"Why Do Protestants Convert?"

Why Do Protestants Convert? is a short (100 pp.) popular-level book published in 2023 and co-authored by Brad Littlejohn of the Davenant Institute and pastor-theologian Chris Castaldo. While nodding to Protestant conversions to Orthodox churches, Why Do Protestants Convert? focuses on conversions to the Roman Catholic Church. And even here, the authors opine that more folks baptized into the communion headed by the Bishop of Rome eventually affiliate with a Protestant church than vice versa. Indeed, this book is not fortified by empirical or qualitative research. Why Do Protestants Convert? is the authors's account of the reasons they believe that, over recent decades, a non-trivial number academic and otherwise intellectually-oriented Protestants have converted to Rome. From my limited vantage point, the reasons Littlejohn and Castaldo describe strike me as entirely plausible.

The core of Why Do Protestants Convert? is its three middle chapters: The Psychology of Conversion, The Theology of Conversion, and The Sociology of Conversion. Each of these chapters in turn is divided into three parallel subchapters followed by a clear summary conclusion. The book's final chapter is "Why Protestant's Should Not Convert."

For example, the first section of the chapter The Sociology of Conversion, "Tired of Division" invokes a concern among many (most? all?) Christians that the current divisions of the Church dishonors Jesus' prayer for the unity of his followers recorded in John 17:20-21. Addressing this legitimate concern, the authors contrast the Protestant understanding of the Spiritual unity of the Church (in terms of reconciliation through the work of Christ, the priesthood  of believers united to Christ, and the marks of preaching of the Word and administration of the sacraments) with the "sacerdotal vision of ecclesial unity upheld by Rome." The multifarious forms that the Church now takes "may appear deficient" from the perspective of a church whose clergy claim to exert apostolic authority, "but they are simply the outworking of an ecclesiology that defines catholicity by adherence to the kerygma." In short Protestants emphasize the Spirituality of the Church over against claims of hierarchy and apostolic succession.

The authors acknowledge much of the substance of the second rationale of conversion to Rome ("Tired of Shallowness") but observe that the Evangelical decline into worship characterized by therapy and smoke machines developed long after the Reformation. Still, even if entertainment-as-worship would have left Protestants aghast until the latter half of the twentieth century, it remains a reason for dissatisfaction for many with worship in some Evangelical churches today. Of course, shallowness characterizes contemporary versions of the Mass in most Catholic churches. And many Protestant churches have maintained a serious liturgy of God-directed worship.

A desire to be counted among the "in" crowd also pulls some Protestants toward Rome. No one can deny that Protestants in America have largely failed to build institutions that carry heft in public life. This failure is not endemic to Protestantism. After all, for generations following the Reformation, Protestants founded many great institutions. But this is no longer the case today, which calls for a program of institutional reconstruction. (On a related note, folks interested in an accounting of the failure of American conservatives generally to build sustainable institutions of higher education should read this post by James M. Patterson.)

There's much more of value in this short book. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in understanding why many of American Evangelicalism's best and brightest are not staying the course.