Code Switching Faith

From Catholicism to Protestantism in one fell swoop.

My continuing story: I was born into Christianity and left after six decades, switched from Catholicism to Protestant Evangelicalism, then deconverted.

Last time, I’d switched from a private primary school to a state high school, leaving my Catholic tribe behind. My last year of school was crucial, and my future hung on achieving good marks. My parents encouraged me to focus on my studies. So, I gave up playing football for my town team, knuckled down, and studied hard.

Ironically, that year I joined a small group of high-school students known as the Interschool Christian Fellowship (ISCF). The irony is that such a group could never exist at a Catholic school. Yet here they were, in a public state school.

A friend recruited me. One lunchtime, we hung around a water-fountain chatting about the standardised Matriculation scoring system. A pass or fail depended not only on our marks, but the overall cohort score for that year. I remember making an offhanded comment about it, like ‘Only God knows—if there is a God.’ Obviously at this point in my life, I had doubts God even existed.

To my surprise, my friend replied: ‘There is a God.’ That kicked off the next leg of my faith journey. We began discussing faith during breaks. It turned out he’d recently come to faith and took the Bible seriously. I hadn’t read the Bible, only the Catholic Catechism, and found it too dry. My friend gave me a pocket Good News New Testament, a readable modern translation. He then invited me to attend the ISCF lunchtime meetings. I was curious, so I went along to check it out.

I discovered a handful of students at the ISCF. I learned they were Protestants, but no one made a big deal of it. Coming from a Catholic background, I had never been part of a small group discussing faith. I had no idea what they did or why. It was a novel experience, but as an outsider, I soon enjoyed the fellowship when they met.

The group met regularly to chat, pray, read the Bible or tracts (small comic-book style proselytising aids). Everyone was engaging, but I felt a little uneasy with the subtle pressure to share what was going on in my inner life. This was often under the guise of prayer requests. If enough people ask to pray for you, you feel obliged to share. Outside my family, I never talked to anyone about my inner life, it just wasn’t done. I had never asked for prayer, so prayer requests were a new thing. I remember feeling pressure to conform, to reciprocate, and share personal information. It felt a little weird, and in hindsight, that feeling was a red-flag.

Over a year, I discovered more differences via the ISCF. Catholics go to church, Protestants do church when they meet, and the building isn’t their sanctuary. Protestants use extemporaneous prayer often; Catholics use set prayers with a priest rarely. Protestants have a stronger group ethos, but less respect for personal privacy. Catholics talk about their inner life to a priest. Protestants believe in the priesthood of all believers, which is code for sharing your inner life with everyone.

For example, one girl shared about her open-heart surgery. We all then prayed for her operation. Her composure made an impression on me. I’d have no such serenity in her situation, but neither would I feel compelled to share intimate health details.

I’m not suggesting that’s an exhaustive list of differences, or even that it correctly describes current practices for all Catholics and Protestants. They’re a diverse bunch. I’m simply recording my impressions then, and I realise practices change. My first impressions were clearly broad generalisations that seem to lack nuance.

I continued to attend ISCF meetings and read the Bible, and it began to bite. I recall one night reading Romans, and Paul’s remarkable oratory resonated deeply. Its logic felt so compelling that I jumped up and bounced around the room. The Bible had an emotional pull, and that excited my curiosity. But emotion isn’t evidence, and an emotional pull doesn’t make it true. However, I now began to believe what I read was true, without any evidence to back it up. By now, I was emotionally, if not intellectually, convinced the Bible was true. Little did I know where my response would lead, or that it could intellectually mislead.

One day, my friend asked if I’d like to become a Christian. That was a weird request since I was Catholic. Weren’t they Christian? I was informed Protestants don’t think they are. That was a weird idea for me, but I didn’t know better. It’s weird because for 1,500 years, Catholics were the only Christians around. I realised that years later but for a long time I believed it myself. That’s how little I knew or understood. Even today many Protestants believe it. I had to learn it was a lie, and so do they, but many don’t bother. Insights like this I stored away. In hindsight, Christians lying or lazily ignorant about other Christians was one huge, jarring insight.

My friend wanted a response and suggested I make a personal confession of faith. We looked at Bible verses together, and one was Revelation 3:20, which says someone is standing at a door and knocking. Most Protestants interpret this as Jesus knocking at the door to a person’s heart, even though Jesus isn’t explicitly named, and the passage is addressed to a church in Laodicea, presumably with an actual door.

It’s odd logic to underscore a salvation request, but the odd interpretation persists because the wording is useful to get a response. Christians love the form of words. They want you to respond to them. Why else would a piece of apocalyptic literature, written in response to Nero’s persecution, that barely made the canon, be relevant? Why do Christians think an ancient middle-eastern text applies to anyone everywhere for all time? These are questions I didn’t know to ask, so I agreed with it, hoping something good would happen, or at least they wouldn’t disown me. That was my introduction to Christians weaponizing friendship to promote religion.

My friend explained the ‘gospel’, using one of those small tracts. God was holy, and we all were sinners who offended him. The penalty for sin was death, but accepting the death and resurrection of Jesus would get us to heaven. There’s a lot to unpack, which I’ll do here one day, but on that day, I was primed to believe it. The Catholics had made me horribly aware of the threat of hell and the promise of heaven. As far as I was concerned, I was already saved, but making sure of it couldn’t hurt.

Maybe I was hedging my bets, or my friends manipulated me, or they were genuine in their beliefs and still wrong. My friends thought I wasn’t saved, I thought I was already saved. Maybe we were both wrong, and salvation is a scam. I knew nothing of the dangers of Bible interpretation. How we tend to impose our agenda, then claim the Bible as our authority. I’ll share more about that danger in future posts.

Back then, I didn’t know how to interpret the Bible, so I accepted the need for a personal confession of faith. I believed it was the right thing to do. Looking back, I know we misinterpreted some verses underscoring my confession, but I still responded in good faith with a genuine commitment. Both can be true at once.

So it was, on September 20^th, 1974, I ‘came to Christ’ via a public confession of faith. That’s all it took to become a Christian at age sixteen. Without realising it, I’d switched from Catholicism to Protestantism in one fell swoop. I now belonged to a new tribe, with all its historical trauma. I used my sister’s typewriter to record my conversion and kept it handy for years. The date now pops up in my digital calendar as my conversion date. I prefer to call it my code-switch, like going from rugby to AFL. Ironically, it’s also the date I deconverted back in 2021. If you come along for the Substack journey, I hope one day you’ll understand why.

It’s fifty years since that high-school conversion. Since then, further study, and self-reflection have given me perspective on what happened that day. I have asked myself many times: Did I really become a Christian? Was my conversion real?

I’ll explore some answers next time on UNSAVED: From Religion to Reality.

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