Evangelical to Catholic: The Intellectual Journey

The road from evangelicalism to Catholicism is not a rejection of what came before — it is a discovery that the tradition goes deeper than you knew.

I grew up Southern Baptist in Arkansas and trained for Baptist ministry at Ouachita Baptist University. Years later — after a long stop in Anglicanism — I was received into the Catholic Church while completing a Master of Divinity at Yale Divinity School. This series tells that story properly: not as scattered arguments, but as a single narrative told in order, pairing the moments that changed me with the questions they raised.

The Series So Far

1. The Apologist Who Believed Too Much — A sophomore apologetics assignment on Justin Martyr’s First Apology, and what chapter 66 said about the Eucharist that cost me the church I was raised in.

More installments are on the way, and each will appear here as it is published. If you want them as they arrive, the subscription box below will do it.

Related Reading

These essays are not part of the series, but they cover ground the series crosses:

• Sola Scriptura and the Journey Toward Catholicism — Why “Scripture alone” was the first thing to crack.
• How to Talk to Protestants About Authority — The hinge question, engaged charitably from both sides.
• Real Presence and Transubstantiation: What Catholics Actually Believe About the Eucharist — The doctrine at the center of the story, argued in full.
• John MacArthur: A Critical Assessment — What happens when the patristic record meets the pulpit that denies it.
• The Insufferable Recovering Evangelical — Why walking toward something matters more than running away.
• Evangelical Catholic Thought — Why you don’t have to leave your evangelical heritage behind.
• Anti-Catholic Evangelicals — Understanding and overcoming inherited prejudice.

The journey from evangelicalism to Catholicism is not easy. It cost me friendships, strained family relationships, and forced me to rethink convictions I had held since childhood. But it also gave me something I did not have before: a faith with roots deep enough to survive the storms — and a tradition capacious enough to hold both the evangelical passion for Christ and the intellectual rigor of two thousand years of theological reflection.

If you are on this road, keep walking. The destination is worth it.