In this episode Trent shows where Evangelicals excel and what non-Evangelicals can learn from them.

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Transcript:

3 Things Evangelicals Get Right

In the online theology wars, it seems like everybody wants to gang up on evangelicals and accuse them of being a bunch of smoke-machine-inhaling, boyfriend-Jesus-song hippies whose theology is as thin as the Communion wafers they only receive once a month.

But Protestant evangelical culture also has a lot of strengths that non-evangelicals, both Catholic and Protestant, can learn from.

So today I’m giving credit where credit is due and highlighting three things evangelicals get right.

Starting with:

1. Pre-Evangelization

We tend to think of evangelicals doing a lot of evangelizing. I mean, it’s in the name, right?

But they’re also very good at pre-evangelization, which is ironic because that term comes from the 20th-century Jesuit priest Fr. Alfonso Nebreda, who described it as building trust with people so they are better able to receive the Gospel.

Pope Paul VI called pre-evangelization an initial, incomplete evangelization that includes:

“Explicit preaching, of course, but also art, the scientific approach, philosophical research and legitimate recourse to the sentiments of the human heart.”

Basically, pre-evangelization is about meeting people where they’re at and making them feel welcome and understood before you share the Gospel with them, even by using things that just meet a person’s basic human need for community.

Here’s a personal example.

One time, while my wife needed to have extensive cancer treatment done in downtown Dallas, I had to kill a few hours with our children after I dropped her off. It was raining, so I couldn’t take them to a park.

So I looked up indoor playgrounds and found a free one online. It turned out to be at Prestonwood Baptist Church.

I took the kids inside and was blown away by how big the space was.

This church’s children’s play area looked like a discovery center or kids’ zone, with tons of tunnels and play areas, and it was all free. All you had to do was give your email address to the polite woman at check-in.

And just like clockwork, a representative from the church invited me to attend a service a few weeks later.

I admit I’m tempted to go to Prestonwood’s Christmas services because they have what resembles a Broadway show, with people on wires and even Santa Claus flying overhead.

Then, in the second half of the show, they do a traditional reenactment of the Nativity story, but with actual camels walking on stage.

But as I said, what really impressed me about this church, and really many evangelical churches, is that they make a concerted effort to invite people to their services through functions and other things that meet a person’s need for fellowship.

Then they use this built-up trust to explicitly share the Gospel.

And it’s not just playgrounds.

Successful evangelical churches host festivals, community talks, advertise Bible studies, and even send mailers to people’s homes asking them to come to their services.

Though even evangelicals will admit this has a dark undercurrent in allegations of “sheep stealing,” or nondenominational churches seeing each other as competition for members instead of as partners in the evangelical harvest.

But at least you don’t have to worry about Catholics and mainline Protestants doing this kind of thing to each other.

Many mainline Protestant churches are basically dying social clubs where a handful of elderly people like to sing their favorite hymns, like “The Circle of Life,” all the while oblivious to the fact they’re on a sinking ship.

Here’s a Canadian mainline denomination whose roots go back to 1925 that is reduced to boomers trying to find Christian themes while watching The Simpsons.

And from a Catholic perspective, one of the worst things I hear about are people who want to become Catholic, call their nearest Catholic parish, and then never get a call back.

Or, even worse, someone does call them back and asks them something like, “Are you sure you want to be Catholic?”

Many evangelicals treat evangelism as a battle for souls, and that should be emulated.

But just because someone is zealous to share their faith, that doesn’t mean they have correct theology.

When I visited the Mormon Battalion Historic Site in San Diego, I filled out a welcome card that Mormon missionaries later followed up on to have a conversation with me.

So I gave them my work address at Catholic Answers, which I was later told they walked up to, saw the office sign, and then promptly turned around.

And I’m grateful that U.S. dioceses are seeing a surge in Catholic converts, though in many cases these converts explicitly seek the parishes out and weren’t invited in the first place.

Though for some people, like me, not being super inviting can be helpful.

As I described in this exchange I had at Ruslan KD’s Bless God conference, where many evangelicals were in attendance, I talked about the first time I was choosing a denomination as a teenager:

I started going to churches. I went to this wonderful evangelical church, and I remember like five people came up to me and said hi and introduced themselves.

They’re super happy and nice, but I am horribly introverted, so I never wanted to go back.

And then I went to a Catholic church and I walked in, and no one said hi.

And I’m like, “What? This is my place. These are my people.”

They hand me the missal and I sit in the back by myself, and I’m like, “This is where I could be.”

But other people need a more explicitly welcoming approach.

So, as Catholics, we need to step up our game to create inviting spaces to help people come to our church services, where they can be more comfortable hearing about the message of Christ and participating in the worship of him in the liturgy.

2. A Meaningful Identity

In April of 2026, Allie Beth Stuckey wrote the following on X:

“All this hate for evangelicals when, statistically, we are the only bloc consistently holding it down for biblical marriage, the pro-life cause, secure borders, and every other issue.

“We are by far the most conservative and united in every political, cultural, and moral area. This is not statistically contested. Without the strength and cohesion of this group, conservatives lose everything. Consequently, the country loses everything. Not an exaggeration.

“So ask yourself: why would someone want to divide, destroy, and demoralize this stalwart group?”

Well, I don’t want to destroy evangelicals.

I just want them to be, as George Weigel put it, evangelical Catholics who want to bring the fullness of the Faith to everyone.

Even though evangelicals are strong on many cultural issues, they also often falter on things like remarriage, contraception, IVF, and surrogacy.

But I agree with Stuckey that evangelicals have a special identity rooted in upholding traditional positions on issues like LGBT ideology and abortion.

The Public Religion Research Institute found that while only 27% of white evangelical Protestants supported legal abortion, 68% of white mainline Protestants and 62% of white Catholics supported legal abortion.

And a 2024 Pew poll found that only 36% of evangelicals supported so-called same-sex marriage, whereas 70% of Catholics and 71% of mainline Protestants supported so-called same-sex marriage.

What are we to make of these results?

Well, when it comes to mainline Protestants, some of these responses aren’t surprising because the denominations themselves support these evils.

According to the Associated Press, in 2024 the United Methodist Church became “the last of the major mainline church bodies to go through this process” of accepting homosexuality.

Granted, there are small mainline bodies that uphold traditional teachings, but even there is a catch.

For example, the Presbyterian Church in America, or PCA—not to be confused with the larger and far more liberal Presbyterian Church USA—is an evangelical denomination.

And in the Catholic world, I wouldn’t be surprised if clergy that trade on confusion related to the Church’s clear teachings on this issue have contributed to some of this problem.

But there is a deeper reason to explain these numbers.

Labels like “Catholic,” “Presbyterian,” “Methodist,” or “Lutheran” tend to have a wide scope and meaning.

They reflect not just current religious beliefs but also a person’s ethnicity, heritage, and shared cultural traditions.

So if someone says they’re an evangelical, I can usually guess what they believe about abortion.

But if they say they’re Catholic, I have no idea what they believe because that label refers to a broader identity claim beyond certain political or moral views.

A person might even become a generic deist, or even just a “spiritual person,” and still answer in a survey that he is Catholic or she is Presbyterian because they remember that was the church they were baptized into or the tradition they grew up in.

For these people, there aren’t many off-ramps from their religious identity.

As a result, the identity has such a wide meaning to the person that it becomes meaningless in conversation until it’s clarified.

In contrast, the identity label “evangelical” tends to be rooted almost exclusively in holding a current set of religious beliefs.

The Public Religion Research Institute found that 72% of white evangelicals said their religious identity was one of the most or very important identities in their lives, compared with 32% of white Catholics and 24% of white mainline Protestants.

That means for many non-evangelicals, their identity is rooted in how they were raised, whereas for evangelicals it’s rooted in what they currently believe.

As a result, it’s not uncommon for someone to reject major Catholic teachings on contraception, LGBT ideology, and abortion but still say that they’re Catholic.

Clip:

“I’m a very Catholic person, and I believe in every woman’s right to make her own decisions.”

However, when an evangelical stops believing in traditional teachings on things like abortion or sexuality, they usually stop calling themselves an evangelical entirely.

They instead might say they’re now a liberal Christian, a deconstructing Christian, or an ex-vangelical.

This may be because when evangelicals leave their faith, they have to formally express this, leaving relationships with other people who will reach out to them.

And, to our shame, this may not happen often in Catholic parishes, where when people stop going to church, many people in the pews might not even notice it.

This shows that comparing self-identified labels between Catholics, mainline Protestants, and evangelicals is an apples-to-oranges comparison.

The term “evangelical” is subject to a self-selection bias effect, where more fervent adherents are more likely to use that term, whereas other labels like Catholic or Presbyterian do not have that same effect, and so more nominal people are likely to adopt the term.

Likewise, people who identify as Counsel of Trent subscribers tend to actually be subscribers and not just part of a vague Trent Horn community.

And they especially show they have a fervor for this program by supporting us for as little as $5 a month at TrentHornPodcast.com.

So a better comparison between evangelicals and non-evangelicals involves looking at weekly churchgoers in these traditions.

In 2022, Pew found that weekly Mass-attending Catholics were far more pro-life than those who attend Mass less often.

Pew even said:

“On these core questions about abortion’s legality and the start of human life, Mass-attending Catholics are about as conservative as White evangelical Protestants, who stand out among U.S. religious groups for their strong opposition to abortion.”

Though, to be fair, other surveys, even with this subset, still often show weekly evangelicals doing better than weekly Catholic Mass-goers.

That isn’t surprising given how well some weekly Mass-goers can compartmentalize their faith in public life.

And this leads us to a third thing evangelicals get right.

3. Strong Doctrinal Commitments

When I spoke to Redeemed Zoomer about evangelicalism, he basically said that Christians should attend mainline churches even if those churches formally teach heresy, because Christians should not break away from these historic churches.

I asked him:

“So you’d have a preference for, let’s say, a mainline church that has these liberal views and female pastors versus a really conservative evangelical church that’s straight down the line on abortion, same-sex marriage, male pastors only?

“It seems like you have a preference for the more liberal mainline one. Am I hearing this right?”

He replied:

“Yes. And that’s kind of why I’m doing the Reconquista, because all the mainline denominations are liberalized to the same extent that the ELCA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church—”

I asked:

“You just think they can be fixed?”

He said:

“Yes. Because Athanasius didn’t split off voluntarily and start Athanasius Free Bible Church in the desert when the majority of the Church was hijacked by heretics in the 300s.”

Redeemed Zoomer even went further in an online post, saying that it’s sinful for a Christian to attend nondenominational churches.

So I think a lot of evangelicals resonated with Gavin Ortlund when he responded to RZ and said that it would be better to attend an independent, doctrinally sound evangelical church than a beautiful, historic mainline church that teaches heresy, even if your goal is to root out the heresy.

Gavin Ortlund:

“My view of the Church is such that, first and second, there’s an overvaluing of institutions here for what makes something an actual church.

“I would say—I’ll put it as blunt as I can—I would rather worship Jesus in a sewer with orthodoxy than in a cathedral with heresy.

“If the institutional power that backs it ultimately has gone to seed and ultimately has fallen away from the Gospel, then I think—and I think that is the historic Protestant view—you have to have fidelity to the Gospel to be a church.

“You have to have proclamation of the true Gospel. That’s what I’m talking about.”

I totally agree with Gavin here.

If the entire Catholic Church fell into heresy, I would leave the Church and not try to fix it.

That’s because if this impossible hypothetical really came to pass, then I would know this could not be Christ’s Church, since Christ promised the gates of hell would not prevail against the Church.

That doesn’t mean individual churches or even regions may not fall into error.

In 2022, Pope Francis warned the German Catholic Church that their Synodal Way risked a schism where they would no longer be a part of Christ’s Church.

He told them:

“The universal Church lives in and of the particular Churches, just as the particular Churches live and flourish in and from the universal Church.

“If they find themselves separated from the entire body, they weaken, rot and die.”

Pope Francis also told an interviewer:

“To the president of the German Episcopal Conference, Bishop Bätzing, I said: ‘In Germany there is a very good Evangelical Church. We don’t need two.’”

So I agree with Redeemed Zoomer that you should not break away from Christ’s Church.

But if your church doesn’t claim to be infallible and the governing body has already universally allowed blue-haired, pro-abortion, pro-LGBT clergy, then I’ve got news for you:

The church you’re defending can’t possibly be Christ’s one, universal Church.

And any attempt to fix such a church is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic after it’s sunk to the bottom of the ocean.

Liberal Christianity just leads to the most abysmal kinds of theology, as you can see in this clip of an Episcopal pastor who can’t even console someone facing death with the hope we have in Jesus Christ, who conquered death.

Clip:

“Last week—or two weeks ago—I was sitting with an older congregant, and that congregant asked me, ‘What happens when we die?’

“I had to look this person in the face, who was obviously struggling, and say, ‘I don’t know.’”

So I applaud evangelicals for sticking to their guns on the issue that true doctrine matters above all else.

Though I would say one of those true doctrines is that Christ established one universal, enduring, hierarchical, and authoritative Church.

But as Catholics, we should not be afraid to point out when fellow laity, and even clergy, have deviated from true doctrine and respond to those errors with assertive charity.

We should also be able to imitate the evangelical ability to briefly summarize the essence of the Gospel, even though the Bible itself never explicitly defines the Gospel in a way that matches the common evangelical definition, as I and Jimmy Akin have noted in previous episodes.

However, we should be able, as Catholics, to give that same kind of evangelical elevator pitch about man’s problem of being in sin and the solution God gives us in his free offer of salvation to anyone who would believe and be united to his Son, Jesus Christ.

But, ironically, the evangelical commitment to doctrine over all else often leads to doctrinal error.

You can see this in evangelicals who say they will not let authorities like early ecumenical councils, or even the Nicene Creed, regulate their doctrinal beliefs because they value Scripture over tradition.

William Lane Craig is a classic example of this because he denies Christ has a truly human will and more recently denied that the Son is eternally begotten of the Father.

For more on that, see my colleague Joe Heschmeyer’s recent episode on the subject.

You can find many more examples when it comes to serious doctrinal errors related to liturgy, baptism, the Eucharist, and salvation itself that even historic Protestants would also condemn.

For example, the prosperity gospel is alarmingly prevalent in evangelical communities.

But even in spite of those errors, I will still give credit where it’s due.

And so I would encourage all Christians, and especially my fellow Catholics, to imitate evangelicals in their successful efforts to create environments where it’s easy to share the Gospel and invite people to worship; to have an identity that is rooted in making religion the central part of your life; and to value truth over merely human traditions and sentiments.

For a good book on applying evangelical values to a Catholic framework, I recommend Francis Beckwith’s Return to Rome: Confessions of an Evangelical Catholic, which recounts his reversion back to Catholicism after serving as the president of the Evangelical Theological Society.

Thank you all so much for watching, and I hope you have a very blessed day.