Why Do We Convert?

Typically not because several perfectly logical syllogisms

My chrismation into the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church

I was talking with a guy after his niece’s baptism. I was good friends with the parents, but this was the first time I had met the uncle. He had been raised more or less irreligious and was a convert to Catholicism. What was interesting about him was that before he had converted to Catholicism, it had looked a lot like he would convert to Orthodoxy. He had been running around with Orthodox people, and it was through them he adopted a sacramental and liturgical worldview. They had been having serious intellectual conversations about the faith, but did he become Orthodox? Nope. He became Catholic, and not Byzantine Catholic, where he would have been just about as Orthodox as he could get and still be Catholic, but Roman Catholic.

“So why did you become Catholic instead of Orthodox?” I asked.

“I honestly don’t know.”

And this was a guy who had clearly thought his way through faith.

Okay.

In a reverse situation, my Byzantine Catholic parish was hosting an event with the Akathist to the Most Holy Theotokos¹ followed by some lectures on St. Joseph. A young man I had never met before showed up. He had been raised Baptist, but then he made an Anglican friend who had some great things to say about the Real Presence in the Eucharist. After that, he started sneaking out to attend Roman Catholic Masses and began watching Matt Fradd videos. Normally, that’s a pretty direct path into Roman Catholicism. Is that what happened? Nope, this guy converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. I don’t think I got a clear reason why.

I know two Byzantine Catholic deacon candidates who had been Orthodox but became Byzantine Catholic to marry Roman Catholic women, and I know a formerly Roman Catholic guy who became Eastern Orthodox because he was seriously dating an Eastern Orthodox woman he did not ultimately end up marrying. He is still Eastern Orthodox. All of these men admit they did not convert because of any specific theological reasons.

I once went to an Orthodoxy on tap to make some Orthodox friends, for if we are ever to have reunification between East and West, it’ll be through normal people being normal friends. There were many young men there, as apparently young men tend to outnumber young women at young adult Orthodox events, who had converted via the combined route of Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pageau. I have also met two other guys who took that route to Catholicism instead. When I asked the Byzantine Catholic one why Catholicism instead of Orthodoxy, as he had been raised Protestant and studied Calvinist theology, he said he already knew all the reasons to not be Catholic. To him, Orthodoxy did not present any more compelling reasons to avoid Catholicism. When I asked the other, who became Roman Catholic, and not Byzantine, why Catholicism instead of Orthodoxy, he said because the Roman Catholic Church was the one he had been Providentially led into. He had thinking about both Catholicism and Orthodoxy but had not really done anything about either, and he spontaneously met Roman Catholics, not Eastern Orthodox. He met a young woman in Target who was a parishioner at a very vibrant local Roman Catholic parish. He showed up there, met more Catholics, and then became Roman Catholic himself. He then, of course, when prodded further, also offered the typical Catholic critiques of Orthodoxy: nationalism, less transcendence of national boundaries, a hierarchical structure where no one’s in charge and two Patriarchs can excommunicate each other, who’s in communion with who issues, etc. (I know many Orthodox have their own critiques of Catholicism.)

I know I’ve only written about men here. For whatever reason, I have primarily had these conversations with men, so I’ll share a bit of my own experience. I rejected Protestantism sometime between October 2017 and January 2018 during my junior year of college. When I walked around Wheaton College, a Protestant institution, on October 31, 2017, the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, wishing people a “Happy Dissolution-of-Western-Church-Unity-Day” it was pretty clear I would not remain Protestant much longer. How much of this was logic? I found sola scriptura to be self-defeating, and as I was attending an Anglican church that kept having sermon series on liturgy and sacraments, I had been participating in the liturgy long enough that it was inevitable my worldview was going to change. Christ commanded us to be one, and when I looked around and saw the Anglican Church, the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, the Presbyterian Church in America, the Presbyterian Church USA, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, the United Methodist Church, the Wesleyan Church, the Southern Baptist Church, the Independent Baptist Churches, all the non-denom mega churches that practically were their own denomination, and so on, I noticed a problem. I also noticed One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church and the fact that up until 1517, all Christians believed in the Eucharist. Or, how much of my conversion was the fact I just do not do conformity? Somehow, sophomore year, I managed to become the proto-typical Wheaton student. I had never been able to fit into a mold ever before in my life. I’d always been way too weird. How had I suddenly changed in college? My subconscious apparently needed to rebel, so junior year, when Wheaton said, “We’re celebrating the Protestant Reformation,” I said, “I’m not.”

And to add to that lack of conformity, I didn’t even become Roman Catholic. Why be what over 90% of Catholics are when you can be what less than 10% of Catholics are: Eastern, Byzantine? Thanks to a Catholic podcast I happened to listen to while on the stationary bike one Saturday morning in April, 2019, I attended my first Byzantine Catholic Divine Liturgy on June 30th, 2019, and it was like everything clicked, and no wonder. As I reflected later with more exposure to Eastern Christian theology, I found although I spent the latter half of college coming to the same conclusions as Roman Catholics regarding the Eucharist, Mary, prayers for the dead, etc, the fact they were real, the way I inadvertently got there was decidedly Eastern, as was how I intuited theodicy. Take the Eucharist for example. No one ever explained substance vs accidents to me. Instead, while walking back to my apartment in November 2017 mulling over what we had been reading and discussing in a theology class, I found myself reflecting on what exactly it meant for something to be the Body of Christ. The Church is the Body of Christ, but what does that mean? How is the Church the Body of Christ, the continuation of the Incarnation here on Earth? Oh, we the Church, really do become the Body of Christ by taking the Body of Christ within us, gnawing on it, absorbing it into ourselves. That necessitates the Eucharist being real. I know now had I wandered into an Eastern Orthodox Divine Liturgy the summer of 2018 when I was still busy figuring out my faith, I would have become Orthodox.

And now, how much of my own stubborn insistence on remaining in communion with Rome has to do with Christ’s command to be one and the common aforementioned Catholic critiques of Orthodoxy, of which I will not be developing in this post, versus my continued need to reject conformity? I can go to both Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox young adult events and not feel like I fully fit in either. Still, either Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy lived intentionally and faithfully would serve my purpose of not at all conforming to the mold of a normal American twenty-six-year-old.

I once was listening to an Eastern Orthodox podcast with a call in Q&A, and one of the callers asked about what’s the best way to get people to convert. Now, this is a very intellectual podcast where the hosts can quite easily provide very logical well-thought reasons to be Orthodox. Instead, one of the hosts said many people become Orthodox because they come to an Eastern Orthodox parish and feel loved and become part of the community. Community plays a major role. The community that is often present at Byzantine Catholic parishes, particularly those in the Western United States, is a draw. It is why at least one woman I know transferred Churches from the Roman Catholic Church to the Byzantine Catholic Church (Ruthenian).

We have conversion, but we also have de-conversion. We have people leaving Apostolic Christianity in droves. When they leave for Protestantism, they will often say, “Protestantism is more Biblical”, but when I hear that, being the biased Apostolic Christian I am, I am more apt to hear, “I was never well-catechized, and, in fact, I was catechized so poorly that the idea Catholicism or Orthodoxy could possibly provide an in-depth knowledge of Scripture and scriptural justification for the weird things in them has not occurred to me.”

But there are other de-conversions. It is not popular now to believe marriage should be between one man and one woman, not when we now know people cannot choose to whom they are attracted, not when those who experience same-sex attractions have been so cruelly mistreated. How often do we catechize the youth in such a way that their main takeaway of the faith is that old Irish axiom, “In the beginning was the word, and the word was, ‘No!’” I’d be surprised if any more than a very slight handful of the kids I grew up with who attended the Roman Catholic parish in my hometown are still practicing. When I spoke with a college friend who had been raised Roman Catholic and has been experimenting with High Anglicanism since college, she mentioned her brother is no longer Christian. She spoke of her experience growing up, and at one point I had to say, “Well, it sounds like you just went to a really bad parish.” This was not in terms of it being heterodox, but in terms of power, instance after instance of going to confession and being made to feel terrible coming out, contempt for disagreement, over-emphasis on the negative prescriptions, etc.

I mentioned people converting because they feel loved. How often do people de-convert because they do not feel loved? We do not have to look hard to find that. Back when I was a teacher and first starting, I remember sitting in one of those boring PD’s everyone in education can relate to that seemed to only serve the purpose of denying us lesson planning and classroom setup time. We had to fill out some worksheet and discuss our culture, our backgrounds, etc. This one rather vocal (and unfortunately annoying) teacher in the group was making a fuss over what to do with the word Christian. Christianity was part of his background, but he made it clear he had rejected it because he had had a “terrible experience". Terrible experiences in Christianity abound. Being Catholic means I’m part of a Church where the only thing we seem to make secular headlines about is sexual abuse. How many people have left Christianity because they were mistreated because they were gay? There is that Olivia Rodrigo song, “hope ur ok” (my inner former English teacher screams and screams when celebrities choose to use text language for their titles because of how often I found lower case “i”s and text language in student work). In the podcast, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, the host commented on how many exvangelicals cite terrible experiences for their exodus from Evangelicalism. Terrible experiences are not the same thing as having intellectual blocks.

Intellectual blocks are real, though. I’ve already written about the current exodus from American Evangelicalism, and as I stated, American Evangelicalism is ultimately a culture, not a Church. Although certain spaces, like Evangelical colleges and universities provide an in-depth intellectual backing to the faith, for I received a very rigorous liberal arts education from Wheaton College, that intellectual backing is often lacking in the broader spaces, communities, and churches where American Evangelicalism is practiced. Although Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and the intellectual forms of Protestantism, such as the Calvinist traditions, all went through a real dumbing down in the latter half of the twentieth century so that children growing up in the faith are not exposed to the faith’s intellectual traditions², American Evangelicalism never really had an intellectual tradition. Now deceased respected intellectual Presbyterian pastor Tim Keller commented on how this was because in the 1800’s out on the frontier in Kansas, etc, if a man wanted to be ordained in a more established denomination, such as the Presbyterian Church or the Episcopal Church, he would be sent back to the East Coast to get a liberal arts education; whereas, if he were a Baptist, he would just have hands laid on him, and boom, he would be ordained. Thus, uneducated pastors abounded, and it is not hard to see how that can lead to the, “Don't think. Just believe,” mentality that can often rear its ugly head in many Evangelical circles. This has led to many exvangelicals leaving Christianity for never having questions answered or being told straight up not to ask questions; however, if intellectual reasons were the only reasons why people come to, remain in, or leave Christianity, then there would not be the same amount of people in Christianity or spread across the Christian Churches and denominations.

Intellectual reasons are part of the why for faith or lack thereof, and should not be neglected, but they are never the whole thing. We are, unfortunately, not nearly as rational as we pride ourselves on being, and with the amount in the universe we ultimately do not know, how can we be? Conversions and de-conversions, are ultimately a combination of relationships, experiences, practices, and then intellectual reasons. If we want to bring people to the faith, then above all, we must love them.

1. A prayer service/long hymn to the Mother of God sung in Eastern Christianity

2. I’ve run around in all three circles. I was never exposed to any sort of well-thought Reformed theology growing up as a Presbyterian (granted in this case I was 8) or Episcopalian as a teenager, or any well-thought theology at all for that matter as Protestant. The same goes for Catholic theology when we attended a Roman Catholic parish (granted I was 9 and 10). My Roman Catholic father has commented my Catholic formation has now greatly exceeded his. As for Orthodoxy, I have a cradle Greek Orthodox friend who just assumed, unfortunately correctly, I’d know more about Eastern Orthodoxy than him by virtue of me being a convert to Eastern Christianity.