Farrell’s journey highlights the intellectual weight of historical continuity over modern doctrinal isolation. It serves as a compelling case for how rediscovering the early Church can fundamentally reshape one's theological framework.
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I’m a Protestant now considering Catholicism. Here is what changed my mind.Añadido:
Okay.
>> [clears throat] >> So, I am a Protestant and I have been my entire life.
But, recently I have become very interested in Catholicism.
And I wanted to make this to talk a little bit about how I got to that point and what I've discovered so far because I feel like there's a lot of Protestant men especially out there, Protestants in general, but especially the men who feel [clears throat] like Christianity is something that's good and it's something that they should pursue.
Um and they they feel like they should participate in church to some extent, but they don't really feel a fire in here.
Uh they feel like there's some vague sense of positive effect in their life they would get from participating in all of that, but they kind of feel like they're not really drawn to it. And so, they go out of some vague sense that it's good for them and their family.
Um or if you're younger, just that it's good good for you. You know, you get that feeling.
And I've kind of had that feeling my entire life. Um And this recent kind of journey into Catholicism has changed the way I look at all that.
And so, I wanted to talk about that a little bit. So, [clears throat] I've been a Protestant my entire life, grew up in uh Oklahoma, the Bible Belt.
Uh you know, vast majority of people around here are Protestants.
Um had a couple friends that were Catholic growing up, but they never really talked about it.
Whole family's Protestant, most of my friends are Protestant community, this whole region, right?
Um, and that always made sense to me. You know, the Protestant way of looking at things.
It's what I was raised in, grew up going to a Baptist church, was baptized into a Baptist church when I was 13.
And uh went to like went to church a good amount when I was a kid, didn't really go so much in my teen years.
Uh and then started going again more consistently in my 20s.
Um, but never really dug into Christianity itself, like from a historical perspective or a denominational perspective.
I never really got into the whole denominational thing because in my view it was kind of petty, like disagreements between denominations, you know, there's thousands of them and the idea that one of them was correct and then all the rest were wrong seemed silly to me.
And the idea that I was going to find one specific one that had it all right and the others were just completely wrong just didn't make any sense and so I I took more of like a C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity perspective in that there's probably a little bit of truth uh in all of them, you know, they probably all have some good and some bad, you know, some things right, some things wrong.
And so to me for most of you know, my 20s I would say uh it didn't really matter which denomination, you know, I didn't even really look into denominations, I didn't really care.
And I didn't really look into like religion in general as it pertains to the world, um theology and God and other religions and all that until I was about 25.
>> [snorts] >> And then I'd say that 25 was when I really started to look into it seriously.
And um it's been it's been a whole journey since then, you know.
Um I'm 34 now.
And so it's it's been a journey and maybe I'll talk about that at a different time.
But the long and short of it was for the the vast majority of my life Protestantism was kind of what I knew to be, you know, I knew that it was right.
And in the experience that I did have with Catholicism was very like passing moments, you know, like fleeting conversational topics about the Pope and um I don't know how all Catholics have to do whatever the Pope says, you know, and Catholics don't read their Bibles and they're not allowed to read the Bible for themselves and figure it out, you know, they have to do what the Magisterium tells them to do.
And all this kind of stuff.
Just just common misconceptions that I think most Protestants have.
And uh even though I felt kind of disaffected in the Protestant church I always looked at Catholicism as what it was always framed to me as which was a cult.
You know, that's what that's the way it was always put to me that it's it's a cult.
And if it wasn't framed that way, it was framed like um you know, they they just get a lot of things wrong. Like people would lot them in with um you know, not to disparage any tradition, but they would lot them in with Mormons and um uh I can't who I'm losing it right now. The the people that come to your door.
Jehovah's Witness. Yeah. They came to my house a lot when I was a kid.
Um they would lump them in with them and say, "Look, they're just they're kind of like these groups. They're all over here. They're kind of radical. They believe some crazy stuff. That's not biblical Christianity."
And I always believed that.
>> [clears throat] >> And even when I started looking into all this uh you know, religions and Christianity, it was always through the lens of Protestantism. I didn't even know it really.
And that's hard to explain, but it was through the lens of Protestantism. And so, anytime I would come across a debate between a Protestant and a Catholic, I kind of from the get-go was just looking for reasons to like critique the Catholic perspective. Like, "Oh, that's you're wrong here." And if if they did make a good point, it was like, "Well, you know, that's not actually true."
That kind of stuff.
Anyway, so eventually, last year, I get uh interested in my family ancestry.
And I start looking back through, you know, my lineage and the bloodlines and all that.
And it turns out that um my family on my father's side is Irish.
And you can't look into your Irish ancestry for long before you start to come across Catholicism. You know, Irish Catholic, they just it's just something that go together at this point. Like, it's just can't separate them almost.
And so, wait, I started looking into it and reading more and more, and I started thinking, "Man, like if if my ancestors, you know, I don't know, a thousand years ago were Catholic, why am I not Catholic?"
You know, like why am I a Protestant?
Well, when did that happen? And why did it happen?
Um and I started asking all these questions and looking into it and this like newfound kind of curiosity in this area combined with me feeling disaffected in the Protestant church in the churches I had went to uh kind of left me looking for answers.
And the whole time I was going to these, you know, Protestant churches when I was younger and in my 20s um I always felt like I felt like it was good that I was there but I never felt like really on fire for it if that makes sense.
I knew that it was a good thing to be there and participate but I never felt driven to get involved or you know, be active in any way and just the overall like feel and vibe of it just just never fit with me.
Like I remember one time I was going [clears throat] to, I won't name the church I was going to a church and just pretty normal Protestant church. I mean, you show up kind of the meet and greet, they play music for 20, 30 minutes there's the the sermon, some baptism, some announcements and then it's over, you know.
Well, uh the band's like getting ready to go and the the the guitarist says you know, he kind of kind of like a performer at a concert be like, "Okay, you know, trying to get everyone fired up. Okay, like who's who's ready to worship Jesus?"
You know.
And uh there's probably like 100 people there and maybe like three people are like, "Woo!" You know.
And uh he was like trying to get everybody pumped up, you know, to like kind of put their hands in the air. And he was like, "Oh, okay, great. Three of us."
You know, like he was really irritated by the fact that the whole church didn't just rise up and yell, you know, like And, um I just remember thinking like why do I have to do that?
Like why do I have to stand up and wave my hands in the air and sing at the top of my lungs for like 20 minutes or 30 minutes sometimes even every morning before like the sermon begins. Like why do I got to Why do I have to do that?
And I just thought that's all I ever knew, you know. I just thought that's what it was. I didn't know there was anything different.
And so I just always felt like, man, like if this is what it is and I've been going for this long and I'm still not feeling any fire I mean, maybe it's just not for me.
Uh or maybe I need to read my Bible more. Like I don't know.
I don't know. Um but I guess, you know, these guys who were talking about how they were one way and then they discovered Christ and then now they're another way and they've never been the same since. Like I could just never I could never relate to those stories. And I wanted to so bad. I kept wondering like when's that going to happen to me?
And, uh it just never did. And And maybe that's through some fault of my own. I don't know.
But it just never did.
And so, you know, fast forward to last year and discovering Catholicism. And I thought, man, I got to figure this thing out.
And so, um I said a a good place to start with the Reformation. You know, so start in the Reformation cuz that's where every That's That's Protestantism came about, you know. That's how it all got started.
And so I started buying books on the Reformation and trying to have like a really objective viewpoint because I didn't want to really be too entrenched in either side and like try and I didn't want to not give either side its fair shot, I guess. I wanted to give each side a fair take and so I bought books written by Protestants about the Reformation. I bought books written by Catholics about the Reformation.
I didn't even know what Eastern Orthodoxy was until last year.
Never even heard of it.
But there were some Eastern Orthodox that wrote books about the the Protestant Reformation, so I bought that book and read that book. And I wanted to get like the whole full perspective on it.
And so went down the wormhole on the Protestant Reformation.
Kept going back throughout the history reading about um you know, church history really. And I didn't even know what church history was. And this is kind of the whole like great revelation and kind of the reason I'm making this is I didn't There's so much to Christianity historically and the church historically that I never knew about.
I never knew about the church fathers.
I never even heard of them before.
No one told me about the church fathers.
I was led to believe that the first 300 years of Christianity was like a kind of like this dark, vague, obscure period of history where we really didn't have much to go on, but we're just lucky that the New Testament made it out, you know, we're lucky we have that cuz we don't really have much else.
Well, that's not the case at all. Like there were there were a lot of guys back then you know, there's um Ignatius of Antioch, Irenaeus of Lyon um I mean I I can't even think of any cuz I'm not you know, I'm not a theologian.
Um Justin Martyr uh all kinds of guys that and they wrote thousands of pages. They wrote thousands of pages back then and we have a ton of stuff to go on.
But no one ever told me. Like the the whole Protestant mindset is like all the answers are in the Bible. Flip that open and read it and you'll find what you're looking for.
No one told me that there's like other sources that you can look at. There's there's people who are Christians back then who are like, "Hey, I'm going to write about these topics so that everyone knows what to believe going forward." No one told me that.
>> [snorts] >> I didn't know.
I didn't know that the Catholic Church was the church for Western civilization for the first 1,500 years of Christianity.
I did not know that.
I didn't know [snorts] that there was one singular church for the first thousand.
I didn't know about the Great Schism.
I didn't know.
Like no one ever told me this stuff.
Like I've I've been to I don't know how many church services over the years. No one ever talks about Augustine. No one's talking about Aquinas. No one's talking about you know any history at all about the church. And there was a ton of history, man. There's so much history out there. And I started feeling deprived. I started feeling something was stolen from me. Like someone someone lied. You know, like I don't think any particular church or particular pastor was like intentionally like withholding anything from me, but this just discovery so late in my life about such a broad and vast and just deep reservoir of historical knowledge about this religion of Christianity just left me feeling like man, like I can't believe I never knew about this stuff. I can't believe nobody ever told me.
And it just left me even feeling more disaffected in the Protestant side of things. And so I just kept reading.
Keep reading. Um working my way back.
Read, you know, um History of the Church by Eusebius. Um There's a lot of good books on quotes of early church fathers. I haven't read all of them. You know, I don't know all the quotes and all the church fathers. I'm still pretty um I'd say I just started looking into this last year. So, I mean, it's like brand new to me.
But then you start getting into like the actual beliefs of Christianity.
And this is where This is really what started to kind of make me think that Protestantism might not have all the answers.
I think they have a lot of them, but they don't have all of them.
And you start to get into what the early Christians believed.
Uh for instance uh the Eucharist or what we Protestants call communion.
If you go to a Baptist church or really any Protestant denomination around [clears throat] here, most of them um the low church um kind of way of seeing things they will tell you that uh communion like the little cracker and the grape juice, it's just a symbol.
Like we're we're going to do this once a quarter or once a month, however often your church does it, but it's just a symbol.
There's nothing real here. There's nothing spiritual actually happening here. It's It's just out of reverence that we do this symbolic gesture.
Well, that's not how the early Christians believed at all.
They didn't believe that at all.
No one thought that for the first 1,500 years of the church. No one. I mean, you might be able to find anecdotal evidence from a guy here or a guy there. Like there That's always going to be the case with any topic ever.
But I'm talking like the vast majority believed that.
And that's what the Catholic Church believed. That's what the Orthodox believe. Now, they differentiate on details, but they believe it's the real presence of Christ. They believe the real body and blood of Christ is in that bread and wine.
That's not what I was told.
No one ever told me that. They told me it was just a symbol.
How was it just a symbol if that's not what they believed for 1,500 years?
You know?
Stuff like that.
No one ever told me that the early Christians believed that baptism actually saves you.
They told me that again, it was a symbolic gesture of your decision to join the church and become a Christian.
You know?
That idea of it just being a symbol is not found in early church history. They believed something spiritual was happening there.
They believed it actually saved you.
No one ever told me that.
No one ever told me that. Confession is in there.
You know, confession uh you can read documents I mean, I think you can read documents I think you can read documents from the first century, if not the first century, then second century of church fathers talking about confessing your sins.
And that's existed in one form or another in the apostolic traditions like Catholicism and Orthodoxy for 2,000 years.
In one form or another.
Protestants don't do that.
We don't confess our sins.
You know, we say that we confess them to God.
But that's not that's not really like driven home. Like you don't go to like your church service every Sunday and they're like, "Hey, make sure you confess your sins this week."
That's not a thing. At least not in the churches I've been to.
And to the extent that it is you know um pushed in the Protestant church, they don't believe they just believe that it's something good to do to like make you feel better.
They don't believe there's anything like salvific happening there. They don't believe that you're getting your mortal sins forgiven.
And the last one is a big is a big one is salvation.
You know.
I was always taught that like once you get baptized and decide to be a Christian and you join the church, you can't lose your salvation.
That's what I was always taught.
You cannot lose it. Once saved, always saved.
That did not exist for the first 1,500 years of church history. Prior to the Protestant Reformation I mean, I I couldn't find it anywhere.
Maybe you can find I haven't read everything and I'm still new.
Maybe you can find a guy here or there talking about it. I don't know.
But I do know that the vast majority of early church teachings um and it's pretty consistent, man. Like all the way even up to today. Like the Catholics taught that you can lose your salvation.
You know, that's that's why they believe in the the authority of the church. They believe that Christ established the church and we, the laity have to become members of the church.
And you participate in the heavenly kingdom on earth through the sacraments of the church.
It's not just something you do on Sunday. You don't just show up to hear, you know, a pastor give his opinion on a particular verse for 30 minutes because you think it might be good for you to hear it.
Like they really take it seriously.
And they believe that their salvation is tied to that. They have to go and confess their sins to a priest. You know, and then they go and partake in the Eucharist. Their Sundays revolve around the Eucharist, not a sermon.
And so all these things, just seeing like, okay, Protestants believe one way, Catholics believe another way, and it sure seems like the Catholic way of doing things and seeing things and believing in things sure seems a lot more similar to the way that the early church did it.
It's not exactly the same.
But I don't think you should expect it to be.
You know, it's been 2,000 years. Like I think it's okay for things to change a little bit.
But there's a difference in changing you know, there's a difference in growing, I guess you should should say.
There's a there's a difference in growing uh and completely changing.
And it sure feels like Protestantism in the 21st century completely changed.
And like I just don't know what to do with that.
So, as a Protestant, I'm sitting here like, man, sure feels like we don't have everything right the way that I used to think that we do.
Uh and then finally just thoughts I have like just while I'm driving or something like that.
It's that and this this stuff right here really kind of really makes it hard to stick to the whole like Protestant way of like Christianity is a biblical like it's a Bible-based religion. Like we even the Catholics agree.
But uh the doctrine of sola scriptura, you know, like it's you reading the word of God is what it comes down to. That's the foundational belief, right? You don't need to go to um somebody else to know what it means. You got it right here. You can read it for yourself.
Jesus Christ never wrote anything down.
Like God thought it was important enough to literally become a man and physically walk the earth and never wrote anything down.
In his earthly ministry while he was here on earth as far as I can tell he never told any of his disciples to write anything down.
You know, I know there's some I think he tells John to in Revelation, but that's not his earthly ministry.
You know, so you'd think if if uh reading words on a page was the most important thing, why didn't he write anything down? Why didn't he tell his disciples to write anything down?
And I'm not saying I know this is you know, this sounds controversial. I'm not saying scripture's not important.
Scripture is important. Uh we can say that uh it's infallible, we can say that it's central. I'm not I'm not denying any of that.
But when you get down to it, it sounds like the church came before the New Testament did.
So, the whole Protestant idea that you hold this Bible up and read it for yourself and somehow that supersedes the authority of the Catholic Church that existed before it, it's like, man, I don't know how you get there once you look into the the historical growth of everything.
>> [snorts] >> And the last thing is is this.
If if reading the Bible, although it's a good thing and we should do it, if that's all you need, and you don't need to go get anything from a church like through the sacraments or anything like that, if you just need to read the Bible, then what do you do with with this?
Over 90% of the European population couldn't even read until like the 16th or 17th century.
So, so what we're supposed to believe that like the foundational doctrine of Christianity is that any man can go pick that Bible up and read it and figure out what it means, even though for the first 1,500 years less than 10% of the population could read.
Like, does that Does that make sense?
Like, okay, well then if that's what the doctrine is, then how were these Christians for the first 1500 years figuring out anything?
Like, okay, let's say they had the Bible and they had the words on the page. They couldn't read it.
They couldn't read it.
Very few people could read.
So, anyway, all these things kind of come together and it's it's just got me thinking.
It's got me thinking and I just feel like there's a lot of men out there, you know, in the Protestant church who feel this way. And so, I just thought I'd put this out there and yeah.
Just put this out there and talk about this stuff. So, I hope that hope this is helpful to anybody that happens to see it.
Um See you guys.
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