A brief account of my conversion

"The steps of man are guided by the Lord..."

Above: "The Pilgrim at the Gate of Idleness" by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1568), depicting a pilgrim at a gate contemplating the path ahead.

The process of coming to believe in particular doctrines and then coming to change your view is not, in real life, a strict logical process, with ergo’s and distinguo’s for its milestones. Your religion builds itself up you know not how; some habits of thought stepped into unconsciously, others imbibed from study, others acquired by prayer. And beyond that, the whole complex of your psychology, moulded by innumerable influences not merely religious, predisposes you this way or that; your mental outlook, though it does not alter the facts, does condition the ways in which you come to appreciate them. — Msgr. Ronald Knox (1888-1957)

It is customary for Catholics to describe a conversion as a profound "coming home." Newman famously depicted his own as "coming into port after a rough sea."¹ This portrayal resonates with me, but with a qualification: my journey was more Aeneid than Odyssey. For wherever an odyssey takes you, “it must involve coming back home at the end of it.” An aeneid, by contrast,

involves not merely coming home, but coming home to a place you have never been in before—one that combines in itself all that you valued in the old home with added promises of a future that is new. In an Aeneid, as in an Odyssey, you may be driven from your course; but… in an Aeneid you do not even know where your port lies.²

My conversion was not a rupture with everything that came before it, but rather the fulfillment of every good and true aspect that I inherited from my past. None of the individuals who contributed to my understanding of the truth have been set aside or forgotten.

The complete tale of my early life, the wanderings through the wilderness of youth into adulthood, the vicissitudes of my educational sojourn, and the ultimate conversion that crowned it all—that is a story too long to tell. I cannot expound upon every experience, argument, or reason that guided my steps into the embrace of the Catholic faith. I will attempt merely to sketch some of the

external features of the country through which [my] soul has passed—the crossroads, the obstacles, the ravines—and to give some sort of account of the consultations held by the way.³

I must therefore content myself with communicating the truths as I saw them, not their demonstration. How could I say more than that? Faith, after all,

is a divine operation wrought in the dark, even though it may seem to be embodied in intellectual arguments and historical facts.⁴

I was born in Orlando, the fourth of eight children—seven boys and the youngest, a girl. We were typical homeschoolers growing up in the South. My father, who baptized me at age six, was a Southern Baptist pastor, as were my grandfather and a few uncles on my mother’s side. I stand as the sole Catholic in the extensive lineage of both my parents.

The Protestant churches of my upbringing had about them an air of anti-intellectualism, and I recall no formal theological training. My parents, however, instilled a love for Scripture that remains with me today. I fondly recall the mornings when my father would read and discuss Psalms and Proverbs with me and my brothers. The many Bible drill competitions, which taught me the savory English prose of the King James Version, fostered a love for the written Word—an affection which now extends to the deuterocanonical books excluded from the Bibles of my youth.⁵

As for any anti-Catholic sentiments, they were sparse, save for the occasional disparaging remark from an uncle. The subject rarely surfaced in conversation. When it did, the predictable tropes emerged: Catholics were deemed foreign and peculiar, accused of worshiping Mary and preaching a false gospel, and so on. Still, those caricatures failed to take root within the soil of my heart and mind.

In the final reckoning, I found my way to Catholicism driven by a deep-seated belief in its truth. I found it to be the most authentic expression of Christianity, maintaining a profound fidelity to the early church and the words of Jesus of Nazareth. Given my background, how did this all come to pass? My conviction did not appear at once. It unfolded gradually, over the passing years, motivated by several crises and realizations. 

Crisis

Around the age of twenty, I underwent a sort of intellectual rebirth, and it was during this period that I began to view Catholicism favorably. As I neared the end of my college years, I delved deeply into Christian apologetics, grappling with challenges to the worldview in which I was raised. In an earnest effort to address objections fairly and logically, I observed two significant points. Firstly, the most influential apologists, or those from whom I learned the most, were philosophers. Secondly, many of these philosophers I was reading, figures like Peter Kreeft and Francis Beckwith, were Catholic. Despite my ignorant perception of Catholics as odd or mistaken, I considered them to be Christians.

Following college, my life embarked on a series of unforeseen and winding turns. For a year, I traversed the country and ventured into Central America, serving as a youth speaker for a Protestant revival ministry. The struggle to bring the light of Christ (as I understood it) to American youth, coupled with my own uncertainties and inquiries, propelled me deeper into history, philosophy, and apologetics. Subsequently, I enrolled in a Protestant seminary in Southern California, where I hoped to find answers and solidify my path as a youth minister.

The first crisis unfurled while I was a philosophy student at the seminary. I had become discontent with Protestant traditions and their answers to questions of utmost concern—questions regarding salvation, ecclesiology, authority. After a time of internal struggle, I admitted to myself that the profusion of answers laid out before me seemed either incoherent or, more disquietingly, incompatible with Scripture and church history.  

In tandem with that crisis came another, namely, a struggle to view church attendance as anything other than pointless. If "church" consisted primarily of a band playing “worship” (sometimes secular) songs, coupled with a sermon of dubious quality, and perhaps a convivial gathering during the week—if that's all it is, I surmised, then my time could be better spent elsewhere. I could immerse myself in the wisdom of eloquent sermons penned by historical luminaries—like John Wesley, from whom I inherited my name—revel in beautiful music from ages past, and engage in meaningful conversations with friends at my own discretion. Even volunteering for noble causes struck me as a more worthwhile endeavor than the act of attending a church service.

During this period, I abandoned the idea of youth ministry and decided instead to pursue doctoral studies with the aim of teaching at the college level. I also met and married my wife, and the next year we moved to the Midwest to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy.

Those crises, among others, eventually led me away from evangelical Protestantism to confessional Protestantism. But although the latter satisfied certain yearnings for sound theology, liturgy, and a connection to history and tradition, I could not find my true home within it. The Reformed path was untenable, for I rejected its core tenets on philosophical and theological grounds. The Anglican church I tried and found wanting. Aware of its origins, I perceived it as a church that never should have been and saw no basis for its claim to apostolic succession. Moreover, having succumbed to social pressures of modern times, it was theologically compromised and resembled a progressive humanitarian organization more than the Church our Savior founded. 

Realization

Periods of crisis, as I call them, prompted several realizations. First, I began to see that

there is no stable middle ground between Catholicism and atheist materialism. One must always be traveling, or slipping unintentionally, in one direction or the other.⁶

I witnessed this phenomenon in the lives of numerous friends and family members over the years, as they moved in one direction or the other. We don't simply abandon our religious commitments; rather, we exchange them for others. The world tends to polarize, with Christ the King at one pole and the prince of this world at the other—the Holy Spirit or the spirit of the age. In my view, Christianity could serve as a bulwark against the currents of our degenerate culture only if it was true. However, discerning its truth required grappling with the nature of the church and her authority. This line of searching led me inexorably to view Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox Churches—Greek East and Latin West—as the only viable options.

The second realization was that I came to see Catholicism as a sort of default theological position. The tacit assumption throughout my life was that the Catholic Church, whatever its merits, was otherly and suspect; I needed a good reason to become Catholic. But I began to see the opposite: the Catholic Church was the default position and I needed to have a good reason not to be Catholic. The Catholic view of justification, a visible church, the sacraments and nature of grace, etc., made sense to me and aligned with Scripture and the early church—more so than the Protestant competitors did. More importantly, since I affirmed the Nicene Creed and held that Christ founded a Church, namely, an apostolic one, I could not see how any Protestant tradition could fit the bill.

Intellectual Shifts

Concurrent with these crises and realizations, my intellectual landscape underwent significant shifts over the course of a decade. These pivotal transformations drew both my heart and mind closer to the Catholic Church, tilling the ground of my soul for its eventual embrace. Here are six examples to illustrate the sort of shifts I experienced:

1. I began to notice the remarkable unity among diversity in Catholicism. Although her teaching and sacraments are one, her saints, liturgies, traditions, and expressions are diverse enough to appeal to anyone. Intellectual or mystic, married or single, young or old—there truly is something for everyone.

2. As a man endeavoring to navigate an degenerate culture, struggling to justify the conclusions I held as a Protestant, the moral teaching and reasoning of the Catholic Church, with its basis in traditional natural law, appealed to me like an oasis in a desert. The notion that the universal Church could speak authoritatively to its members and the world by declaring what logically follows from Scripture and Tradition and applying those consequences to novel circumstances and challenges in every age—the very idea compelled me. It embodied what I expected from a visible Church actively engaged in the world over time.

3. I found an intellectual soulmate in the thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas. I remember, as a graduate philosophy student, learning about Aquinas’s doctrine of double effect. We were debating ethical dilemmas and reading contemporary philosophers who appeal to an array of disconnected ethical principles to arrive at absurd or inconsistent conclusions about human behavior. And there was Thomas’s doctrine, clear and timeless, which could solve every single one in a principled, consistent way. To my peers, who tended to dismiss the doctrine, it was suspect because it was medieval and outdated, or because it presupposed objective moral facts and the natural law. But to me it was a salve for a weary mind, desperate to ground my beliefs in something solid.  

4. No merely human institution can endure for two thousand years. The sheer existence through the centuries of the Catholic Church arrested me, not to mention its role in building the good and beautiful aspects of Western Civilization as we have known it. All of this in spite of centuries of fierce opposition from every other religion, denomination, or philosophical school.

5. The embodied nature of Catholic liturgical life left a lasting impression on me. We are composite beings, body and soul, and our Lord reaches us through his Body, the Church, in physical ways. Absolution demands that we confess our sins aloud and in person, thus giving physical reality to what is in the heart and mind; to receive the very divine life of Christ in the Eucharist, you must consume Him physically; the very idea of sacraments as signs which do what they signify—all of these things are the physical realities our Lord entrusted to His church for the dispensation of grace. Protestantism, even the confessional sort I was drawn to later on, was far more abstract and disembodied than the Church as our Lord intended her to be.

6. Although not the typical path for a convert, before I ever darkened the doors of a Catholic church, I became convinced on philosophical grounds of the Church’s teaching on sex, contraception, and the human person. I embraced the traditional natural law and its teleological principles: that our sexual powers were created for two proper ends—union of spouses and procreation; that human flourishing and social order demand that we respect these ends; and that the sexual revolution and its aftermath were rooted in the widespread use of our sexual powers in ways that subvert or thwart their proper ends. The grave matter of thwarting the ends is ultimately a rejection of our sexual powers as goods from God. 

Culmination

In 2016, I decided for various reasons to abandon a career in higher education. After dropping out of the PhD program, my wife and I ended up running a children’s home for at-risk youth in Washington, DC, before moving to Charlotte, NC, where I became a software developer. My first job brought us to St. Louis, MO, in 2017. That is where the culmination of all the factors and changes occurred.

Spiritually homeless in St. Louis, we were attending mass at a Catholic parish down the street from our apartment. It was a simple, reverent novus ordo mass and the architecture of the church was beautiful. We couldn't partake of the Eucharist but attending mass was better than nothing, and we really enjoyed it.

Around this time, I read the conversion story of Dr. Lawrence Feingold, a Thomist and seminary professor at Kenrick-Glennon Seminary. Intrigued by his story, I stalked his information from the faculty website and emailed to ask if we could meet for coffee. This is what I wrote:

Dear Prof. Feingold,

I am a philosopher-turned-software-developer. I am thirty years old, new to St. Louis, and a mere Christian (in C.S. Lewis's sense of the term) who is feeling a pull toward Orthodoxy or Catholicism. Some theological and other barriers stand in the way, of course, and my wife and I are actively reading, thinking, and praying about where we need to be. A former student of yours told me about you and I recently read your brief account of your conversion. Would you be able and willing to meet with me—perhaps over coffee—to discuss some of the theological matters with which I am struggling? I am sympathetic with the words of Adrian Vermeule, who in a recent First Things piece said that "there is no stable middle ground between Catholicism [I would add Orthodoxy as well] and atheist materialism. One must always be traveling, or slipping unintentionally, in one direction or the other." I am not heading toward materialism, but I am not sure where to go in the other direction, and you seem the perfect sort of person from whom I can learn. 

Larry graciously responded, declining coffee but instead inviting my wife and I to dinner at his home. (This will come as no surprise to anyone who knows Larry and his wife.) The hospitality and conversation that night developed into a friendship that remains to this day. Thereafter, we joined RCIA—taught by Larry, thankfully, as not all RCIAs are created equal.⁷

Ultimately, I became convinced of the Catholic position, and I had to follow and submit to the truth wherever it led. So, on Easter Vigil 2018, my wife and I entered the Catholic Church and sacramentally con-validated our marriage, with Larry and his wife by our sides as our sponsors.

My wife’s story is hers to tell, but I would be remiss not to mention that, in the years leading up to our conversion, we were drifting apart. But as she underwent her own radical conversion, very different from mine, we aligned and united in ways I didn't think were possible.

I chose Peter Damian as my Patron Saint, whose image my Substack bears. Or, perhaps through his intercession, he chose me.

excursus - Why not Eastern Orthodoxy?

The above is a rough, somewhat chronological summary of a much longer story concerning the same events. Still, readers might wonder what it was that drew me to the Catholic Church and not to Eastern Orthodoxy. 

Ultimately, it came down to the disagreement over the Vatican I view of the prerogatives of the Bishop of Rome. The following were the views I became convinced of, though readers should bear in mind that what follows is an account of my beliefs at the time of my conversion, not what I would now acknowledge as the complete or ideal case for Catholicism over Eastern Orthodoxy.

As a preliminary philosophically conviction, I was convinced that there had to be a visible head and unity of the universal Church, which is the Body of Christ; and that the prerogatives of that head had to be the same or similar to any that the Eastern Orthodox already applied to the Church as a whole, however they define it. Indeed, it seemed to me that the Church must possess them through (or in union with) the head. 

Following that philosophical position, I became convinced of several theological views from history and Scripture that favored Catholicism:

1. Our Savior established a Kingdom on earth—a singular, visible Church, to which he promised indefectibility and infallibility until the end of the world. This precludes any lasting disunion or failure. Among the various religious communities or sects, one alone could be regarded as the Church and Kingdom founded by Christ.

2. Christ appointed Saint Peter the apostle as the rock and foundation on which He built His Church. To Peter alone He gave supreme jurisdiction, symbolized by the keys delivered solely to him (Matthew 16:18-19), and indicated by the commissions given solely him to strengthen the brethren in their faith (Luke 22:31-34) and to be the shepherd of the universal flock (John 21:15-17).

3. These high prerogatives endure in and through the Bishops of Rome, as apostolic successors to the Chair of Peter.

The Vatican I view of the Papacy was the only one that could align with my initial philosophical stance and the three points mentioned above.

Finally, although my wife and I had various Greek Orthodox friends and loved the divine liturgy of their parishes, I had a caution in my spirit about the whole thing. I’m afraid I don’t know how else to describe it. Some alarm within me just would not allow me to become Eastern Orthodox. It didn’t help that one Orthodox friend had bragged about his priest denying the existence of hell, while another lauded his priest’s allowance for contraception.

In any case, that’s the brief version of why I became Catholic instead of Eastern Orthodox. Admittedly, I know a lot more now than I did then about ecclesiastical history and objections to Catholicism, but everything I have learned since then has tended to confirm rather than weaken my initial position.

Regardless, I long for reunion of East and West and encourage all of us to fast and pray for that end.

1.  St. John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua, ch. 5 “Position of my Mind since 1845”, 1865.

2.  Msgr. Ronald Knox, A Spiritual Aeneid, ch. 1 “First Influences”, 1919 (second printing).

3. Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson’s Confessions of a Convert, ch. I, sec. 1, 1913.

4. Ibid.

5.  Scandalous though it sounds to traditional Catholic ears, I usually prefer the KJV to the Douay-Rheims.

6.  https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2016/11/finding-stable-ground.

7. Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults.