A Catholic Moment or an Evangelical Century?

Contrary to online chatter, we are not in a “Catholic moment.” But we may already be in an evangelical century. 

Significantly more people are leaving Catholicism than converting to it. By contrast, evangelical Protestants boast remarkably high conversion and retention rates and healthier levels of practical piety—church attendance, Bible reading, catechesis. Through the upheaval of the past half century, evangelicals have remained numerically and spiritually stable, have repeatedly reformed their institutions, and consistently outperform their counterparts. To cite one example, the percentage of Americans who convert from Catholicism to Protestantism (4 percent) is higher than the percentage of all converts to Catholicism (1.5 percent).

Some Catholics remain optimistic. Even as the Catholic Church shrinks numerically, there is an oft-forwarded argument that Catholicism is capturing the public discourse, shaping its contours with a “religiously informed public philosophy,” as Richard John Neuhaus predicted in his 1987 book The Catholic Moment: The Paradox of the Church in the Postmodern World. A historically Protestant culture will nevertheless be directed by Catholic religious sentiments—a reasonable expectation given that Episcopalians once ran the country with only a few million members. 

The usual evidence for this kind of Catholic moment is JD Vance—both his person and his invocation of Catholic theological concepts in public. But curiously, more than once, Vance has publicly limited the scope of the pope’s competency to strictly spiritual affairs and asserted his own theological judgment. It all sounds eerily familiar. Martin Luther’s Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520) called on secular princes to break Rome’s hold over German bishoprics, wealth, and law. If not guilty of Protestantism, could the vice president be guilty of Americanism, and under the reign of the first American pope no less? 

In any case, these episodes are not proof positive that Roman Catholicism has secured the “binding address,” James Davison Hunter’s term for the “inner imperative” and moral expression produced by predominant cultural norms. Of course, no self-respecting Protestant would permit Catholics to claim a corner on the ordo amoris or “just war” market, now much discussed. Augustinus totus noster est, as John Calvin said. 

True enough, Catholicism has punched above its weight in the intellectual ecosystem. It has provided moral framing and vocabulary for sociopolitical matters, framing and vocabulary that was seamlessly adopted by the more numerous evangelicals. Catholicism’s contribution was to equip Christians to express, as Joseph Bottum puts it in An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America, “religiously derived moral truths in the language of the secular public square.” The effects have been underwhelming. Obergefell was undeterred by teleology; Dobbs depended not on anthropology but on the weight of American tradition and constitutional structure.  

The previous “Catholic moment,” lasting from 1995 to 2002 by Bottum’s reckoning, failed to fill the Mainline Protestant void. Rather, the post-Protestant poster children maintained their birthright, and this without a “philosophically coherent public vocabulary.” Ultimately, “Catholicism as a system of thought proved too foreign,” and even an American pope has not overcome this foreignness. 

As Joshua Mitchell has observed, it is still fundamentally Protestant theological categories, however bastardized, that dictate public reason. Only Protestantism can correct its prodigal children in their native tongue. 

Insofar as our politics are theologically inflected, it is broad, nondenominational evangelicalism that informs the sociopolitical imagination. Nearly every observer of Charlie Kirk’s memorial last year compared it to an evangelical revival service. If any brand of Christianity resonates with the Trumpian right, it is Charlie Kirk’s.  

While not definitive, it is worth noting that nondenominational evangelical churches are experiencing more growth than any segment of American Christianity. And while we may soon have our third Roman Catholic president in Vance, he will be extending the policy legacy of Trump, the first president to shed a specific denomination in favor of a nondenominational affiliation while in office.

Much was made online of the cover of Vance’s new book. To sell his spiritual biography, a shrewd publisher must have realized it had to be a stereotypically rural Protestant church on the cover, a motif that, by Vance’s own admission, reflects most of his upbringing. American aesthetics and sentiments are still captivated by frontier Protestantism. Hillbilly Thomism is an endearing brand, but it doesn’t sell books, and it doesn’t win elections; the simple, steepled Congregationalist church does. 

Some Catholics have suggested that our postliterate social media age, which prioritizes aesthetics, favors Catholicism. But it is the intellectual reputation of Catholicism that is attractive to high-profile, elite converts like Vance. If Catholicism loses its very literate reputation, it will lose its elite appeal. 

The more pressing question is whether literacy depletion will hurt Protestantism, thereby creating a vacuum for Catholicism to fill. Wherever Protestantism has spread, literacy has followed—so it’s tempting to assume the reverse must also hold: that as literacy fades, Protestantism will too. But literacy is not strictly necessary to Protestantism; preaching is. In the sixteenth century, it was the pulpit that animated Protestantism. It is the pulpit that remains central in Protestant architecture and spirituality, and the sermon the predominant medium. In seventeenth-century New England, perhaps the most literate society in history, it was nevertheless the spoken word that occupied most people’s time. Per Harry Stout, the average New England churchgoer listened to 15,000 hours of preaching in his or her lifetime. 

Protestantism will rise or fall by the strength of its pulpits, not the flair of Catholic TikTok. The concern for Protestants should be filling pulpits with bold, competent pastors, not developing Zoomer influencers. In an era when three-hour podcasts are shifting elections, maybe Protestant preachers should consider droning on a bit longer. 

Tocqueville’s prediction of a “great and sudden advancement” toward Rome never materialized in America. But even if it had, his mechanism looks nothing like today’s conversions. He theorized that democratic America would turn to Rome through unconscious assimilation: Catholics quietly absorbing American democratic habits—equality, self-government, civic individualism—while remaining doctrinally submissive. This is not the brand of Roman Catholicism that has attracted young converts in recent days. Rather, converts have been attracted by the unified system of doctrine and authority presented by ultramontanism; it is the revolt against liberal democracy and modernity that brought political Catholicism back into the conversation.

Tocqueville’s dream of Catholic triumph in America required assimilation into the American, which is to say Protestant, way of life—the combination of the “doctrines of Protestantism” and “great political freedom.” In fact, the reason Catholicism survived is because it entered the decidedly Protestant system of denominational competition.   

If there is a new “Catholic moment,” it will probably be short-lived. Commanding the binding address requires more than intellectual prestige—it requires people in the pews. I’d wager that there will always be Catholics and Jews in America if for no other reason than that there always have been. But the same logic suggests that America will always be Protestant because it always has been. Insofar as America ceases to be Protestant, spiritually and culturally, it ceases to be America. The future is not Catholic; it is either Protestant or atheist.