Pilgrimage to Rome

Keith Nester had been a Protestant pastor for two decades when, in 2015, he found himself in a surprising place—the 12:05 p.m. Mass at Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

At the start of the service, a deacon walked down the aisle carrying a thick red copy of the Gospels above his head. “That hit me like a ton of bricks,” recalled Nester. The United Methodist minister had been pondering Roman Catholicism ever since a friend encouraged him to study the early church fathers, and he was feeling discontent with his own faith tradition. “As a guy who was so on fire for the Bible … I was seeing the Bible become more and more pushed to the side in my Protestant world.”

So, in 2017, Nester joined the Roman Catholic Church. He is one of many former mainline and evangelical Protestants who have pivoted toward Catholicism within the past two decades. Although the number of converts doesn’t indicate a mass exodus, it does highlight a perhaps counterintuitive trend toward high church traditions.

Religion data shows U.S. Catholic churches have experienced steep membership declines in recent years, yet some Americans do move in the opposite direction. According to analyst Ryan Burge, about 5 percent of Americans raised as mainliners and 3 percent of those raised as evangelicals converted to Catholicism as adults, based on survey responses collected between 2010 and 2018.

High-profile conversion stories have drawn attention to the trend. Vice President–elect J.D. Vance was baptized into the Catholic Church in 2019, and former Daily Wire pundit Candace Owens announced her conversion in April.

Nester said studying early Christian beliefs helped convince him of the importance of church authority. Without the Catholic Church’s leadership as authorized by the pope, he argues, denominational rifts necessarily follow. “When we just have the Bible alone, we devolve into chaos because we have no real way of dealing with interpretive issues,” he said. (Protestants adhering to Reformation teachings say church leaders can aid in Bible interpretation but that the Bible remains the only infallible guide.)

Now a podcaster, Nester claims many are looking for answers in Rome’s direction: “I hear from probably two or three people a week that are sending me messages … saying, ‘Hey, I’m on this journey. Can you help me?’”

Before converting to Catholicism in 2017, U.K.-born Chris Newton attended, as he described it, “the Hogwarts of evangelical ministry schools”: Bethel Church in Redding, Calif., a charismatic church with about 10,000 congregants.

When Newton attended a Catholic Mass for the first time in 2015, he noted the absence of fog machines or strobe lights. Now a member of St. James the Less in Rossendale, England, Newton appreciates how Catholicism emphasizes reverent worship. He said he found that the Roman Catholic Church offered a level of doctrinal clarity he had longed for since childhood.

Chris Castaldo, co-author of Why Do Protestants Convert?, said many Christians who switch from Protestant­ism to Catholicism suffer from what he calls “Holiness Deficit Disorder”—a result of churches treating congregants like consumers. He traces the problem to the seeker-sensitivity movement and what he calls “an entertainment approach to ministry.”

“I’m afraid it has unwittingly reduced the Christian faith to felt needs, as opposed to providing substance that is rooted in the Christian tradition,” Castaldo said.