Gracy Olmstead has written the latest edition of an article that is in danger of becoming a meme amongst traditionalist conservatives: Millennial Christians are, apparently, converting to high church traditions en masse. Rebecca Van Doodewaard, Jeremy Tate, and Scot McKnight have also discussed this issue recently so it’s hardly a new story. There’s two things that need to be raised every time this article is written and, as best I can tell, none of them are discussed at any length in any of the pieces I’ve found.
First, there isn’t a ton of data showing how many people actually are converting to Catholicism or Orthodoxy or Anglicanism out of more evangelical backgrounds. (And we probably shouldn’t be including Anglicanism with Orthodoxy or Catholicism anyway, but that’s an entirely separate discussion.) Here’s the data we do have: Data from February of 2011 from the Pew Forum found that 9% of all Americans are former Catholics whereas only 7% of Americans are ex-Protestants. Of that 9% that have left Catholicism, 5% converted to Protestantism.
While it’s fair for members of high church traditions to point out that many of the converts to Protestantism are less engaged to begin with, while converts to Catholicism tend to be more noteworthy (Scott Hahn, Francis Beckwith, Jason Stellman, etc.), that doesn’t change the fact that more people convert from Catholicism to Protestantism than vice versa—a fact that most of these stories ignore completely.
The point here isn’t to get into a fight about who has more converts, but simply to highlight the fact that the trickle of noteworthy evangelicals going to Rome tends to get a fair amount of coverage while the stream of young people leaving Catholicism for Protestantism seems to receive far less. (The pieces that do discuss Catholics leaving the church are typically more focused on the general decline in numbers experienced by most churches in the contemporary west. Few articles mention that slightly more than half of the former Catholics in the USA are now Protestant.) Keep reading
2 comments:
I came to Anglicanism from Charismatic Evangelicalism. I think there is a move of some Protestants towards the sacraments and the liturgy. However, I don't think they are necessarily changing their beliefs in a drastic way.
Steve,
I am planning one or more articles on this topic. What I have observed is that a substantial number of Protestants who are attracted to sacramentalism and liturgical worship do change their beliefs over time. A number of factors contribute to this shift. One of them is that in pursuing their interest they increasingly expose themselves to the influence of unreformed Catholicism. Folks who do not have a solid grounding in Biblical and Reformation theology and who do not have mentors and peers to help them maintain a Biblical and Reformation perspective are particularly at risk.
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