Why intellectuals (really) don't often become Protestant

"Faith seeking understanding" sometimes becomes too much to bear

When describing her journey to become an evangelical herself after critically studying the movement for many years as an academic historian, Molly Worthen noted that at one point before her conversion she told J. D. Greear, with whom she’d been corresponding about her questions regarding the possibility of Christian faith, that if anything, she’d become Catholic. This offended the deeply evangelical Greear, who essentially encouraged Worthen to read more Lewis and recognize the reasonableness of Protestantism in the long run.

As far as the growing political traction of Christianity within the cultural mainstream, Rome has consistently held the star power, with Orthodoxy a close second. It is exceedingly rare to hear of either celebrities or respected public intellectuals opting for the socially-stigmatizing miasma of conservative Protestantism, let alone evangelicalism, when coming to Christ. Explanations abound from evangelicals about why that’s the case, usually amounting to our need for richer liturgies and a greater engagement with the early Christian tradition. I think there’s another, equally viable one: Conservative Protestants stress the relationship between faith and reason to its absolute breaking point, and elite intellectuals in particular know the pressures of trying to make sense of everything all too well already, something Catholicism and Orthodoxy don’t ask them to do.

We can turn to Rod Dreher’s recounting of his own conversion to Christianity as an example of the latter two traditions’ strength on this front. For Dreher, it wasn’t at an altar call but underneath the apse of Chartres Cathedral that he realized his need for faith. It was here, as he puts it in his latest book, that “I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that God was real, and that he wanted me.”¹ Such an experience was not a rational apprehension of Christianity’s truthfulness but rather a mystical awareness of God’s transcendence. In other words, what would come to root his belief system was something suprarational. It was in reason’s suspension, not its immediate fulfillment, that God was finally to be found.

Many Christian theologians of all confessional stripes have turned to the Anselmian aphorism of credo ut intelligam (“I believe so that I may understand”) as the proper motivation for theology, itself inspired by a similar statement from Augustine, Anselm’s foremost influence.² The central point is that reason, rather than having a magisterial role which can subject divine revelation to its superseding scrutiny, instead seeks to subject itself to the established teaching of Scripture. On this front, the three streams of orthodox Christianity can find common hermeneutical ground. The goal of the theologian is to humbly receive what God has declared to his church, not formulate things based on their own estimation apart from him.

How it plays out practically is a much different matter. For Catholics and the Orthodox, the sole purpose of the individual’s reason in matters of faith is better accommodating oneself to the received dogma of the church. John Paul II regarded reason’s positive use, chiefly as exhibited in philosophy, as “an indispensable help for a deeper understanding of faith and for communicating the truth of the Gospel to those who do not yet know it.”³ As he goes on to critique concerning the modern West’s appropriation of reason,

Reason, in its one-sided concern to investigate human subjectivity, seems to have forgotten that men and women are always called to direct their steps towards a truth which transcends them. Sundered from that truth, individuals are at the mercy of caprice, and their state as person ends up being judged by pragmatic criteria based essentially upon experimental data, in the mistaken belief that technology must dominate all. It has happened therefore that reason, rather than voicing the human orientation towards truth, has wilted under the weight of so much knowledge and little by little has lost the capacity to lift its gaze to the heights, not daring to rise to the truth of being.⁴

This sentiment is reflected in the Orthodox perspective, although to reason’s further diminution. As it was communicated by Orthodox patriarchs in 1718, “We preserve the Doctrine of the Lord uncorrupted and firmly adhere to the Faith he delivered to us and keep it free from blemish and diminution as a Royal Treasure and a monument of great price neither adding any thing nor taking any thing from it.”⁵ Put more bluntly by John of Damascus: “We do not change the everlasting boundaries which our fathers have set, but we keep the Tradition, just as we have received it.”⁶ The whole point of reason is to be in the service of articulating and defending matters of faith that have already been decided. With that part done with, the believer is simply tasked with making sure they don’t stray from the well-defined guardrails.

Things are a bit trickier within Protestantism. Although the Anselmian/Augustinian approach was promoted by the magisterial Reformers, competing streams about the nature of reason quickly presented themselves. The radical Reformers, especially manifested by Andreas Karlstadt, emphasized the ultimacy of the Spirit in interpretation. Conversely, Socianism opted for an exacting biblicism which subjected the dogma of the church, most of all the Trinity, to rationalistic scrutiny. And Kant and Schleiermacher and so on. The consistent issue throughout the Protestant tradition has been discerning exactly where reason ends and faith must take over the reins, an unending dialectic that is occasionally a boon but usually a bane, especially when confessional identities are at play. Such a tale was played out in the battle between fundamentalism and modernism at the turn of the twentieth century, whose results I am not convinced we have fully reckoned with yet in terms of its impact on how we broadly understand the nature of doctrine and the precise grounds for its authority (Hint: The modernists weren’t the only ones doing some long-term ecclesial kneecapping.)

That brings us back to the freshly proselytized elite. Simply put, becoming Catholic or Orthodox excludes you from feeling the internal pressure to exhaustively justify every aspect of Christian belief. It’s true enough that hardly any believer will try to rationalize something like the doctrine of the Trinity as self-evident apart from church tradition. But that’s honestly beside the point, because the deeper phenomenon ingrained within Protestantism is that, at a certain level, you have an irrepressible need to explain things according to reason (since you are not dogmatically bound to tradition in the way Catholics and the Orthodox are) while also acknowledging that nothing can go beyond Scripture (something that Catholics and Orthodox have an easier time with since their respective ecclesiastical authorities keep acceptable exegesis on a tight leash).

Among many distressing battlegrounds for faith and reason, evolution presents one where Protestants have perhaps encountered the greatest degree of intellectual agony within recent record. Both Catholics and Orthodox Christians can hold to the substance of modern evolutionary theory without jeopardizing their standing with their respective faith traditions. Not so for conservative evangelicals. Evolution has consistently been a front where many Bible-believing Protestants either check their reason at the door or, more commonly, try to demonstrably prove creationism’s infinitely superior scientific accuracy. If you are an Ivy League-educated academic, there’s not much of a debate in terms of what is a professionally and personally preferable stream to swim in.

Worthen certainly presents a welcome exception to the norm in this respect. Yet I think we need to be more honest with ourselves about how Catholicism and Orthodoxy are precisely so alluring to the refined intellectual, real or supposed. There is a sense of liberation in being able to have a functional separation of faith and reason in the manner we typically understand the latter by just letting yourself get lost in the firm but welcoming arms of Mother Church rather than trying your hand at figuring out what is, in the final analysis, irreducibly mysterious. Comparatively, evangelicalism has historically done a pretty bad job in being epistemologically transparent. I don’t think it’s all that surprising that deconstruction and “deconversion” is pretty much exclusively an evangelical thing, as it is, in some way at least, the process of individuals realizing they were sold a mess of sentimentalist pottage when they thought they had the answers.

I sincerely hope we do see more secular thinkers who embrace conservative evangelicalism as their chosen home for belief. At the same time, we should be less surprised when they don’t, despite what they might be missing out on. Maybe that should give us pause to reflect on all that really might be keeping them away to begin with, and how much we’re willing to let go, or be more honest about, to see them better persuaded to join us.

1. Rod Dreher, Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age (Zondervan, 2024), 12.

2. Augustine’s formulation can be found in his Old Testament sermons, specifically Sermon 43. See Augustine, “Sermon 43,” in Sermons 20–50 on the Old Testament, trans. Edmund Hill, O.P. and ed. by John E. Rotelle (New City Press, 1990), 238–43. https://wesleyscholar.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Augustine-Sermons-20-51.pdf

3. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio [On the Relationship Between Faith and Reason]. The Holy See. September 14, 1998. https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091998_fides-et-ratio.html

4. Ibid.

5. “The Answers of the Orthodox of the East to the Proposals sent from Britain for an Union and Agreement with the Oriental Church,” in The Orthodox Church of the East in the Eighteenth Century, ed. by George Williams (Rivingtons, 1868), 15–67.

6. Quoted in Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church (Penguin Books, 1997), 196.