home: Evangelical Orthodoxy and the Search for the Original Church,” in Bradley Nassif, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), pp. 98–102.
4. See the 2001 study by the Hartford Institute for Religious Research.
5. The quote from Thompson is cited in Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 266. Green cites the Chesterton quote in At the Corner of East and Now, p. 42.
6. Daniel B. Clendenin, “Why I'm Not Orthodox,” Christianity Today (January 6, 1997).