For converts looking back, the emotions can be complicated

“Back in my internet apologetics days,” my young friend Tim told me, “I mostly used converts as weapons against various strains of Protestantism.” He’d grown up Catholic and had read lots of conversion stories, and he found those converts’ testimonies about their former religions’ problems and failures useful.

He learned something else. He found the converts he liked the most “were not those who had the most devastating arguments against their former sect, but the ones who looked back on their previous experiences with sincere appreciation and affection. Ex-Catholic evangelicals often seemed to look back on Catholicism with bitterness or disdain, but Catholic converts saw God working in their lives before they crossed the Tiber.”

Three qualifications​

Tim’s observations generally fit my own as a convert, with three qualifications. First, I’ve known some Catholic converts who feel very bitter about the religious bodies they grew up in, especially if they grew up fundamentalist.

Second, grateful converts often remember with gratitude the good people they knew, but not so much the religion itself. They see goodness and holiness in people whose religion they came to believe is defective.

I credit my own conversion to serious Christianity in part to a saintly Baptist deacon and his son. They were wonderful people whose lives made the Gospel story credible, but they believed things I knew even then were wrong. Some of those things were destructively wrong, like their bigoted view of the Catholic Church, which they tried to impart to me.

Third, some people who talk publicly the way Tim describes are much more bitter and critical in private. A former Episcopalian I knew many years ago, and quite admired, who eventually became a friend, would talk about the wonders of the evangelicalism of his youth and the beauties of the Anglicanism to which he’d moved as an adult.

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