Have American Catholics Given Up on Evangelizing?

Here’s a simple, biblical truth: We’re never as smart as we think we are, and we’re never as wise as we need to be. The best intentions can have unintended consequences.

I remembered this recently when a friend shared a chart posted on X by Ryan Burge. Burge is an interesting voice. He’s a talented political scientist, statistician, and former Baptist pastor. The data he highlights suggest that less than a third of American Catholic and mainline Protestant pastors have an authentic missionary approach to their ministry. This compares unfavorably to the rate among evangelical pastors. Far more of the latter place a high priority on the conversion of others.

The data are at least plausible. They warrant some reflection.

I grew up in an intensely mission-oriented Catholic family. I’ve been around committed Catholics all my life. My mother, Claire, had a much-loved cousin who died preaching the gospel and serving Chile’s poor as a Maryknoll missionary priest. Throughout my childhood, whatever money we could spare went to the Catholic missions in India. At every meal, I sat across from a large framed photo on the wall of a rail-thin, smiling Catholic missionary being swarmed by African kids.  

Claire was a superb catechist before ever opening her mouth. She hardwired an appetite for souls into our family DNA. And it worked. Over my lifetime I’ve traveled throughout the Catholic missions in Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, and Senegal. They do outstanding work, and the priests, women religious, and lay missionaries involved do it very explicitly—with their whole lives—in the name of Jesus Christ. The missionary outreach of the Catholic Church dwarfs all other Christian evangelism efforts combined. In no way does that demean the fruitful evangelization work of other Christian communities. It’s simply a fact.

So much for edifying personal experience. I mention it here because, at least among the Catholics I know, it’s far from unique. But it also poses the obvious question: If what I’ve just said is true, then why—as the Pew Research Center reports—are 13 percent of U.S. adults former Catholics? Put differently, why do 43 percent of people raised Catholic no longer identify as Catholic? And why—if Burge’s data are correct—do only 32 percent of Catholic priests and the same meager 32 percent of mainline Protestant pastors believe that it’s important to convert others to their particular Christian path? This, compared to 82 percent of evangelical pastors.  

The age profile of the priests interviewed in Burge’s data would be useful to know. The Second Vatican Council (1962–65) had a massive and not always positive impact on American Catholic life. It disrupted lay confidence along with the health of U.S. seminaries—evidenced in part by the subsequent clergy abuse crisis and (too often) confusion in matters of belief and worship. Reforms in the decades since have produced a healthier, more doctrinally sound process of seminary formation reflected in many younger clergy. But this doesn’t finally explain Burge’s findings. Nor does it explain the Pew finding that, “for every U.S. adult who has become a Catholic after being raised in some other religion or without a religion, there are 8.4 adults who say they were raised in the Catholic faith but who no longer describe themselves as Catholics.”

The realities of Catholic life in “the next America”—our current “new America”—were predicted in these pages quite accurately sixteen years ago. At the time, Charles Chaput noted that the original, colonial roots of the American experiment were profoundly Protestant, with a deep streak of contempt for “popery” and all things Catholic. The result was 

harsh Protestant discrimination throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This included occasional riots and even physical attacks on convents, churches, and seminaries. Such is the history that made John F. Kennedy’s [presidential] success seem so liberating.

The irony is that mainline American Protestantism had used up much of its moral and intellectual power by 1960. Secularizers had already crushed it in the war for the cultural high ground. In effect, after so many decades of struggle, Catholics arrived on America’s center stage just as management of the theater had changed hands—with the new owners even less friendly, but far shrewder and much more ambitious in their social and political goals, than the old ones.  

Simply put, Catholics in this country have always had the uphill task of showing we belong here. As Stanley Hauerwas once observed, the reason so many Catholics in the post–World War II years could be found in the CIA, FBI, and marines was to prove their loyalty. Assimilating has always been a priority American Catholic goal: a well-meaning search for inclusion. We’ve done an outstanding job of becoming the kind of “Americans” who are just like everyone else in a ferociously materialist, appetite-driven culture with a generic (and rapidly fraying) religious veneer. Whatever made us distinctly Catholic Americans has too often, for too many of us, been bleached out. We’re meant to be leaven in the world. We’ve been digested by it instead. And our priests are not immune to the problem, as Burge’s findings suggest.

Today, dozens of vigorous apostolates fill the Catholic landscape. They do wonderful, fruitful work. But they do so against decades of a tide running in the wrong direction. The Catholic instinct to assimilate and “fit in,” despite the cost, is a dead-end mistake. Ten percent of American evangelicals are former Catholics. And it’s telling that the great majority of converts to American evangelicalism come not just from the Catholic Church, but from other Christian communities that have lost their energy and purpose.  

Why so? The converts are drawn, in part, by evangelical confidence in God’s Word and evangelical enthusiasm for spreading it. The many weaknesses of evangelicalism—ample grist for a different column—don’t negate the core of its simple appeal: the need for a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and active discipleship in the world.  

The overall decline in U.S. religious observance has complicated roots. Many of them lie outside the control of religious leaders. Yet the fact remains that we live in a culture of soft atheism and consumer addictions that obscure the transcendent. And we colluded in creating it. To the degree Catholics forget our baptismal identity and missionary obligations, we get the bleeding out we deserve. 

Here’s the good news: At least at the level of our personal lives and friendships, it doesn’t have to be this way. We change the world by first changing ourselves. And we do that by turning ourselves over to Jesus Christ and his Church, not just in our words but in our actions. Witness is the heart of a faithful Catholic life.  

We’ve forgotten that. We need to recover it.