For years now, I’ve suspected that Catholic evangelists have been focused on hardline evangelicals. Recently, some hardline evangelicals began noticing that too. Today, let’s explore how Catholics are targeting this mission field—and more importantly, why.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 3/28/2025. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available now! NOTE: I’ve gotten a new recording mic. Overall, I love it and think it’s a vast improvement in terms of raw audio capture quality. However, it brings all new audio crimes to the table. Please be patient with me as I learn.)
SITUATION REPORT: Uh oh, evangelicals have noticed Catholic evangelists going after evangelical flocks
On March 1st, Andrew Voigt published a post over at The Gospel Coalition (TGC) titled:
Roman Catholic Apologetics Is Surging Online. Intended Audience? Protestants.
Uh oh!
First, Voigt runs through an impressive list of names of prominent Protestant-to-Catholic converts among both laity and clergy. A 2024 post he wrote for Christianity Today even reveals that one of these converts is J.D. Vance, America’s current Vice-President.
Taking the two posts together, they indicate that evangelicals have not only noticed this trend, but that they view it with some alarm. The TGC post also describes “Catholic apologetics” making inroads with evangelicals. In one TGC subtitle, we’re told “Protestants Are a Primary Catholic Mission Field.” Voigt even quotes William Lane Craig, who sounds downright tetchy about the whole thing:
Many Catholic apologists seem to be more exercised and worked up about winning Protestants to Catholicism than they are with winning non-Christians to Christ. And that seems to me to be a misplaced emphasis.
Most especially, Voigt seems enormously bothered by the idea that Catholic apologists and evangelists are specifically hunting Calvinists like himself. In a lot of ways, his TGC post sounds like a call to action for Calvinist pastors to better intellectually and emotionally “equip the laity,” as he puts it, to resist these siren calls from Rome.
Today, we’ll cover the difference between Catholic and evangelical apologetics, how evangelicals lost their culture-war hatred of Catholics, how Catholics are targeting evangelicals and why, and why this entire kerfuffle is funny.
Evangelical apologetics <<<<<<< Catholic apologetics
First and foremost, let’s get this out of the way:
Evangelical apologists are the My First Barbies of logical fallacies and emotional manipulation. I can easily see a Catholic apologist completely sandblasting an evangelical’s soup cracker. Catholic apologists have had almost two millennia to sharpen and hone their blades. I’ve heard them openly mock evangelical apologetics arguments and their hucksters, and I really can’t blame them for feeling that way.
(The field of Catholic apologetics is vast. Here are a few places to jump off, if you’re so inclined: Starting point; Basic topics; Some zingers apologists may encounter; Other topics of varying difficulty.)
By contrast, evangelicals get raised on the shit-tier apologetics of William Lane Craig or, well, literally every Creationist leader/organization. They think this thin gruel presents non-evangelicals with solid, valid reasons to convert. More than that, they think that the only non-evangelicals who refuse to convert after getting hit with shit-tier evangelical apologetics are dishonest ones who don’t want to be accountable to Jesus. That’s how good they think their shit-tier apologetics are.
When they run into a Catholic evangelist who knows apologetics, they’re absolutely done for. They’ve brought a plastic kazoo to a gunfight. They have no idea how deep a Catholic apologetics rabbithole goes until they’re in so far they can’t do anything but accept what they’re hearing. The worst part? Evangelicals already mistakenly believe that arguments can add up to compelling evidence. Well, here are way better arguments. They’re boned.
(NB: Don’t get it twisted. Catholic apologetics might sound way more robust, but it’s still apologetics at its heart. Check out this embarrassing Argument from Antiquity/Tradition if you don’t believe me. If Catholics—like evangelicals—had any real-world supporting evidence for their claims, they wouldn’t need or bother with apologetics. Apologetics is what Christians use precisely because they lack evidence. It can sound as impressive as it likes, but it implodes upon impact with the real world.)
The old enmity between Catholic believers and TRUE CHRISTIAN™ fundamentalists
Some years ago, there couldn’t possibly be more distance between Catholic believers and hardline fundamentalists. They haaaaaaated each other. On the fundamentalist side, a variety of false beliefs about Catholicism sprung up. Jack Chick, a fundamentalist propaganda producer, wrote comic books and tracts containing all manner of urban legends about Catholics. (Archived source of below image.)
And if you liked that snippet, don’t miss Jack Chick’s comic book on the topic, Alberto. That one got Catholics hoppin’ mad!
I’m showing you this stuff because fundamentalists, by and large, believed all of these whackadoo claims about Catholic beliefs.
Having been raised Catholic, I knew better. I knew that evangelicals told and retold these urban legends to vilify and demonize Catholic believers. Evangelicals tittered and whispered about Catholics thinking “works” got them to Heaven or about how Communion wafers were really part of the worship of the evil god Baal. It bothered me quite a bit that “Jesus” somehow never set my peers straight on what I knew were lies.
Indeed, the sky was the limit with these urban legends. Monastery leaders operated secret assassin cabals to protect the Pope’s interests. The Pope himself? In league with literal demons. The sacrament of Confession was just a way to learn incriminating secrets about parishioners—to use against them whenever needed.
I never heard evangelicals talking that way, of course. They tended to be a lot more skeptical of assassin-trained Jesuits and Jesus’ mother Mary being a retread of “the Masonic Isis.”
But this was before evangelicals fused with fundamentalists. Once that fusion completed, evangelicals lost the best traits of their sect, adopted the worst ones of the other, and presented these two rotted cores to the world as if they were brand new and better than ever.
Of note, however, the new fused tribe of fundagelicals didn’t pick up the anti-Catholic streak fundamentalists loved—and still love—so much.
Love in the time of culture wars
Pre-fusion evangelicals looked down on almost every facet of fundamentalist belief and culture:
- Speaking in tongues? Probably demonic.
- Holy rolling/dancing in the Spirit/jumping around/”holy laughter”/etc? Almost certainly demonic.
- Way too many people relying on individual personal revelation.
- Fundamentalists refused to stop calling seminaries “cemeteries.”
- They also didn’t know the difference between a Marcionite and a Midianite. (I guarantee there are fundamentalists still out there who have no idea what Arminianism is.)
- Just zero in-depth knowledge of the Bible’s history, Christianity’s early years, or the various big meetings that determined Christian beliefs for centuries to come.
- Young-Earth Creationism is STOOPID.
- And WTAF is up with the way fundamentalist women dress?!?
But I’ll tell you one thing both fusion and post-fusion evangelicals never criticized:
Fundamentalism’s various culture wars—in particular, women’s reproductive rights.
Evangelicals were originally pretty hands-off about that whole debate. Fundamentalists, however, never had been. With the new post-fusion focus on literalism and inerrancy, fundagelicals opened their arms wide to all of the old fundamentalist bugbears. In particular, fundagelicals veered closer and closer to a very hardline Catholic view of abortion and contraception.
Obligatory:
The post-fusion fundagelical landscape looks pretty damn’ Catholic
Fundagelicals completed their fusion around the end of the 1990s. Alas, they didn’t have very long to revel in their new tribalistic identity. Around 2006, Christianity in America began its still-ongoing decline in both credibility and membership.
As fundagelicals entwined themselves more and more into hardline conservative politics in America, as well, they found themselves sharing more and more opinions with fundamentalists’ onetime hated foes, the Catholics. In many ways, fundagelicals’ increasing reliance on other tribes’ shared political and culture-war positions spoke volumes about their desperation to maintain dominance over American society. It still does.
Sharing goals provided a good boost in voting numbers. But that solution came with a dreadful price.
Thirty years ago, you could have told at a glance if a given conservative guy was Catholic, evangelical, fundamentalist, Groyper catboy, or atheist. Now, it’s almost impossible to differentiate them. They all sound exactly alike—and they all have the same thought processes and reasons for holding their opinions. It’s gotten easier and easier for them to set aside religious differences to pursue shared political goals.
Now more than at any other point in American history, Catholic and evangelical evangelists alike have completely lost any hint of out-of-step good qualities compared with any other group. I suspect this sudden awareness of similarity may account for some of the religious switching we’re seeing between post-fusion evangelicalism and Catholicism.
How Catholic recruiters are targeting hardline evangelicals
Evangelical converts to Catholicism brought with them an emphasis on recruitment. Until the past few years, I really only saw evangelical guides to evangelizing and recruiting Catholic believers. When I was Catholic myself, it wouldn’t even have occurred to me to evangelize anyone for any reason. But that’s all changed. Now, we can find a deluge of resources online for Catholic evangelists!
First, of course, Catholic flocks need to know they should be evangelizing. Catholic leaders seem very distressed about how few Catholics seem willing to get out there and SELL SELL SELL WITHOUT MERCY. In particular, Catholic leaders seem to want their flocks to focus on evangelicals, meaning the post-fusion crowd.
One Catholic site, Ascension, offers a ten-point instruction manual for evangelizing evangelicals. Its writer, James Merrick, claims to be a convert from evangelicalism. Unsurprisingly, then, the listicle mostly consists of what worked on him. Among other culty suggestions like offering friendship to targets, Merrick suggests drilling down hard on Catholics’ shared anti-abortion stance with post-fusion evangelicals.
Another Catholic site, Real Clear Catholic, offers a similar guide from another former evangelical, Shane Schaetzel. Interestingly, he begins by differentiating pre-fusion evangelicals and fundamentalists. However, I disagree about there being some huge number of pre-fusion-style evangelicals still floating around. Fundamentalists who never liked those evangelical hoity-toity airs still don’t—and there are lots of those (see also: Kim Davis). But it’s rarer than hens’ teeth to find a pre-fusion-style evangelical nowadays. Of note, Schaetzel also suggests using the tribes’ shared hatred of abortion as a launching-off point of evangelism.
Over at Catholic Answers, yet another converted evangelical, Eric Sammons, offers up “The Secret Weapon of Evangelization.” If you’re wondering, it’s the sacrament of reconciliation—which is confession and penance as assigned by a Catholic priest. It’s not even a higher-level forgiveness; every faithful Catholic does this. It’s easy to see that Sammons thinks his “secret weapon of evangelization” will work on not just lapsed Catholics but also even those who were never Christian at all. Really, our dude just took post-fusion evangelicals’ belief in the magic power of quoted Bible verses to another level.
Hardline evangelicals getting alarmed by ickie Catholic evangelism
As you can imagine, evangelical leaders are viewing Catholics’ new focus with some alarm. As one Rome-based evangelical pastor, Leonardo De Chirico, noted in January:
The call to the “new evangelization” by John Paul II and Benedict XVI [discussed by De Chirico back in 2010; here’s a Vatican writeup of it] has repositioned a growing number of Roman Catholics from being recipients of evangelical zeal to becoming active players of “catholic” evangelization.
Today, it is no longer evangelicals who “evangelize” Catholics, but it is also Catholics who “evangelize” evangelicals with targeted and planned initiatives. Apologetic efforts are now bidirectional.
On March 1st, The Gospel Coalition (TGC) ran an article about how good, faithful little evangelicals can protect themselves from ickie Catholic evangelism. It joins a host of similar guides that evangelical leaders think seek to “discredit the reliability of the evangelical faith and present, as an alternative, the depth of the Catholic faith,” as De Chirico put it.
(If you’re asking “WHAT reliability,” you’re not the only one. Evangelicals think their “gospel truth” doesn’t change—except all the times they change it themselves. Say what you want about Catholicism—I sure do!—but at least their centrally-based authoritarian structure makes change glacially slow but consistently implemented.)
Unfortunately, the TGC post repeats a lot of old anti-Catholic talking points.
For example, they think there’s some cosmic, Heaven-or-Hell difference between their own version of TRUE CHRISTIANITY™ + good behavior = Heaven and the formula Catholics believe. Evangelicals just think the good behavior sprouts out of TRUE CHRISTIAN™ beliefs, while Catholics make good behavior more of a participatory thing. Either way, someone who doesn’t behave correctly doesn’t make it to Heaven—and good behavior is useless without the correct beliefs. But TGC desperately needs the Catholic version of the formula to be hugely and dramatically different.
And how does an evangelical sheep roll to resist Catholic evangelism?
Hilariously, TGC recommends the old evangelical standby for all problems with recruitment and retention: Do more of what you were already doing, just more of it and harder. There’s just no self-awareness with these guys. Their writer recommends four surefire ways to defuse Catholic evangelism:
- “Revisit Reformed roots.” Reformed theology is very slightly different from Calvinism, but for our purposes I usually just consider them as one package. TGC’s writer thinks that evangelicals must of course be Reformed, and they must read lots of stuff from the earliest Reformed thinkers. In particular, he thinks evangelicals should know why Catholicism needed “reforming” in the first place. Of course, if a given evangelical being recruited by Catholics isn’t Reformed, he’ll no doubt think that’s their problem, right there.
- “Equip the laity.” For some years now, equip has been upper-level Christianese in evangelicalism. It means stuffing indoctrination down sheep’s throats so they know exactly what catchphrase to parrot at what stimulus. TGC’s writer laments the “shallow” nature of evangelicalism in most churches. Further indoctrination won’t fix that. Nonetheless, he suggests more sermons based on church history or 16th-century theology. Yes, because the flocks will never notice how different their churches’ customs and doctrines are nowadays from those Original Reformed TRUE CHRISTIANS™!
- “Be rooted in Scripture.” Exhortations to do more Bible studying. It didn’t work the first time, but it’ll most definitely work the 5000th time! (Note: I deconverted after a Bible study about prayer.)
- “Participate in reforming Protestantism.” LOL, as if the flocks have any power whatsoever to create any kind of meaningful change from within. Evangelical leaders love to try to shame doubting flocks into trying this. In reality, it’s impossible. And evangelical leaders know it, because they’re the ones who set the broken system up and maintain it to ensure that very thing. It can’t be fixed. It can only be defied, rejected, and left behind.
I just can’t. There’s no way whatsoever a Calvinist/Reformed evangelical can possibly resist what those Catholic boys are bringing their way. Not with these sorry excuses for responses.
Also: Sola scriptura, my left ass cheek.
Why none of it matters
The TGC article made me laugh, at least. And Catholic drive-bys showed up in droves to criticize it on its Facebook page.
Many of those responses caught my attention. One very long response even involved an evangelical couple who converted to Catholicism together. We’ll talk more later about what draws Christians in either direction, and about the evangelicals trying to Jesus harder and harder because they’re sensing something, well, lacking in their practices and beliefs. For now, I just want to say this:
We find a very serious disconnect between the self-image and the reality of both Catholics and evangelicals. Both groups’ members inhabit deeply- and dysfunctionally-authoritarian worlds. Their leaders are corrupt from top to bottom, with few having clean hands. Of their practices and beliefs, none make them actually better people as a group. In fact, any time their groups dominate secular culture and can control others, they abuse that power: reliably, consistently, predictably, inexorably. No gods hold back their grabby, sticky little hands. No agape-style love prevents that abuse.
And yet each group’s members think they are Jesusing way more correctly than those other ickie subpar Christians, so they each have this obligation to poach their counterparts for their own churches!
How could I not find this utterly fascinating? I hope you do too. This is such a very human situation. Only from the outside can we gain enough perspective to untangle all these knotted-up threads of ego, power-lust, security needs, and false certainty. The people stuck in the middle of those knots are too focused on other things to notice anything amiss.
But we notice. We always will.
NEXT UP: The evangelicals craving self-importance. And their heaven will be a BIG heaven, and they will walk through the front door. Next week, we’ll tackle why Catholics convert to evangelicalism—and vice versa! See you soon <3
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Endnote
I found a Catholic magazine under my grandmother’s bed. It contained an article about “Charismatic Catholics.” At eight years of age, I barely knew what that first word meant, but I devoured the article. Unfortunately, it left me completely mystified. So I went to ask Grandma what it all meant.
I showed her the magazine and asked what a “Charismatic Catholic” was.
Her bright blue eyes scanned the article. I could see her trying to figure out how to answer her precocious granddaughter. Finally, her mouth pursed. She murmured, “They’re not like us.”
That’s all I got out of her on the topic. If my aunt-the-nun had been there, I might have asked her about it too. But she wasn’t, and I got distracted afterward and didn’t think of it. At that age, my interests flared to explosive life and fizzled out again like collapsing stars. I was a skinny little blonde wind-up racecar.
Now I know what they are, of course. What’s so funny is that really, Grandma had it right: They weren’t like us. That’s really all anybody needed to say.
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