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As more young British and American churchgoers convert to traditional Catholicism, could we be witnessing a spiritual counterrevolution? UnHerd’s US Editor Sohrab Ahmari and the Reverend Giles Fraser face off against former Church of England bishop Graham Tomlin and author Elizabeth Oldfield in this live debate.
The scientific revolution and subsequent industrial revolution took place in the Protestant countries within decades of the reformation.
After more than 1000 years Roman Catholicism left Europe poor and backward.
Even today southern Catholic Europe is poorer than Northern Protestant Europe.
‘As more and more people turn towards Catholicism and away from the Church of England… And in the States turning from evangelism back to traditional Catholicism.’ Three errors here.
1) You mean evangelicalism, not evangelism (evangelism means sharing the faith, in any church tradition).
2) I’m not aware of any evidence that people in the UK are turning from the C of E to Catholicism. And rates of ordination are dramatically higher in the C of E.
3) In the States people are not turning ‘back’ to traditional Catholicism, when they never had it in the first place.
The bottom line, though, is whether believing in something that is not true is a good thing in the long run.
Now, why do I keep thinking: glasnost and perestroika?
Is it ‘cos you’re confused? (Or you believe in not believing).
Catholicism brings misogyny since Matthias replaced Judas when Magdalene was the better candidate.
Giles Fraser final comment about being offered prayer to become a ‘real’ Christian was interesting – but he failed to add that as a Protestant I am not allowed to receive the bread and wine in a Roman Catholic communion service because apparently I am not really a Christian!
Scientists and rational thinkers had to spend three centuries battling the restrictions of the Church on scientific enquiry that really had nothing to do with religion except through a literal interpretation of Genesis. Do we really want to go through all that again? Just because there is an atmosphere of moral confusion in the early 21st century is a not a reason for backsliding, least of all to arbitrary authority.
It took the French Revolution and Napoleon to finish the dead grip of the Catholic priesthood on much of Europe. Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and 1688 were far preferable.
One of the reasons the Protestants in Northern Ireland did not want a united Ireland was that they did not want to live under the Roman Catholic Church and given the horrors that have emerged from that institution worldwide as well as in Ireland I agree with them,
Ireland is now largely secular and much the better for it. No more persecution of gays – they can now get married. No more bans on birth control including life saving condoms. No more Magdalene Laundries and all their horrors.
A secular society with religious freedom is the best type of society. In countries where religion is compulsory there are no freedoms, no rights, no democracy. They are all dictatorships.
As to turning back to RCatholicism, the bare stats bear out the opposite. In the US, at least, Catholics becoming Evangelical converts outnumber the reverse by 3 or 4 to one, and if wish-wash “Protestantism” is factored in, by a factor even higher than that. Meanwhile, 14% of those raised Catholic now ID as Protestant, while only 2% of those raised Prot. now ID as Catholic.
Catholics are generally noisier about any Protestant who ‘returns to the fold’, the phenomenon being somewhat rarer and worthy of notice, whereas Evangelicals, in particular are very loathe to condemn a conversion to any stripe of Christianity, even RC’ism, since the barest of Christian dogma qualifies one as an Evangelical Christian.
This would account for the illusion of a slide in the opposite direction.
Excellent debate!