Why are Young Men Turning to Catholicism and Orthodoxy? (with Matt Whitman & Redeemed Zoomer)

Why Young Men Are Turning to Catholicism and Orthodoxy

Welcome to Your Calvinist Podcast. My name is Keith Foskey, and I am your Calvinist. Today on the show, I'm going to be joined by Matt Whitman of the 10 Minute Bible Hour and Redeem Zumer, who many of you know I've had on the show before.

I've done debates with him, and we've talked a lot about the faith. Well, today we're going to be talking about a movement within Christianity that's been taking place a lot online, where a lot of young men are moving towards Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.

Why is that? What's the attraction? Why the change, and why now? Well, those are some of the things we're going to discuss today, so stay tuned. The show begins right now. Your Calvinist Podcast is filmed before a live studio audience.

Hey, guys. This is Keith Foskey, your Calvinist, coming at you today with two good friends. I'm joined by Redeem Zumer and Matt Whitman of the 10 Minute Bible Hour, and it's already going great. Isn't that wonderful that it just starts out so perfectly?

Yeah, we're in good shape. I had Matt on my show a few weeks ago, and Redeem Zumer, who I've had on the show several times, we've done debates, we've been good friends now for several, well, I guess it's going on a year now.

I guess we've known each other more than just a few months. In the comment section, we began talking to each other and said we should do something together, the three of us. We talked about what would be a good opportunity and what would be a good subject that might be beneficial to everyone, and we have landed on why none of us are Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox.

No, that's not what we're going to talk about. We're actually going to talk about why we are seeing in the evangelical world a shift toward the more traditional Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox views, especially among young men.

The reason why we chose this particular topic is because both Matt and Redeem Zumer have had the opportunity to engage with people specifically from those backgrounds. Now, if you've ever watched any of my videos, you'll know that I do a lot of interviews with denominational pastors and things like that, but I haven't had a lot of Roman Catholics and Orthodox on my show.

In fact, I don't think I've ever interviewed one yet. I look forward to one day, but I'm going to be working today sort of as the person asking the questions since Matt and Redeem Zumer have actually engaged on this issue and had an opportunity to talk to people because I know I have a ton of questions and things that I'd like to ask them.

But before we go any further, I want to just, in case you don't know who these guys are, and if you're watching on their channel, obviously you do, and you might not know who I am. Again, I'm Keith Foskey.

I do the Your Calvinist channel on YouTube, a lot of funny stuff, especially making fun of denominations. That's kind of my thing. I like to be funny, hopefully not too mean, but still try to get people to smile.

But if each of you could just introduce yourself real quick, talk about what you do on your channel, and then we'll jive right into the conversation. Redeem Zumer, go first.

What Redeemed Zoomer and Matt Whitman Do Online

Thank you. So I'm Redeem Zumer, for those of you who don't know me. I'm the one here who is not a pastor, and I have zero credentials. What I try to do is I just try to explain theology and Christianity really simply for young people to try and be like a gateway drug for them to investigate more advanced and credentialed theology.

So I quickly explain denominations, quickly explain books of the Bible, quickly explain why I'm Presbyterian, all those sorts of things. And I have a lot of interactions with other Gen Z Christians, and I know a lot of people, other Gen Z influencers, and I've been noticing a lot of patterns in Gen Z, trying to think of ways to help Gen Z become more religious, because right now it is the most atheist generation.

And yes, I definitely have seen a trend in Gen Z towards more traditional forms of Christianity, which for many of them is, you know, Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. We've also seen a rise in, you know, classical Protestantism as well, like Presbyterian, Lutheran, Anglican and stuff.

So I just try to engage with that. But I'm a big fan of both of your guys' channels, and I have been way before I had any sort of channel myself.

Well, we appreciate that, and love the fact that you're coming to us from Notre Dame today, which is really cool. Neither of us are

This is a Presbyterian church behind me. This is not some Roman Catholic cathedral. Protestants used to build churches like this, and we're not just talking Anglicans, Lutherans. You know, there's Baptist churches that look like this.

There's Methodist churches that look like this. Even some historically Black Pentecostal churches that look kind of like this. So this is sort of my way of saying, if you want tradition, Protestantism is still an option.

Nice. Matt, share with everyone what you do.

Yeah, I've been doing internet stuff for about 10 years, which has kind of come on quickly. And mostly I like Bible stuff. Just the text is really interesting to me. I'm also interested in what people do with it and what they make of it.

So my YouTube thing that maybe the most people have seen or chatted up with me about when we run into each other has a bunch of Bible stuff on it. But then also I go around other people's churches that are different from my own, and I bring a camera and I ask whoever's in charge there what they do and why they do it and where they're coming from.

And we have a nice time. And my goal is to give somebody the microphone and an opportunity to just explain what's beautiful about their tradition. Generally, I try to go and visit historic creedal Orthodox expressions of Christianity so that a lot of my interviews turn out to be kind of us comparing notes on what looks similar, what looks different.

I'm really excited about trying to find those places of common cause. I would not say I'm an ecumenicist. I would say that convictional unity is something I'm enthusiastic about. The better we understand why we think what we think and why someone else thinks what they think, the quicker and easier it is to get past the insecurities that cause us to have no common cause and squander all of our kingdom energy on trying to defeat other Christians.

The quicker we can get past that and get to the point where we're realistic about where we can partner and where it just makes sense to have this group go it alone. We'll go it alone over here. And that's been a fascinating process for me.

I've learned a lot going and doing that. And then my, I guess my more, how do I want to put it? The project that's maybe the little bigger project for me is the daily Bible podcast I do. That's actually called the 10 minute Bible hour, where we just pick a book of the Bible and we go through it.

And if it takes 800 days to get through the book of Matthew, then I guess it took 800 days and there are fart jokes. And I suppose that's everything.

Yeah. And the last part, obviously the most important are those flatulent jokes are what get the likes, you know, it's what gets the clicks.

They always started being funny when I was like three and it never quit.

Yeah. Well, gentlemen, you both have had interactions again with Roman Catholics and with Eastern Orthodox teachers, leaders, apologists. And Zuma, I know you've done debates and you said you have another one coming up.

Matt, have you ever done any debating or is it just all been interview style?

Yep. Not my game. Compare and contrast. That's more my style.

Yeah. And I haven't done any official debates with Roman Catholics or Eastern Orthodox yet. So far, the only debates I've done have been with other Protestants. Two of them were with Pastor Keith himself, and one of them was with a Lutheran once.

But I've not done any debates with Catholics or Orthodox yet. I did a discussion with Trent Horn, which was very, very good. He's an awesome guy. And I did do a conversation with Jay Dyer that turned into a debate, but it wasn't really planned to be.

So I've had experience. I think Pastor Matt has had more experience talking to actual like priests and clergy in Catholicism and Orthodoxy. I've mostly talked to either young.

Humans or like apologists and stuff. Well, that leads to a quick question that I think might be a good way to start. What do you think is the drawing card for many young men? And the reason why I ask this is what you just said, Zuma, you said you've talked to many young, basically ones who've just become this faith.

What is drawing them? Is it the internet? Is it hearing these apologists online? Or are they going into churches and being drawn by the churches themselves? Is there evangelism going on? Is there apostatizing going on?

Or is it online that's really drawing? And that's sort of.

The Internet, Tradition, and the Pull of High-Church Christianity

My first question. Yes, the first two things. It's mostly the internet, and it's this idea of wanting tradition. Because my generation grew up in an age where progressivism and a big disdain for tradition was just shoved down everyone's throats.

And young men developed more of an aversion to it than young women, because a lot of the modern progressive stuff targets young women and sort of excludes young men. And a lot of young men also grew up in churches that also have disdain for tradition.

They might be conservative on social ethics, but they don't really care about the church fathers. They don't care about traditional liturgy and stuff. So men are just starved for tradition all around.

They're starved for a more masculine, traditional type of Christianity. And the internet advertises orthodoxy and Catholicism as the only place to get such stuff. If you want tradition, if you want the church fathers, if you want beautiful churches, if you want beautiful hymns and liturgy, you need to go Catholic and Orthodox.

That's what the internet says. And there really aren't very good internet representatives of traditional Protestantism. I try to be that, but I'm not very good at it because I'm not a pastor. I'm a Minecraft YouTuber.

That's what I am. And people say, oh, you're not qualified to represent Protestants. I know I'm not, but there aren't many other traditional Protestants who have channels dedicated to defending traditional Protestantism.

So there's just a huge disparity in the amount of internet apologetics for Rome and the East than there is for any traditional Protestantism. Most Protestant apologists are very low church evangelical and stuff.

So if someone starts out wanting something more traditional, nine out of 10 times, they're eventually going to go to Rome and the East. Sometimes they'll stop being, stop off at Lutheran or Anglican for two weeks or something.

You see a lot of denomination hopping. And it's not like these people are going to denominations. They treat denominational identities like a lot of other young people treat gender identities where you have a new one every week.

It's just like today, I'm a Lutheran today. I'm an Anglican because today I intellectually assent to the propositions of this denomination that I have barely studied. So there's a lot of what we call LARPing in Gen Z.

A lot of people, I don't know, people like Luke who grew up in Missouri identifies as Eastern Orthodox despite never attending an Eastern Orthodox divine liturgy. So I think there's good and bad, just like all movements.

It's a very good thing that young men desire tradition. I think in the millennial generation, there was a big disdain for tradition. I think Gen Z is reacting against that. Like most of Gen Z is not traditional, but there is a strong resistance movement.

What I don't like is I think they are being very superficial with a lot of the traditions and in some ways valuing the aesthetic and the identity over the essence of Christianity, which is the gospel.

And a lot of times these people become experts on interdenominational debates while being very biblically illiterate. I've had a lot of people give me like long essays on why they think the filioque is heretical or why they think the papacy is true, or even in other high church Protestant settings, like why they think Anglican apostolic succession is the most valid.

And they've never read the gospel of John, like seriously. So that's a problem with this movement. It's a problem with this trad movement. And also in a lot of these trad circles, not just Catholicism and Orthodoxy, I'm talking about trad Protestantism as well.

There's very little fruit of the spirit. So I think Pastor Matt's videos are much better representative of these denominations of Catholic and Orthodox because he's talking to actual ministers, talking to actual priests, trained priests, whereas the people I've interacted with in all denominations are really just the online personalities of those denominations, which usually aren't going to be the best representatives, myself included.

Well, Matt, what are your thoughts on that? The online personalities of all of these different groups are very different in person than they are on the internet. It's something I can... Okay. So for the people who don't have a YouTube channel and don't monitor the analytics, there's a phenomenon that happens where the algorithm will roam around with your videos, like a prowling lion looking for which audience it might devour.

And I can tell where it's probing, where it's trying. So if I don't publish a video for a few weeks, you lose the initial momentum of a new video that you've published. That's fine. That's the life cycle of a video.

It's not weird. But then the algorithm will say, well, this channel has been around for a while. Then some people have seemed to like it in the past. Nothing's cooking there now. Let's see if this pocket of people might like it.

And I can tell there's no feedback loop on that. I don't get to see who the algorithm is putting stuff in front of. It's only by the comments that I can tell. And wow, can I tell. Like, oh, okay. We are trying jilted atheists right now who used to be Christians and deconstructed in the mid 20 teens.

Cool. Yep. I recognize these comments. Ah, these are King James onlyists. That's who's getting served my videos this week. And they are all mad about the same thing. And what's interesting is as you see the different groups who are being served your video in these kind of fluky algorithmic wanderings, what you'll discover is that each of these groups, their internet identity is characterized by what they're mad about.

All of us, evangelicals, Calvinists, ortho bros, people turn in Catholic after years of being an evangelical, evangelicals who've turned evangelical after years of being Catholic. I can tell you what they're mad about.

I never got the Bible when I was a Catholic. And I don't know. I kind of like that complaint. I like the Bible too, but there's a skewing that happens with the way videos work and are served to the audience on the internet that has a feedback loop that I think a lot of people wouldn't notice that encourages a doubling down on the most negative aspects of what people are upset about from each of these different little pockets.

I think a really important detail to remember whenever we talk about the internet version of anything is that your feed does not look like everybody else's feed. There is a not human machine learning algorithm that is looking for patterns in thought and language and that rewards clicks.

What gets clicks? You see a comment that's nice and friendly and you're like, oh, that's thoughtful. You think this thing is beautiful. You don't like it. You don't engage with it. You nod and you're like, that's emotionally mature and healthy and you move on.

You see something that is born out of hurt or confusion or not a total understanding of the thing, but insecurity and anger come through. The likelihood of engagement goes up and this incentivizes the algorithm to keep doing that.

Now, eventually that reads back onto people who read the comments and they start to imitate what the algorithm has been rewarding. And thus, I think one of the central characteristics of internet Christianity in the 2020s is what you're hurt, angry, or insecure about, as opposed to in real life, it's much more about what you think is beautiful about the tradition you're a part of.

There's more humility involved. There's more, I'm growing and learning these things involved. They're not one-to-one in my opinion.

A lot of times when I ask people, if people are very vocal online about being a certain Christian denomination, I ask them, when did you convert to this? I can just assume that that's what they were born and raised as.

I can assume they converted at some point. And usually it's because they saw some internet content. It's often like, I saw some based trad orthodox TikToks. And for those of you who don't know, based means like a very good opinion, trad means traditional.

So there's just this like propaganda that floats around on TikTok. I don't use TikTok, but there's a lot of propaganda for lots of stuff on TikTok.

Did you just Zoomer, they have mansplaining. I think you just Zoomersplained for us old men.

Who might not know what based is. I'm talking about the audience.

No, it can be me. I just thought it was funny. I'm sorry. This is for my age group. He just.

Defined terms and I'm so thankful. That's awesome. I did some Zoomersplaining. So yeah, it's very interesting that a lot of people these days, when I ask why are so many people going Catholic and Orthodox, they'll say, oh, it's because we're right.

Now, two things. One, if only one of you can be right, and if there's some great spiritual awakening that's happened, why is the flow going equally in both directions instead of to one or the other? The second thing is, why is it happening now and not before if you've always been right?

There's been Catholic and Orthodox books, resources. It's due to a YouTube algorithm. It's due to an AI algorithm that we're seeing an unprecedented move towards high church traditional Christianity in America.

Part of it is it's motivated. It's fueled by being starved for tradition. But I think the reason we're seeing it now is because of the internet. And I think a real Catholic or Orthodox priest would say, you know, being convinced by like internet TikTok propaganda is not really a good reason to join our church.

You should actually talk to Catholic Orthodox priests in real life before you make some sort of decision like that. I guess we've got two reasons.

The Algorithm, College, and Why Internet Christianity Rewards Anger

That we've thrown out that the algorithm is a disruptive force. It sort of plays the role that college used to play in terms of taking things you were raised around and being an authoritative voice in the life of people at some point.

That sort of grabs you by the shoulders. I mean, what did a college professor used to do? Hey, here's a whole bunch of scary ideas that aren't like what you already think. And it's going to unsettle you.

I'm not saying I think or don't think these things. I'm going to teach you all of these dangerous ideas and you're going to do something with them. Now, I don't get the impression that's exactly how college works now, but maybe in a way that mantle, that role has been assumed by the seemingly impartial algorithm who is going to be incentivized to give you one of two things.

You're either the kind of person who is going to click the most if you get stuff that deeply confirms what you already think. That seems to be very effective on an older generation. I don't think that's a current phenomenon.

I think that's always been the case. Sunk cost and just wanting to feel like you didn't screw up your life by investing in the wrong things and thinking the wrong things are going to make us more likely to want reassurances that we've played our cards right and believed the right believes when we start to get a little bit older.

I don't think there's even any shame in that. I think it's a reflective place to be to want to feel like your life had meaning and like you invested in something that mattered. It's why I like to invite people to talk about what's beautiful about their thing rather than debate.

It's just my style. But I also think that the algorithm is going to connect with the aspect of youth where you've been raised with a certain set of values, but you maybe haven't fully gamed that out for yourself and the clicks for younger people are going to be found in stuff that is jarring and at first offensive and troubling and maybe you will end up rejecting it eventually.

But wow, that flies in the face of my assumptions the same way that people who maybe went to a good college both sort of hated and really valued that professor who just kept insisting on putting frustrating difficult ideas in front of you and making you feel profoundly unsafe and challenged.

But in the end, you felt like you were better for it. Well, I mean, the algorithm seems to be imitating. It seems to know or anticipate these same tendencies at different points in life for how we relate to ideas that are foreign to our own or reassuring to our own.

So I think there's no surprise that there's going to be that jarring shakeup effect and that you're going to see a lot of this migration in both directions. And it is in.

Both directions amongst younger people. When I look at things like things that are taught in Roman Catholicism, things that are taught in Eastern Orthodoxy and the things that I've studied and some of it, of course, I would reject because I don't believe that it's in line with what I believe.

But what are some of the aspects of it that are really appealing, according to the people that you've talked to? What are some of the things that people say, this is what I really like? Because it's like I said, for me, I see things like the papacy.

I see things like even, even things like praying the rosary and things like that. And those are, to me, immediate, like, I don't, I don't want anything to do with that. I'm not interested in that. That has no appeal to me at all.

What is it that do you think that is appealing? I know we've already said tradition, but I want to dig down a little deeper and say, what traditions? What do they like? What is it that's drawing them to these two movements, which are, which have major differences with Protestantism?

Historical Continuity, Apostolic Succession, and the Appeal of Tradition

I would say, by tradition, I would define that as.

Historical continuity, because everyone has a tradition, you know, the tradition of evangelical contemporary worship. It's a tradition that goes back to like the 1980s. And they want something that they feel is connected to the apostles, where they can draw a direct line of continuity from their current church today, all the way back to the apostles.

That's why, for example, apostolic succession is a compelling idea for them. There's some Protestants who have various views about apostolic succession, but generally the apostolic denominations are like Catholic, Protestant, not sorry, not Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, maybe Assyrian Church of the East, and some Anglo-Catholics try to join that club as well.

And we've seen this alliance of these apostolic denominations, Catholics, Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, who historically said each other was damned to hell. Historically, they said that. Now they have this alliance against Protestants.

Now you'll just see like these sort of pan-apostolic YouTube channels where the only thing they agree on is Protestant bad. You'll see these trad memes where it's like Catholic churches, beautiful cathedral, Orthodox churches, beautiful tourist attraction cathedral, Protestant churches, strip mall, as if that is a fair representation of, you know, the typical building for each denomination.

But this idea of continuity with the past, where you can have a direct line of tradition from today, all the way going back to the apostles. Because a lot of times, like Pastor Matt mentioned, these college professors back in the day would start with tricky questions, challenge your assumptions.

Well, a lot of these Catholic Orthodox YouTube channels will do the same thing. They will ask, when was your church started? When was your church's theology invented? And most Protestants will have to say, you know, if they're non-denominational, they'll say my church was started by Pastor Jim 20 years ago.

What is the correct answer to that question?

If they're like Lutheran or Reformed, it'd be my church was started in the 1500s. I think the correct answer I think it's Acts chapter two.

Yes. I mean, my church started the same day your church was started, with a demonstrable public manifestation of the Holy Spirit, after a clear instruction from Jesus himself, that this was supposed to look different and go to different cultures.

And it's not done until it's gone to a whole bunch of different cultures at the end of the earth. Acts one and Acts two say all these churches that teach the gospel, they all started the same day. I understand that's offensive.

Yeah, now that is the correct answer. That's the answer I would give, certainly. But these young inquirers, they don't know that. If some YouTuber tells them, your church was started by Martin Luther, your church was started by King Henry VIII, they'll be like, duh, okay.

They'll show some graph where it's like a direct line of continuity with the Orthodox church, and then all the Protestant churches just split off and splintered. And these 13-year-old inquirers who are looking for tradition, they don't know any better.

They don't know that that's not true. So you can't exactly blame them. I think in America, Protestantism really has been largely disconnected from its own tradition. In the mainline Protestant churches, you see an inward disconnect from its own tradition with an abandonment of traditional theology.

That's why I'm part of the movement Operation Reconquista, to bring the gospel back to the mainline Protestant churches. That's why I'm still PCUSA. And in evangelical Protestant churches, you see more of an outward abandonment of tradition with churches abandoning traditional liturgy, aesthetics, all those things.

Either way, Protestantism, even if it is traditional, even if it is connected to the past, it doesn't seem like that outwardly to the average person. And you see a pride flag on First Methodist Church.

You see a non-denominational church that has no regard for the church fathers. Then you see an Orthodox church with icons of the saints plastered everywhere, and they have convincing claims to apostolic succession.

The average inquirer is going to think that that has more of a connection to the past. The average inquirer is going to be convinced by the claims that these apostolic denominations were started in 33 AD at Pentecost, and that these Protestant denominations are new innovations.

And obviously that's not true, but I can see, I don't blame people for thinking that originally.

There are two categories here that I hear straight from the horse's mouth. One is the kind of stuff we've been talking about so far, the really big picture, intellectual, theological stuff. And I think one of the phenomena that happens here, whether we're talking about the kid going off to college and learning about the world from their freshman liberal arts professor, or learning about the world from content creators on the internet as curated by the algorithm, it's the same thing.

You don't always think hard about what you were raised with. And a lot of the objections I hear from people about Protestantism, like, oh, this was never spoken to. Yes, it was. Yeah, it was spoken to all the time.

You were just nine. So you just kind of missed it. You were bored that you drew anime characters on your bulletin for a kid, no judgment. Like you were a kid, you made it through church and you took it for granted.

And that's part of the beauty of that college rite of passage is it does grab you by the shoulders and it's meant to make you retroactively look back and have that end of the usual suspects moment where you go, all of it was taught to me.

The Bible makes sense. My parents knew something. This is amazing. Or if you really got nothing out of it, it's meant to make you question those assumptions and do something new. So for me, I think it's tempting to way underestimate that aspect of humanity.

You don't, you just take for granted what you're raised around and you get used to it and you think everybody thinks it, it doesn't have any exotic factor. It doesn't have any intrigue. You think you know all of it, even though you know 2 of it at best.

And that gets you by socially in those circles to say the 2 that everybody knows. So you assume there's nothing to it. Well, then you go out onto the internet. You don't get some Catholic who doesn't know anything and takes it as seriously as you took your childhood Protestantism.

That's not how you're going to hear from their videos. Aren't going to get any views. They're not going to get any traction. You're never going to know who that person is. You're going to hear from somebody who has recently discovered more of the fullness of Catholic church and they see the beauty of it and they're excited about it and they're going to highlight these things and they're going to get out their yarn and red thumbtacks and they're going to make maps and explain all the stuff that they figured out.

And it's going to be compelling because you just kind of got bored and used to what you were raised around and this feels fresh and it still has Jesus in it. This, it's not that complicated in that regard.

So I do think that aspect along with the algorithm, I know I keep coming back to it. I just can't emphasize it enough. But the other thing is that I think we just need to acknowledge that Catholics and Orthodox do some stuff really well that scratches itches, that Protestantism maybe has a little tougher time scratching in a very practical sense.

A whole bunch of people I know who quit being evangelical and started being Catholic or Orthodox do so because they naively believe that confession and the church authority structure solves church fights and church discipline.

Now, it doesn't. They'll figure this out when they get into it. But confession is kind of useful within certain expressions of evangelicalism. There isn't a clarity on this. All anybody's got is go Matthew 18 it.

Well, what does that always mean? That's really difficult to shrewdly navigate when you've had a legitimate falling out with someone or you can't resolve it, but now you've got this outstanding thing where you have guilt before somebody else and you can't fix it.

Well, bad church leadership in some evangelical and Protestant settings, we'll just let that metastasize. And now somebody comes away feeling totally burned. Whereas within Catholicism and Orthodoxy, particular Catholicism, I mean, you just have a thing that you do.

You go to the thing, you say the things, it all happens in the little booth and it's done. And somebody who has the authority to be like, hey dude, it's done. Make these gestures, say these words, it's done.

Is that the best? I don't know. But I think it's very satisfying for some who really just need to put a nail in the coffin on that little dust up, that little point of pain. Again, I wouldn't say that it necessarily accomplishes that, but I think it's very appealing to have that point of closure in that regard.

I think that Catholic churches are appealing. Orthodox churches are appealing to people who have seen how much volunteerism and kind of social dance steps are involved in being a part of a non-denominational church.

Whereas within Catholicism, you really can just receive the sacrament and kind of you're good. Ideally, you might do more someday when you're into it more, but it's okay to not be into it more. There's a mechanism for that.

Whereas if you're not into it in a place where belief and loudly asserting that belief is kind of how you're in, well, that can be difficult if you're not in a place where you can muster that right now.

And that can make the high church more appealing where you kind of outsource the heavy lift of your faith a little bit to somebody else. The church mediates. It isn't so dependent on your belief. And I think there can be an advantage that people detect in how practically speaking, the historic apostolic high church handles some of those doldrums of faith and some of those, I'm just not into it, but I want to go to heaven things.

And we can sit here. All we want is guys who are really into it and really excited about the gospel and say, well, those people should just be into it more. They shouldn't want something where the church does more of a heavy lift, but that's easy for us to say, because we're really into it.

I have been at a point in my life in a place where I wasn't as sure about anything. And it really would have helped me to have been able in that point where my faith was wobbling, to have been able to have a theological mechanism by which I kind of just outsource this for now.

I got to go autopilot. I don't have this. I can't really fake it right now. If I'm rightly established by my belief, my belief is in the gutter. It's damaged. I don't know what's wrong with me. I want to believe.

I want to follow Jesus better. I just suck. And I would like to stop the suckage as soon as possible. I talk with people who get to that place and there's an appeal to having the priest kind of do the heavy lift for a while.

Am I saying that these things are right or that this is the way church ought to be? No, I'm not necessarily saying that. What I am saying is there are just some very practical mechanisms that exist in these traditions that are often handled differently within Protestantism, particularly evangelicalism, that I think offer some appeal as well.

Strong Institutions, Protestant Weakness, and the Loss of Cultural Power

Right. I think that's definitely a reason. I think another reason where Catholics and Orthodox have an advantage over Protestants today is that they still have their historic strong institutions. Because if you have a strong institution, there's so many resources at your disposal.

You can have apologetics to defend your faith. You can have scholars to answer the hard questions of the faith for you. You can have, I don't know, campus ministries everywhere. There are endless advantages to have strong institutions.

Catholics and Orthodox have not been alienated from their own institutions. An Orthodox church built 500 years ago, it's still Eastern Orthodox, still preaching Eastern Orthodox. A Catholic church built 500 years ago, still Catholic, still preaching Catholicism.

A Protestant church built 500 years ago, it's preaching the United Nations and the environment and nothing else. Right. And it's basically just turned into a museum. So Protestants used to have strong institutions.

Remember, the Ivy League schools, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, founded by Bible-believing Protestants. Brown, founded by Baptists. Baptists founded an Ivy League school. Most Protestants are just, do not know that.

The vast majority of young Christians I've talked to did not know that the Ivy League schools were founded by Bible-believing conservative Protestants. They didn't know that. Because the public schools, like the ones I went to, teach that Christians have just been the bad guys in history.