I found evangelizing as a Protestant very difficult and confusing. Granted, it’s possible that I was not very good at it! But many of my frustrations stemmed from the nebulous nature of how various Protestant traditions even define the conversion experience, based as it is (in most cases) upon intellectual assent to certain propositions.
Once, during a college evangelism mission at Panama City Beach, Florida, I persuaded a guy lounging in the sand to patiently listen as I went through the four spiritual laws. He agreed to accept Christ into his heart. I encouraged him to find a good, Bible-believing church after his vacation, told him I would pray for him, and then I was on my way.
I wonder, what was that?
This is not a new problem for Protestants. As historian Alec Ryrie observes in his excellent new book The World’s Reformation: How Protestantism Became a Global Religion, “early Protestants sought to make converts in simple, commonsense terms. . . . The problem was: how could this be achieved in practice?” Depending on your particular theological commitments, you might be inclined to think human agency might not be part of the evangelistic picture at all, everything dependent on the mysterious work of the Holy Spirit to save the predestined. “And, not least, how could you know when it had been done, and when a conversion was authentic?”
No Christian tradition is capable of reading a person’s heart and mind. A catechumen in the Catholic Church must take many months of classes and go through various rites before being baptized and confirmed. Just because he goes through it all, no one, short of a confessor with a miraculous gift, will be able to tell if that person’s contrition and piety are sincere. But at least in the Catholic tradition, there are clearly designated sacraments that objectively confer grace, as long as the recipient is properly disposed. And even if the person is not properly disposed, the sacraments of baptism and confirmation objectively define the recipient as a Catholic. That baptized catechumen, regardless of intent, is Catholic.
This might explain, at least in part, why Protestants were so cynical and suspicious of Catholic missions. Protestants, per Ryrie, condemned Catholic missionary efforts as corrupt, the priests allegedly willing to “baptize anyone for a few coins, leaving converts who could ‘at most mumble a few prayers.’” Early Reformation figure Martin Bucer attacked Spanish missionary achievements as nothing more than “souls killed by false superstition.”
Other Protestants claimed that the result of Catholic missionaries accommodating their teaching to local customs, as the Jesuits did with great effect in China, was nothing more than “Pagan-Christianity.” English travel-writer Samuel Purchas claimed that Catholics “boasted conversions of the Pagans,” who, he assessed, were no Christians at all.
Protestant antagonism toward the Catholic Church in these early years of missionary activities reached absurdist proportions. “This mindset produced a hair-trigger readiness to react to any real or imagined hints of popery among actual converts,” writes Ryrie. When a Native American asked Baptist minister David Jones for the date of Easter Sunday, Jones wrote: “My soul was filled with horror to think that mortal man should presume to teach a heathen religiously to observe what GOD ALMIGHTY never taught him.” Jones proceeded to lecture the indigenous man on the “superstitious relics of the scarlet whore,” condemning both Easter and Christmas, which he labeled “POPEMAS.”
Indeed, Ryrie notes the “all-consuming preoccupation” of anti-Catholic fervor “dominated Protestant minds when they traveled beyond Europe and encountered people.” To cite an even more amazing (or ridiculous) example, Englishman John Eliot recorded a meeting with Native Americans in 1671 at which he informed them “that in the other part of the World there be a certain people who are called Papists, whose Ministers and Teachers live in all manner of wickedness. . . . These wicked Ministers will not suffer the people to read the Word of God.” One can only imagine how the indigenous people reacted to being told that far away in a land they would never visit and could barely imagine, there were some bad people teaching bad things.
In truth, early Catholic missions in the Americas, Africa, and Asia were effective not only because they were more objective in determining converts, but because they were able to more easily relate to natural human tendencies such as creating sacred spaces and revering the dead. Thomas Thompson, an early English missionary to West Africa, bemoaned the Fante people’s defense of their venerating a sacred site, declaring, “So jesuitical is Idolatry among Pagans as well as Christians!” Roger Williams, founder of the colony of Rhode Island, argued that if he had employed the methods of the hated papists, he would have “brought many thousands of these Natives . . . to a far greater Antichristian conversion than ever was yet heard of in America.”
In some cases, Catholic missionary efforts provoked admiration from Protestant observers. John Ogilvie, an eighteenth-century English missionary to the Mohawk, noted, “I find some who have been instructed by the priests of Canada, and appear zealous Roman Catholics, extremely tenacious of the Ceremonies and Peculiarities of that Church.” However “erroneous” their methods, Catholic priests seemed far more effective at inculcating piety in indigenous converts.
Why, we might ask, were Catholic missions so effective in comparison to their Protestant counterparts? I would argue it is the same reasons that differentiate Catholic and Protestant evangelism today: the Protestant missionary objective is almost exclusively cerebral, in that success is typically evaluated by getting a person to make an intellectual assent to certain propositions, such as that he is a sinner and Jesus is his savior. The Catholic missionary impulse, though certainly cerebral in that a potential convert must assent to various doctrines, is also sacramental and institutional, the sacraments conferring grace and binding the convert to the Church. And that institution can (within bounds) adjust its liturgy to a diversity of cultures.
Of course, though early Protestant missionary projects were largely a failure, they eventually had incredible success: today there are at least 150 million Protestant Christians in Africa, at least another 100 million in Asia, and another 100 million in Latin America (once a bulwark of Catholic piety). Nevertheless, one might reasonably ask: are Protestant communities in such contexts a reflection of a true, apostolic, and sacramental Christianity that speaks to inherent qualities of (embodied) universal human experiences, or the fact that these areas, once deemed pagan “mission territory,” have embraced enough of individualist, consumerist modernity that they are more capable of receiving the gnostic-like character of the Protestant ethos?