On Not Being an Ex-Protestant
Last week Rod Dreher (see “Crunchy Con” link at right), apropos a news story about the frequency with which Americans change their religion, had a series of posts asking people who had done so why they left one faith for another. One of these was titled “What Makes an Ex-Protestant?” In considering what answer I would make to that question, I realized that although I am, technically, an ex-Protestant, I don’t think the term is an accurate way of describing the development of my faith. It might have been so for a year or two immediately before and after my entry into the Catholic Church, but it certainly has not remained so.
I grew up in the Methodist Church, became an atheist in my teens and a sort of syncretist around the age of twenty or so, and returned to Christianity in my late 20s. I spent several years in the Episcopal Church, and became a Catholic in my early 30s, having become convinced that Protestantism has an insoluble and fatal problem in the question of authority. (Catholicism has a problem, too, but it is not fatal.) I still believe that, but the most appropriately descriptive title for my story is not “How I Ceased to be a Protestant and Became a Catholic,” or even “How I Became a Catholic,” but “How I Turned My Back on God and Then Returned to Him.” Or, even better as a broad outline, and leaving out that unfortunate ten or twelve years of wandering, the title C. S. Lewis gives to one of the climactic chapters of the Chronicles of Narnia: “Further Up and Further In.”
I do not see a radical disjuncture between the Methodism of my youth and the Catholicism of my maturity. The Methodist Church I knew in the late ‘50s and early-to-mid ‘60s was not the secular liberal society it seems to have become, at least at the top, since then. And it was not principally the Methodist denomination at large that I encountered, but a specific place and people: Belle Mina Methodist Church, in Belle Mina, Alabama (the name is thought to be some Yankee’s attempt to transcribe the words “Belle Manor,” as spoken with a Southern accent).
I’ve often wanted to write a lengthy tribute to this little parish. In case I never manage to get that done, I’ll at least state briefly here my affection and gratitude toward it. It was a small and unsophisticated congregation, and though it began to seem dull and oppressive to me in my teens as I began to resent religion in general, it was in fact kindly and generous. When I look back on my childhood and early youth there, I cannot think of a moment when I was not treated with affection and forbearance.
Most important, though, is the fact that it gave me the Faith. I hear sometimes from younger people (Rod Dreher is one) that the Methodist Church they knew was an empty shell, preaching a gospel from which traditional Christian doctrine had been removed in favor of a worldly progressivism. I don’t know if that’s broadly true or not, but it’s certainly not the church I grew up in. My church taught something close to what C. S. Lewis called “mere Christianity,” and was rock-solid on the basics of the creed. When I “joined the church”—a rite which I now see was a sort of non-sacramental version of Confirmation—at the age of twelve or thirteen I was instructed by a man who still remains in my mind as the perfect type of what a Christian shepherd of souls should be; I mean as a man, apart from the sacramental role which of course Methodism does not attribute to its ministers. He was called, if I remember correctly, Brother Wilson, a white-haired old man who was both genial and firm, kindly and tolerant but uncompromising on matters of faith.
It’s not wise, of course, to dwell too much on what might have been, and anyway, as Lewis also says, we are not permitted to know. But if I could change one thing in my life, it would be my rejection of what I learned in that little white building. Far from repudiating it now, I embrace it and bitterly regret that I ever rejected it; if I had not done so, much harm, to myself and to others, might have been averted. But even so, the foundation that was laid there undoubtedly kept things from being even worse than they were. And years later, in a time of deep trouble, I found myself saying the Lord’s Prayer which had been taught to me there. Even though I didn’t really believe what I was praying, it was from that moment that I reckon the beginning of my recovery. Later on, the presence in my mind of the Apostle’s Creed, which Brother Wilson had us memorize, made it easy for me to recognize the apostasy of liberal Christianity for what it was.
Apart from Protestant mistakes about the nature of the Church, nothing that I believe as a Catholic contradicts any essential theological or moral truth that I was taught at Belle Mina Methodist. Much was missing, of course, but little was explicitly contradicted. When I returned to Christian faith in my late 20s, I did not set out on a new path, but rather regained the one I had been on. I’ve gone further up and further in, and I see Methodism, as a body of doctrine, lower down and further out. But it’s within the Kingdom. If I make it to heaven, I will expect to meet Brother Wilson there, and the first thing I’ll say to him will be to ask his forgiveness for having foolishly discarded what he worked so hard to give me.
Here is a picture of the church. Here is a set of photos that include a couple of pictures of the church as well as other scenes in the area where I grew up (including more pictures of Greenbrier Barbecue).
Oh, and here is the Crunchy Con thread about ex-Protestants.
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