Sometimes, Christians start flailing around trying to figure out what their practice of Christianity is missing. I was reminded of this truth just last week while researching our Catholic evangelism topic. Along the way, I ran across a Catholic convert’s testimony. It contained the usual tropes of something being missing from any convert’s life before discovering the tale’s product pitch. And just like that, a topic landed on our schedule.
Once converts discover what they think was missing all along from their life, they throw themselves into it—often eventually discovering that it, too, has failed to fill that empty god-shaped wound inside of them. Today, let’s meet the Christians who think everyone outside of their group is missing something—and they know exactly what it is.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 4/1/2025. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available now! This post is part of our Catholic-Evangelical Cold War series. From introduction: Where News of the Weird lives now; Archive of News of the Weird; Mighty Morphin’ Valentine’s Day.)
SITUATION REPORT: The missing all-consuming flame
And they will pray to a big god as they kneel in the big church
We’re going to talk much more about the actual process of evangelical-to-Catholic conversion (and vice versa) next time. For now, I just want to highlight this very interesting conversion testimony from an ex-Calvinist/Reformed evangelical couple (archive image 1 and image 2):
We were saved, baptized and discipled in SBC churches. We are well steeped in evangelical biblical doctrine and thought Catholicism was akin to a cult. But for the last 10 years of our evangelical experience, we hit a wall and stopped growing. We prayed daily, read the Bible numerous times, studied scripture and heard 1000s of sermons. We discipled others, served, ministered, were involved with, and lead small groups. But something was missing. [. . .]
Stagnant in our growth, we prayerfully started asking, the Lord to lead us and guide us to show us what the early church was like.
I saw that ‘something was missing’ and sighed. It was one of those sighs drawn from very deep down in the heart. I’d seen that kind of talk before. More to the point, I’d felt and lived that sentiment many times in my life. There was a time when I also ached for that feeling of having found that which was missing all along. Like a lot of the people we’ll be discussing today, I ping-ponged around religions for years trying to find what I thought I was missing.
Eventually, our evangelical couple discovered that all-consuming fire within Catholicism.
Yes. They found what they thought they’d been missing all along. They’d finally found the answer, the solution, the packing that fit into their god-shaped wound. Now they could finally Jesus the way they’d always wanted to Jesus—the way that Jesus himself had always wanted them to Jesus!
The feeling I’m describing here is very common in the more extreme ends of Christianity. In a minute, we’ll talk about its probable origins within the Jesus Revolution/Jesus People Movement. But oh, it is not unique to Catholic converts like this couple. It is not even unique to Christianity. Hell, it isn’t even unique to religion, as we will see.
In fact, almost every group seems to have some variant of the ‘something important is missing from my life’ testimony script.
How the something missing testimony script works
Step back from religion for a moment. Think about how people describe taking up any time-consuming, self-transformative hobby, big family decision, or pastime. Often, it’s as a response to the feeling that something is missing from their lives.
Here’s a guy describing what led up to his decision to start marathon running:
In January 2010, I quit playing college football and a part of me felt like something was missing. I was working out in the same routine I had when I played football but there was nothing to train for. The enthusiasm for training started to dissipate.
Here’s a woman describing why she had children:
My first child was born when I was 36 and I’m considering trying for number 2. Does my child give my life purpose? Yes. Did I personally feel something was missing? Yes, I guess I sort of did. Like even know [sic] when it’s the two of us, I feel a slight tug of something missing [. . .]
And here is someone describing why she switched careers to teach under-privileged children:
I entered this profession after quite a few years in the corporate world, where I had attained a fair measure of success, becoming a director of a large business unit that had sales of over $15 million. [. . .] I enjoyed my job, but I felt that something was missing from my life. At the end of the day, I didn’t feel as if I had contributed anything of value to the world through my work.
And this review of a 2022 book called The Edge of Being:
Isaac Griffin has always felt something was missing from his life. And for good reason: he’s never met his dad. He’d started to believe he’d never belong in this world, that the scattered missing pieces of his life would never come together [. . .]
They all draw upon a very common feeling: something is missing that should be here. This feeling becomes a narrative, part of a three-part testimony script that everyone recognizes:
Part One: Our hero is doing awesome at life! But…. they’re not 100% happy. Something gnaws away at them. They don’t even know what it is, but it makes them unhappy.
Part Two: OMG! THERE IT IS!
Part Three: Now happily complete, our hero feels fulfilled. They won’t ever doubt their purpose or feel unfulfilled ever again.
Setting up the pitch for the missing narrative element
When we see the something is missing narrative setup in Part One, we know we’ll soon encounter Part Two. We’ll learn what the hero thought was missing all along. Then in Part Three, we’ll hear how well the hero’s life is going now that they’ve found that missing piece.
As I said, this narrative isn’t unique to any group or religion or life decision. It plays upon so many pieces of the modern Western psyche. Indeed, once we get fairly comfortable and we’re not stressing out so much about basic survival, many of us start looking around and asking ourselves questions about what our lives mean and what it’s all about.
We want there to be some meaning to it all. We want our lives to matter—and to contribute to that meaning, whatever we might think it is. That’s not always a bad thing, of course. I’m glad that lady who had a child is happy, though we can already see she’s still missing something and thinks a second baby will do the trick. I’m glad that other gal became a teacher; her students probably love her. And I’m glad that guy began running and got his groove back and found a community he loves.
When we can make those changes, that’s great. When we can’t, though, or when we discover after Part Two that we’re still missing something, that’s painful. So we start looking again for that missing piece.
And oh, there are so many groups and affiliations out there saying they have that missing piece.
In a big way, we have entirely lost the knack of finding those missing pieces within ourselves. Long ago, we began outsourcing our sense of meaning and fulfillment. We began buying it, in a sense, either with literal money or with our limited lifespans. And once someone’s ready to buy, the product-pushers appear in short order to sell.
So when someone says something is missing, that they finally figured out what it was, that they’re happy now, that’s huge. It gets the attention of everyone else who has that feeling. And that turns out to be a lot of people.
Selling the all-consuming fire turned out to be easy in the 1960s
I don’t think an all-consuming flame of Christianity really became a something missing for Americans until about the 1960s. That’s when the Jesus People Movement began. The beginnings of this movement sparked as a reaction to New Age and Eastern mysticism—and against the staid, workaday faith of older Americans.
To get that movement’s zeal, it combined the explosion of expressionistic fervor and spiritual yearning with right-wing, super-conformist, increasingly-politicized conservative Christianity. That shouldn’t be surprising. Even within evangelicalism, there existed an extremist fringe of Low Christianity: orgiastic, personal-revelation-oriented, ritual-eschewing, folklore-embracing, childishly-simplistic, and scholarship-averse. It was always far more fundamentalist in nature than most evangelicals would have liked.
When this combo platter hit young Americans, it hit them hard. It told them that they could have a Christianity that flowed outward from their very pores and fingertips and eyes and mouth, that consumed them, that anyone could behold and know was divine in nature. They didn’t need to settle for a religion that they observed on Sunday and then forgot about till the next Sunday. Instead, they could have a religion that expressed itself in every single moment of their day and every action they took and every word they spoke.
Silly, naïve fools that they were, those first converts believed the hype. And many Christians today still do.
Marketing triumph: Every religion’s converts talk about finding that missing piece
Notice that I didn’t say many evangelicals or even many Catholics. This marketing triumph spread to all evangelism-minded Christian flavors—and beyond.
Here are some evangelicals who went Catholic describing their motivation for switching. First, here’s a woman who bounced around between Christian flavors many times before settling into Catholicism:
Being married in the church is such a beautiful thing. After that, I was able to finally take all the sacraments. I was able to take the Eucharist. It was just like being able to come back home and be a part of the Catholic church in its fullness. [. . .] I didn’t know what I was missing and it wasn’t until like that Sunday after our [wedding] ceremony when I was able to finally take the Eucharist that I cried and bawled my eyes out because I missed it. [Switch-loving source, about 55 minutes into the video]
Here are some other Catholic converts describing their decisions:
I grew up in a so called Christian home; wont go into detail but I am gonna be married to a Catholic man and I am gonna convert asap. I always felt something was missing in my family and there was always strife in my home. [Catholic convert source 1]
Jon Zabick, a St. Kieran Parish in Shelby Township, parishioner, said that he was raised Catholic and fell in love with his faith, but his parents moved the family to an evangelical church right before his confirmation in eighth grade. Zabick said he found community in his new church but always felt like something was missing. [Catholic convert source 2]
And here are some Catholics who went evangelical describing their own decisions:
Born and raised as a Roman Catholic, I had many unanswered questions while growing up, so I started a 30-year search for God. I tried Buddhism, Jainism, Lutheranism, Native American ways, and spiritualism, and others I cannot remember. [Evangelical convert source 1]
I was raised traditionally as a Roman Catholic, I never felt loyalty to their tradition. When I look back now, I see the Spirit of Christ has always guided me in the direction he has wanted me to go. In my twenties I remember explaining to a friend that I felt something was missing in my life. When I explained how I felt she stated you are missing Jesus. [Evangelical convert source 2]
For good measure, here’s a Catholic priest describing why he thinks people “drift away” from Catholicism:
Here in New York City I know of a good number of couples that travel over parish and diocesan boundaries to a parish where they find good worship and teaching. They know something is missing and go out of their way to supply the need. How many more there must be whose faith was simply never nourished in their parishes, and how many there are who end up in ‘Bible churches’ because they find fellowship, scriptural preaching and teaching, and a sense of spirituality they had been lacking. [Drifting away source]
And just to be thorough, here are some pagans describing their own spiritual journeys:
I knew I was a Celt even before I knew my ancestry was Celtic. I had and still occasionally had dreams and see things in nature that are analogous to Celtic beliefs. During my mid teens I remember studying Abrahamic and other Eastern religions because I felt like something was missing in my life. They all felt as foreign as they are to my fatherland. [Pagan Source 1]
When I first got serious about the whole witchcraft thing, my practice was very firmly rooted in Traditional British Witchcraft, and as much as I loved practising, I couldn’t help but feel like something was missing — that I was ignoring some part of myself. [. . .] Today though, my practice is a unique blending of Traditional British Witchcraft, Obeah, which I liken to Jamaican witchcraft, and Vodou, and I feel that this fully incorporates my heritage. [Pagan Source 2]
People from almost all walks of life talk in the same way. That intrigues me so much. It tells me that we don’t have a Jesus-shaped hole in our hearts. Rather, most of us just have a religion-shaped wound that we try to fill. For some people, that filling looks like Catholicism; for others, evangelicalism or Celtic paganism or Jamaican witchcraft or whatever else.
Nobody who buys into the narrative of something is missing just wants a religion that works for them, helps them be better people, puts words to their desire to help others, or anything mundane and pedestrian like that. They want to be consumed.
The missing piece is part of the human situation, not the human condition
When we talk about the human condition, we’re talking about the physicality of what makes us human: Our marvelous and all-too-delicate brains, our sense of soaring wonder set against all the animal functions we enjoy—and endure—by turns, and how our brains’ lizard and early-mammal regions react to pictures painted by our genes to keep us alive even long past the time when we were much lower on the food chain.
The human situation, by contrast, changes constantly and can be discussed on an individual or a societal or even a species-wide level. That’s where religion lives. That’s also where our sense of meaning and purpose lives, and so many people’s desire to be utterly consumed by their faith.
To a real extent, this search for something missing is the mark of a species that has officially made it big. It’s a real testament to our species that so many of us enjoy so much relative privilege that we can look beyond simple survival to the grander questions of self-fulfillment and helping others reach their own potential as well.
Still, all too many people are too caught up with simple day-to-day survival to feel like something inscrutable is missing from their lives, much less to go a-wandering to find it.
Chasing the narrative of missing something
Many people feel like something is missing within themselves. I know how that goes. For years, that’s how I felt too.
At the time-period we’re discussing, most Americans were Christian. Everyone I knew was Christian. As a result, I was completely immersed in the Christian indoctrination needed for me to buy into the idea that my own restlessness and uncertain sense of self and identity were caused by missing something I needed to have. And in turn, that some force or entity or person had to hand it to me on a silver platter for it to be valid.
So when Catholicism left me yearning and unfulfilled, the Southern Baptists promised me a solution. When they in turn failed to find my missing something, Pentecostals knew exactly what to do. But then, in turn, Pentecostalism’s many flaws began to wear through its façade. I veered away from an actual cult before plunging even deeper into the narrative.
Even after my deconversion, I still thought I was missing something. I pursued that narrative through Zen and paganism, and then finally had the realization I needed to have:
The narrative is false. The marketing is false. These promises are not theirs to offer. Indeed, they cannot honor them anyway.
What was missing is inside us already—for free
In these far more skeptical days, I suspect most people rightly shy away from the idea of going to some wiseman-atop-a-mountain to get answers to their hearts’ deepest questions. It just took me an awful lot longer to learn what Whitney Houston was trying to tell us all way back in the 1980s.
But I figured it out eventually.
Because the greatest love of all
Is happening to me
I found the greatest love of all
Inside of me
The greatest love of all
Is easy to achieve
Learning to love yourself
It is the greatest love of all
We are adequate within ourselves. The marketing of the missing piece is a false promise. Nobody, no force, no entity, no group external to us can find it for us, much less grant it to us on a silver platter. Supernatural beings and religions—even very esoteric or unfamiliar ones, even extremely lively ones that keep everybody very busy and off-kilter and out-of-context—can’t give it to us, either.
Nowadays, when I hear someone talking about feeling like something is missing, it makes me think they have been disconnected from themselves for a very long time. That talk reminds me of hungry children going from table to table in the religious marketplace with their empty bowls, begging for any crumbs that can make them feel whole—and then going back to begging again and again when those crumbs fail to satisfy them. They have a wound deep down that our culture has shaped like Christianity: a god-shaped wound that cannot heal as long as they buy into that indoctrination.
I wish I could uncover all the debris of indoctrination to reveal that the connection was always there, that they always had what they yearned to find. Everything that comes after that realization flows into purpose and meaning; we cannot help but flower into wholeness once we know and trust ourselves. Even surviving day-to-day cannot threaten our completeness.
Nothing is lacking. Nothing is missing.
We are whole.
NEXT UP: Looking more closely at Catholic-to-evangelical and evangelical-to-Catholic conversions. See you soon!
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