The lure of Rome

When Anika Smith moved to Washington, D.C., more than a decade ago, her first order of business was to find a church. She didn’t have a car, so she used the metro. Even with transportation challenges, she managed to visit about three services each weekend. Her fourth Sunday, on a recommendation from a co-worker, she went to Church of the Advent, an Anglican congregation. Smith grew up Presbyterian in the Pacific Northwest, and Anglicanism was new to her. 

“There were a lot of words, a lot of standing up and sitting down, and so many prayers,” she recalled with a laugh. But she knew almost instantly she had found her new church home. “Some of the first songs I heard were hymns I had sung back home,” she said. And the preaching was “gospel centered and Holy Spirit centered.”

Smith moved to Washington for a job in the conservative movement. That same month she was invited to a big party at the home of a Catholic friend. “It was really fun and sweet,” she said. But Smith noticed that, as a Protestant, she was in the minority. That was her first taste of the city’s vibrant Catholic social scene. Several years later, she enrolled in law school at the Catholic University of America. She continued attending Church of the Advent but also went to Mass. “I would just duck into daily Mass because I loved it,” she said.

When young Protestants move to Washington, it’s usually not long before they start meeting smart, influential conservatives who believe Rome is the one true church. Like many of her peers, Smith began to ask herself: Should I swim the Tiber?

Roman Catholics exiting their church are disproportionately driving declining rates of Christianity in America. And far more Catholics convert to Protestant denominations than vice versa. But you wouldn’t know it if you looked only at places like Washington and some influential university campuses. A small but vocal group of Protestants is converting to Catholicism—and in even smaller numbers to Eastern Orthodoxy. They tend to be ambitious, highly educated, and well connected. Catholics now provide much of the conservative movement’s intellectual horsepower—and they are picking up Protestant converts along the way.

ACCORDING TO PEW, only 2% of Americans who were raised Protestant are now Catholic, but 14% of Americans raised Catholic are now Protestant. Former Catholics often say they attended Mass for years and never once heard the gospel. Roman Catholicism loses 8.4 members for each new person who joins, and those numbers might be worse were it not for immigration from Catholic countries in Central and South America. By contrast, Protestantism only loses 1.8 members for each new addition.

While centers of conversion to Catholicism are tiny, they punch above their weight due to their political and cultural prominence.

Brad Littlejohn is the director of programs and education at American Compass, a conservative think tank, and co-author of the book Why Do Protestants Convert? He says Washington is the most prominent center of conversion to Catholicism, but that evangelical colleges with a Great Books curriculum also produce converts. That’s because students from “nonliturgical, nonhistorical, theologically shallow Protestant upbringings” get exposed to the great Catholic authors for the first time. Littlejohn thinks that leads to an unfair comparison: “My megachurch youth pastor versus Aquinas is Protestantism versus Catholicism.” Also, Catholic graduate schools like Catholic University, Georgetown, and Notre Dame attract students from Protestant schools, and some of them convert.

Conversion is eased by the fact that it is a less dramatic shift in America than it would be in other countries. American Catholics downplay elements of their theology that might put off Protestant converts. “They make the distinction between, ‘Well, we don’t really pray to the saints. We ask the saints to pray for us,’” Littlejohn said. “That’s an intellectual distinction catering to Protestant concerns that your average Catholic in Mexico or wherever is not doing at all.” Littlejohn notes that Protestant converts also are making their mark on the Catholic Church. They bring a Protestant style of theological reasoning with them, focusing on issues such as justification by faith.

Littlejohn says Catholic leaders he talks to have reservations about Protestant conversions. They tell him they welcome anyone who comes to Catholicism convinced at an epistemic level that it is the truer expression of the Christian faith. But if someone converts out of dissatisfaction with things like their church or family background, they are setting themselves up for disappointment and may eventually convert again to another church. Catholic leaders also worry about converts who bring with them a Protestant tendency to fractiousness because they’re not accustomed to functioning within an institution, Littlejohn said.

Anika Smith didn’t feel much pressure to convert from Catholics her own age, but it was a whole other matter when some of her mentors embraced Rome. Both her parents died at relatively young ages, and some of her mentors stepped into parent-like roles. “They taught me and encouraged me and prayed for me the way my mom would pray for me, or my dad,” she said, as tears filled her eyes. While they never overtly encouraged her to join them in Rome, she wondered if they were disappointed at her hesitation.

Smith is not alone in looking up to senior conservative figures who are Catholic. “It is undeniably a fact that Catholics are overrepresented in leadership of political and cultural conservative institutions,” Littlejohn said. He cites Ryan Anderson of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation. They are both cradle Catholics. But other famous converts on the right include Vice President JD Vance, controversial podcaster Candace Owens, and former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich. Less recent converts include Richard John Neuhaus, founder of the magazine First Things, and Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind.

Littlejohn argues that once the pattern of Catholic leadership in the conservative movement got established, it became “self-perpetuating.” Today, “anybody who wants to move into that leadership class tends to—subconsciously, at least—internalize that they should be Catholic, too.”

AMERICA IS a historically Protestant country. Today, according to Pew, only about 20% of the U.S. adult population identifies as Catholic, whereas 40% identifies as Protestant. So, how did Catholics come to dominate the conservative movement? Littlejohn thinks a big part of the problem is that conservative Protestants don’t have many of their own prestigious institutions in which to train up leaders. By contrast, conservative Catholics do.

Protestants once dominated positions of cultural leadership in America, but things began to change in the second half of the 20th century. Many Protestant institutions became theologically liberal, and conservatives either left or were ejected. They tried to start new, conservative institutions, but without much success.

“If you have these inherited institutions from generations of being in the majority, you don’t really know what it looks like to create a countercultural institution,” Littlejohn said.

He thinks Protestant institutions also failed to flourish because of an anti-intellectual streak that assumes people become liberal from “too much book learning.” Moreover, the dispensational eschatology held by many Protestants compounds the problem, according to Littlejohn. They think, “We’re not going to be around much longer. So what’s the point of creating another Princeton?”

Catholics, as a minority group in America, could draw on a long tradition of countercultural political leadership. Conservative Catholics were well positioned to weather the progressivism that began in the 1960s. “They are planning for the long term, and they’re thinking: How do we build up an intellectually robust institution in a culture that is ­relatively hostile?” Littlejohn said.

Vice President Vance became interested in Catholicism while attending law school at Yale, which was founded as a Protestant institution. He was raised in a Protestant, but not especially churchgoing, family. He told The Washington Post in 2016, when he was considering converting, that he noticed Mormons and Catholics at Yale Law School “were really smart and successful, were engaged with their faith.” They made him realize, “Maybe it is possible to have Christian faith in an upwardly mobile world.”

Smith began to notice friends making comments that suggested they expected her to convert to Catholicism, particularly because she was Anglican. A former co-worker on the West Coast joked, “Oh, you’re an Anglican? I give you another two to three years and you’ll be either Catholic or Orthodox.”

Jacob Rodriguez is an assistant professor of New Testament at Trinity Anglican Seminary in Ambridge, Pa. He said it’s “absolutely the case,” that some Protestants move gradually toward more liturgical denominations, and the Anglican church often is their penultimate stop before Rome. Last summer, he addressed the issue head-on.

On a Sunday afternoon in July, Rodriguez waited patiently as church­goers at the Church of the Resurrection, an Anglican congregation on Capitol Hill, finished their coffee and wrapped up their conversations in the fellowship hall. Volunteers set up folding chairs and a large projection screen.

“Before we get started, let me go ahead and pray because this is a very important topic,” Rodriguez said as people took their seats. “It can be a sensitive topic. I also think it’s an urgent topic.” His lecture was titled, “Should I convert to Rome? Protestantism for the global church.” The day had started warm and sunny, but during Rodriguez’s talk, dark clouds gathered and unleashed a rain storm that was audible in the hall.

Rodriguez previously worked at Church of the Resurrection and returned to help out for the summer. He had several motives for giving his lecture. “Part of it was me personally answering the question why I’m not Roman Catholic, but I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t an invective against Roman Catholicism.” He also wanted to make a case that the Protestant church has what he calls a “charism,” a unique spiritual gift, to offer the global church. Part of that charism, according to Rodriguez, is gospel clarity. He said the call to repentance “is beautifully embodied and protected by the Protestant tradition.” If someone converts, he hopes they will still hold on to some of the spiritual goods of Protestantism.

Adam Nicholson, a member of Church of the Resurrection, listened attentively. He had answered the question “Should I convert to Rome?” in the negative several years before. Nicholson was raised Baptist and began attending an Anglican church in college. When he moved to Washington in the mid-2000s, he found himself immersed in a Catholic community.

“I dated several Catholic girls, was always going to Catholic parties, lived in a house with a bunch of Roman Catholic guys,” he said.

Nicholson eventually enrolled in the Catholic Church’s membership classes, called the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, but later dropped out. He realized the classes were for people who had definitely decided to convert, and he still had fundamental questions.

Nicholson met several times with a priest recommended by a friend who said he was good at providing answers. Before the meetings, Nicholson researched Catholic doctrine about Mary, the mother of Jesus, and came prepared with some challenging questions. He was unimpressed with the priest’s lack of answers. “He didn’t blow up in anger, but he basically acted like it was crazy that I could be raising any of those things,” Nicholson said.

Nicholson noticed an attitude among Catholics that conversion was simply a question of “putting your faith in the church and everything else falls into place.” He wasn’t ready to give up his objections to certain doctrines, particularly because the Catholic Church has changed some of its teachings over the centuries. Nicholson noted the sale of indulgences, a major issue in the Reformation. “The Catholic Church has good post hoc rationalizations for how they deal with that now, but at one point that was part of the faith,” he said.

Nicholson stresses that he deeply respects his Catholic friends, but he will stay Anglican. “I am very confident that being in an Anglican church, I’m being taught to think in a Christ-like way, to mold my life to Christ, to repent of sin, to be accountable to other believers and to my pastor and my bishop, and to love people as Christ did, in a way that is informed by tradition and church history.”

Rodriguez has noticed three recurring concerns in people who convert to Rome—both in Washington and at Wheaton College, where he earned his bachelor’s degree. The first he calls “belonging,” which denotes “a longing for home in the true Apostolic Church.” The second he calls “beholding,” or ­hunger for the real presence of Jesus found in the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation which holds that the bread and the wine used in the Eucharist actually become Jesus’ body and blood while retaining their original appearance and taste.

The last one is “Bible.” Some converts are frustrated with the way Protestant churches handle the Bible, which can lead to “a hermeneutical free-for-all.” Converts want a “more clear authority that we can submit to,” Rodriguez said. For Catholics that is the pope, who they believe is “infallible”—protected by God from error when he defines a doctrine for the entire church.

Littlejohn agrees with Rodriguez on some converts’ desire for clear authority. He thinks a wave of conversions got underway under Pope Benedict, whose papacy lasted from 2005 to 2013. “He was very staunchly conservative at a time when American culture was moving toward an embrace of gay marriage, and a lot of evangelical leaders seemed to be kind of squishy on the topic.” That wave had enough momentum to continue during the liberal papacy of Francis from 2013 to 2025. Littlejohn said the current pope, Leo, who was elected in May 2025, has made AI and transhumanism his main area of focus. While Leo may not be particularly conservative, “If he can show that the Catholic Church is on top of answering the most pressing questions of the day, that’s going to make it very attractive for intellectual Protestants,” Littlejohn said.

The question of converting remains profound at the individual level. But Littlejohn points out that today Christians have to answer questions like, “What is a human being in an age of transhumanism?” When placed within that context, he argues, “The differences between Protestants and Catholics are not actually relevant to most of the ­cultural battles that we’re facing.”

ANIKA SMITH TUCKS HER FEET under her as she gets comfortable on her sofa. She’s wearing purple socks with cats that match her purple nail polish. Then she carefully places her mug of steaming mint tea on the arm rest.

She often pauses and looks out her living room window as we talk. The question of whether she should convert to Catholicism came to a head during the pandemic. She had just moved to New Jersey and, like many people during that difficult time, she felt “very depressed” and craved human connection. A nearby Catholic basilica was one of the few places she could attend in-person worship because it was large enough for social distancing.

Agonizing over the decision, she called up a married couple she knew from Church of the Advent and bluntly asked them, “Should I be Catholic?” They encouraged her to read a letter by C.S. Lewis from 1945 explaining his reasons for not converting to Rome.

At that point in our interview, Smith got off the sofa and walked over to a wooden side table with a stack of books. She picked up a heavy volume of Lewis’ correspondence. She had marked the 1945 letter with a sticky note. Like Smith, Lewis had many Catholic friends and always approached their faith with respect. But he singled out three points where he rejected Catholic doctrine: Mary, the papacy, and transubstantiation. On those three vital matters, Lewis believed Catholic teaching is “utterly foreign to the New Testament.”

“The whole set-up of modern Romanism seems to me to be as much a provincial or local variation from the central, ancient tradition as any particular Protestant sect is,” Lewis wrote.

She recalls sitting on the floor of her apartment in New Jersey reading the letter. As she read, she felt an immense sense of relief. Lewis articulated her own subconscious objections to Catholic ­doctrine. She knew then that she would not convert.

Smith eventually moved back to Washington and now teaches Sunday school at Church of the Advent. Church leaders are discussing launching a children’s Sunday school series that explains why they are Anglican and not Catholic. Smith thinks that would be “very useful.”

Also useful? Leaning into the elements of worship that help define the Protestant faith.

“What we sing, we believe. And I can’t not believe hymns like ‘Jesus Paid It All,’” Smith said. “So many of these hymns I grew up with also made it impossible for me to cross the Tiber.”