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A Catholic Century or an Evangelical Century?

A Catholic Century or an Evangelical Century?

Last updated on: November 10, 2026 at 7:34 am by Gene Veith

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A Catholic Century or an Evangelical Century? 2026-11-10T07:34:05-05:00 Gene Veith

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Will the form of Christianity that prevails in the years ahead be Catholic or Evangelical? Some experts are foreseeing a “Catholic Century.” Others are foreseeing an “Evangelical Century.” And where does that leave us “Evangelical Catholics,” also known as Lutherans?

Interestingly, the main argument for a Catholic Century is being made by a Protestant, and the main argument for an Evangelical Century is being made by a Catholic.

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, an intellectual historian at Wesleyan University, has written an article for the liberal-leaning Catholic magazine Commonweal entitled The Catholic Century, with the deck “Why the Church’s social teachings are drawing so much interest.”

He attended a Pentecostal Bible college and a Baptist seminary, but got his B.A. from the now-closed Lutheran Concordia College Oregon! Steinmetz-Jenkins says he is no longer a conservative evangelical and has become a “progressive,” but he doesn’t say what his religion is, other than that he is a “non-Catholic.” (Maybe he’s a progressive Lutheran! See this for why he started his academic studies all over at Concordia after finishing the Baptist seminary program. It was part of his shift out of evangelicalism and his desire to become a historian. He wanted to study under Concordia professor Mark Ruff, now on the faculty of St. Louis University.)

Anyway, in the Catholic Century, Steinmetz-Jenkins points out that whereas all of the justices on the Supreme Court used to be Protestant, today all but two of them are Catholic, including both the conservative Samuel Alito and the liberal Sonia Sotomayer. Of the most talked-about prospective candidates for the presidency–J. D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez–all are Catholic, despite their wide ideological differences.

In light of the existential crises of our times,”some young people are returning to religious traditions in search of solace and solidarity,” he notes. “If the collapse of civil association has left individuals politically agitated and socially adrift, organized religion may offer them a sense of belonging that few other institutions can.” And, he does not need to say, Catholicism is a religion more organized and more institutional than most.

By “the Catholic Century,” I do not mean Catholic dominance or a sectarian political theology like the one embraced by integralists, but rather an emerging political disposition marked by a shared commitment to solidarity, social obligation, and the common good, even if this commitment finds expression in sharply divergent political projects. . . .

But there is this difference: a Catholic Century wouldn’t be a matter of one people’s civilization, or one people’s condition, spreading throughout the world. While solidarity and the common good are key themes in Catholic social teaching, much more so than in many Protestant traditions, they are not the property of Catholics. It is not so much that Catholic thinkers invented those concepts as that they have often formulated them with the most depth and rigor.

Catholic social teaching can inform ideologies on both the left and the right. Whereas evangelicals are all gung-ho about laissez-faire capitalism, “Even Vance’s Catholic-inspired postliberalism is open to government intervention and much cooler toward laissez-faire economics than the Reagan fusionism that prevailed in the GOP until recently,” he observes. “That left and right agree on little else but are both reaching for the state to control or counteract the market is itself a sign of what I mean by the Catholic Century.”

He concludes that even Protestants will need to look to Catholic social teachings if they want to exert a Christian influence in today’s society. “This makes the Catholic Church the default option for those looking for a Christianity that can help guide and support the struggle to build a different kind of politics—a politics that offers some hope for a nonapocalyptic future.”

The Catholic Ross Douthat, though, begs to differ. He responds in The Free Press with an article entitled Why Evangelicals Are Winning, with the deck, “For all the buzz around a ‘Catholic century,’ evangelicalism is the denomination best placed to thrive in contemporary America.”

He doesn’t quarrel with what Steinmetz-Jenkins says about the intellectual appeal of Catholic social teaching. But the success of a religious movement is not just its impact on intellectuals but, more importantly, on ordinary people.

As a Catholic I have a similar reading of the intellectual situation. But it’s also essential to look beyond the intelligentsia to assess the health and future of religion. And in the wider culture, the form of Christianity that’s most adapted to late-modern America is clearly not the Church of Rome. It’s evangelical Protestantism. The vibes of a Catholic moment are real enough, but evangelicalism’s resilience is our era’s more fundamental fact.

He gives examples of that resilience:

You can see that resilience across almost every means of measurement: conversion rates, retention rates, identification rates, church attendance, intensity of belief. A recent overview from Ryan Burge, the religion data analyst, showed that evangelicals have maintained a roughly steady share of the U.S. population since the 1970s, while both Catholicism and the so-called “mainline” denominations (Congregationalist, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and so on) that once dominated American Christianity have seen marked decline. In the 2020s, evangelicals are more than twice as likely to attend church weekly as Catholics. They are also twice as likely to describe religious faith as “very important” in their lives.

Also, importantly, “Evangelicalism doesn’t just win more converts than Catholicism; it also keeps more of its young people in the faith.”

Critics complain about evangelicals. “Sure, the megachurches may be thriving, the critique runs, but the intellectual tradition is underdeveloped, the aesthetics are tacky, the hucksters are numerous, the hypocrisy is gross, and the partisanship is scandalous.” But many of those criticisms are unfair and inaccurate, he says, as shown by Bonnie Kristian’s recent book In Defense of Evangelicalism: A Response to Its Cultured Despisers. For example, “The conflation of evangelical piety and white identity ignores the extent to which evangelical distinctives are shared by the black church, adopted by immigrant converts, and widespread across Africa, Latin America, and Asia.”

Douthat does say that evangelicals have their problems that they should address. “Evangelical churches do have a strong anti-intellectual current,” so that “evangelicalism loses many of its best-educated young people to either Catholicism or post-Christian worldviews.” He gives himself as an example of someone who converted to Catholicism from evangelicalism as a teenager (with the rest of his family) for such reasons.

But the basic test of any religion, especially any missionary religion, is whether it actually persuades people to practice and believe. And the evangelical model—the entrepreneurial pastor, the adaptable church structures, the emphasis on welcoming seekers and accommodating families, even the suburban and middlebrow aesthetic—clearly works under 21st-century conditions in a way that requires respect and some form of imitation.

The Protestant Timon Cline chips in with a piece in mostly-Catholic First Things entitled A Catholic Moment or an Evangelical Century. He points out that “Significantly more people are leaving Catholicism than converting to it.” Specifically, he says, “the percentage of Americans who convert from Catholicism to Protestantism (4 percent) is higher than the percentage of all converts to Catholicism (1.5 percent).”

DeToqueville predicted that Americans would become either Roman Catholic or irreligious. But, Cline, points out, this is because DeToqueville expected Catholic Americans to assimilate to America’s values of freedom, equality, and democracy.

He theorized that democratic America would turn to Rome through unconscious assimilation: Catholics quietly absorbing American democratic habits—equality, self-government, civic individualism—while remaining doctrinally submissive. This is not the brand of Roman Catholicism that has attracted young converts in recent days. Rather, converts have been attracted by the unified system of doctrine and authority presented by ultramontanism; it is the revolt against liberal democracy and modernity that brought political Catholicism back into the conversation.

Tocqueville’s dream of Catholic triumph in America required assimilation into the American, which is to say Protestant, way of life—the combination of the “doctrines of Protestantism” and “great political freedom.” In fact, the reason Catholicism survived is because it entered the decidedly Protestant system of denominational competition.

Cline concludes: “Insofar as America ceases to be Protestant, spiritually and culturally, it ceases to be America. The future is not Catholic; it is either Protestant or atheist.”

So where does this leave us Evangelical Catholics?

Lutherans can draw on the strengths of both of those strains of Christianity while avoiding their problems. One of the contributions of Catholicism cited by Cline, quoting Joseph Bottum, is showing how to express “religiously derived moral truths in the language of the secular public square.” That refers to the natural law tradition, which is the foundation of Catholic social teaching. Well, Lutherans also have a natural law tradition.

I would say, though, that Catholic political theorizing has tended to be anti-democratic and anti-freedom. Steinmetz-Jenkins says, “That left and right agree on little else but are both reaching for the state to control or counteract the market is itself a sign of what I mean by the Catholic Century.” He thinks state control is a good thing. He is glad that Catholics on both the right and the left are opposed to free market economies. He calls himself a “progressive,” but the shades of Integralism–earthly government under the temporal rule of the pope– which he is quick to dismiss, are still evident.

The Lutheran doctrine of the Two Kingdoms makes a space for freedom, markets, and secular concerns. It teaches that God reigns providentially behind the scenes throughout the temporal order, even among leaders and citizens who do not know Him. It encourages Christian citizenship and promotes morality in the public square, but it avoids the politicization of the faith, which has been so damaging to the credibility of evangelicalism.

Both Catholic and evangelical political programs are mostly thought experiments and internet discussion fodder, since implementing them is highly unlikely given today’s secularism. But the Lutheran doctrine of the Two Kingdoms could actually be applied.

Lutherans have a high view of the Sacraments, liturgical worship, an openness to aesthetics, and an intellectual tradition, all of which are attracting some people to Catholicism. We also have a high view of the Word of God and a high view of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which are attracting even more people to evangelicalism.

Maybe Lutherans will someday get a century. Or at least a moment.

Illustration: Image from page 53 of “Christian Century” (1916) via Flickr, Public Domain

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