When considering religion on a scale from “ornate, complex, and nuanced” to “spare, iconoclastic, and straightforward,” you really can’t find a more extreme contrast than the one between Catholicism and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Jehovah’s Witnesses really are the “Protestant’s Protestant”: no other seemingly Christian sect has purged away so many of the traditional beliefs and practices of Christianity in favor of novel interpretations supposedly based on “Scripture alone.” Part of the reason for the puzzling title of this conversion story derives from this reality I encountered: that a Jehovah’s Witness must convert across a greater and more formidable distance than other Protestants when embracing the Catholic Church. In a larger sense, of course, the idea of multiple conversions to Catholicism applies to all of us born and bred in the modern world, once we realize just how alien its presuppositions are to the fullness of the faith of our fathers. I want to recount my journey through these conversions, which are as follows:
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Conversion to the idea of religion.
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Conversion to the idea that there is truth.
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Conversion to the practice of the spiritual life.
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Conversion of the imagination.
The 1st Conversion: The Idea of Religion
There are aspects of life in the Jehovah’s Witnesses that do lend themselves to conversion to the Catholic Church. One is that you’re taught to believe and trust in an organization that claims a divine mandate to teach and govern. Religion, therefore, was very important in my life. My father used to tell me: “I don’t care about your grades or what kind of job you get, just as long as you remain a servant of Jehovah.”
Religion took up a lot of time in my life. There were three “meetings” each week—meeting being the Witness term for any official worship gathering, though sometimes they functioned more like educational seminars. These gatherings ranged in length from one to two hours, with participants expected to prepare beforehand and offer “comments” at least once per gathering. Formal presentations, called “talks,” were also to be delivered once every few months at meetings (and in the early days, these were publicly critiqued!). Then, on Saturdays, we had “field service,” or the door-to-door ministry Witnesses are known for, which lasted around three hours. Finally, devout families like mine held “family study” one night a week at home. All of this was in addition to the personalized program of Bible and Watchtower literature study each Witness was expected to be doing.
Safe to say, I entered my teenage years as an extremely religious—if not neurotic—young man. I was set aside for advancement and given increasingly complex “parts” on the meetings. Soon the question was asked: “What prevents this boy from getting baptized?” As an adolescent eager to please God and my elders, the answer came back: “Nothing.”
However, baptism is a very momentous step in the JW faith. Baptism for a Witness is a public commitment to God and his organization that is irrevocable. Because it is a promise to the Almighty, it makes one liable for “disfellowshipping,” or the shunning penalty, if the promise is broken. Though Witnesses are loath to use the term, the shunning penalty is just that: a total ban on normal contact between active Witnesses and the shunned individual. Each Witness lives with the ever-present threat of losing his entire religious community were he to renounce the Witness religion. For this reason, most Witnesses aren’t baptized until age fifteen or sixteen. This generally is a late enough age that a troublesome teen’s true colors will have already shown through. Nobody wants to baptize a kid that’s just going to get shunned in a couple years. However, if a youth shows promise, baptism at this age may be a sufficient deterrent to future bad conduct—it may keep him on the straight and narrow.
I was only eleven when I got baptized. I couldn’t have known the changes that would take place inside me as I became a teenager. It was only a few short years later that I realized that I actually did want to go to parties, have a girlfriend, and find my own way in the world. Ominously, though, I knew that all those things would bring in their wake an eventual separation from my family and everything I knew.
Part of what drew me away was the increasingly guilt-filled hopelessness I felt. I had grown pretty neurotic throughout childhood, anxiously confessing my sins each night to my dad and blocking off hours and hours each week for meeting preparation and personal study. My stamina began to give way underneath this heavy yoke. Silently, I started looking for a way out, and the burgeoning New Atheist movement, accessed through internet sites, provided me a rationale.
I quickly adopted the entire set of “fashionable” beliefs: atheism, materialism, and progressive, secularist politics. I developed a disdain for my people and heritage and longed for the collapse of the evangelical Christianity that still permeated rural Southern culture circa 2005. But I did all of this half-secretly. As a baptized Witness, any of these beliefs could’ve gotten me shunned, not to mention the new habits of drinking and smoking I’d taken up whenever I was outside the watchful gaze of my parents.
I developed a strong attachment to strong drink. As high school ended and I entered college, alcohol began to consume my life. I drank several times a week to blackout, and even began imbibing before my shifts at the grocery store. After one particularly debauched bender spanning multiple days, I finally hit rock bottom. Luckily, the God I had so vehemently denied deigned to show Himself to me in a way I found unmistakable.
I had been hungover at work one night and mentioned to a coworker that I probably needed to go to AA. Next thing I knew, a man walked up to me on his way out of the store and said, “I heard you talking about AA. My name is Eric; here’s my number if you’re interested in learning more.”
To you this may not seem like an earth-shattering miracle. But to me it revealed everything. At just that exact moment, Eric had passed by and heard me mutter something about AA. After a quick prayer, he felt emboldened on his way out to speak to me and offer help. I knew from that moment there was a God, and that He was seeking me.
AA was an education in how to live in the presence of this God, and to let Him do for me what I had been incapable of doing for myself. As an alcoholic I learned the hopelessness of my situation without God. I had to learn a new way of life, one premised on radical honesty. The honesty began with facing the reality of my situation: alcohol had become my god. I relied on it religiously. But that was only the beginning; why had I made alcohol my god? With Eric as my guide, I was able to trek down the rabbit hole of (sometimes ugly) self-knowledge: I was fundamentally ill-at-ease with the world – with reality itself. My problem was less alcohol and more the incongruity between my will and the way my life was going. Without alcohol, though, and with the power of God, I learned that there was a solution to this conundrum: acceptance. Acceptance was the answer. With an all-powerful and loving God at the helm of my life, I could finally begin to accept this world, life, and myself. I began to grow up again.
In the midst of all this, my opposition to religion had softened somewhat. As I had come to embrace communist and even anarchist ideas, I had come to care about working people, and I desired an economic and social system that didn’t exploit them. With that came a measured appreciation of the “opium” of these masses—the term Marx gave to religion. I observed that many working people found great solace in faith, Unlike many of my fellow leftists, who argued that faith gave workers “false consciousness” and distracted them from the class struggle against the rich, I theorized that any successful drive to mobilize the workers would almost have to have a religious component. And besides, there seemed to be plenty in the Gospels that painted the rich in a bad light. For very earthly reasons, then, I was interested in the prospect of joining a church.
I had been exploring religions (including Catholicism, strangely enough) when God finally reached me at that grocery store. Out of all the denominations I surveyed, Catholicism appealed to me on a very visceral aesthetic level. I was somewhat perturbed by this fact. As a Southerner, Catholicism was still slightly exotic to me. Where I grew up, you were either Baptist, Church of Christ, or maybe some type of Methodist or Pentecostal. If I was going to join a religion for political reasons, it would’ve made much more sense to go with one of those options.
And yet I found myself drawn to the Mass and to books about Catholicism. Catholicism just seemed like a full-blown religion to me in ways that the Protestant churches I’d grown up around didn’t. Chalk it up to smells and bells, if you will, but there was certainly something mysterious and deep about it. Almost despite myself, I had joined RCIA out of curiosity the previous Fall (2009), and once I got sober, I decided to stick with it and carry the process to completion. I was becoming Catholic.
The Second Conversion: Truth and the Church
And we all lived happily ever after, right? In reality, though I believed vividly in a personal God now, I had no expectation that any one religion might be correct. RCIA had not disabused me of this notion, being little more than a primer on Catholic distinctives like the sign of the cross and holy water. Little (if anything) was said about Catholicism being true, or what demands Church membership might place on me. Consequently, when my enthusiasm faltered for Catholicism shortly after my reception, so did my Mass attendance. Despite my persistent fascination with the Mass, my lack of belief in the objective truth of Catholicism ultimately allowed me to drift. Religion was still just personal preference for me, and my preferences were anything but stable at this time. Why not join a Baptist church, for instance? My family had been Baptist prior to becoming Jehovah’s Witness all those decades ago, so maybe that made more sense for a religious orphan like me. If they were all just different paths to the same place, what did it really matter?
I spent my final semester in college in Washington, D.C., doing an internship at the National Trust for Historic Preservation through the Washington Center. At an AA party, I met a girl who gave me the apologetical work More than a Carpenter by Josh and Sean McDowell. She was an evangelical Protestant, and I think it was something about her sincere conviction that convinced me to read it. To my shock, I came away from the book convinced, for the first time, of the truth of the Christian message. There was actually good reason to believe the eyewitness accounts of the New Testament! I was once again face to face with the miraculous, if these apostles and early disciples were to be believed—and why shouldn’t they be, when many of them wrote their fantastical accounts within a few decades of the events they describe, and who in many cases sealed their testimony in blood?
But this further eruption of truth in my life just brought more questions. If God was real, and Jesus Christ was His Son risen from the dead, which group worshipped Him rightly? I was familiar enough with the Bible to know that this God would gather a people for Himself and give them standards. I set about trying to find what those were.
While in D.C., a tortured back-and-forth study led finally to my “re-baptism” in a Southern Baptist Church. I had been swayed by the Protestant case for sola fide, or salvation by faith alone. It seemed like maybe this was the dividing line between Christianity and all other “works” religions. I couldn’t deny the visceral appeal of Catholicism, but I chalked this up to an imagination overly saturated with Tolkienesque fantasy influences. Catholicism had holy water and holy sites and the Holy Eucharist—it was “enchanted,” and so it appealed to me at the deepest imaginative level. But I suspected that it must be too good to be true. The truth, seemingly, was much drier and more ordinary, and I felt it would be sinful to choose my denomination on aesthetic grounds. Too, I had been exposed to some of the great minds of Reformed Protestantism, Abraham Kuyper chief among them. In Kuyper’s writings I found an intellectually satisfying justification for the “spareness” of Protestantism. Leaving behind all these earthly accompaniments to faith (like statues and icons) was actually evidence of a higher level of spiritual development, according to him! It may not warm the heart in the same way, but Protestantism seemed to be the cold, hard truth. I left D.C. after the semester was over with plans to find another Baptist Church back home.
But that nagging attraction to the Catholic Church wouldn’t go away, and soon I encountered a cogent defense of the Catholic position on justification via a YouTube video that flipped a switch in my mind: “works” were works of the law, which certainly weren’t salvific under the New Covenant. (Ironically, the video was a debate between a Baptist and Brother Peter Dimond, who is a sedevacantist of some sort and not in communion with the Church.) “Faith” was the new justifying entrance into the people of God, but it necessarily played itself out in works, which Christ would judge one day. After a perusal of the Church Fathers as well, in which I encountered the Real Presence in the Eucharist, Bishops and Church hierarchy, and even things like the veneration of relics, Catholicism went from an intriguing aesthetic fascination to something I had almost despaired of finding in religion: truth.
The 3rd Conversion: The Spiritual Life
Immediately I felt at home in the ancient Church that Christ founded. But now that the search was done, the real work had to commence. Though I had been sober for a couple years now, I had a whole host of sinful attitudes and behaviors that I realized were compromising my peace and walk with God. I joined a more traditional Catholic parish and their men’s schola (a choir for singing Gregorian chant). In short order, I found myself learning the heavenly chants of the Church and experiencing the liturgical year. Unexpected grace flowed in, and I felt again the Lord’s tender care.
One thing seemed to be missing, though. I’d always been fascinated by the idea of military service, but as a Witness, I’d been forced to put it out of my mind. Joining the armed forces is a shunning offense. But now as I reflected on my status as a Catholic, I revisited the question. Someday my family would surely find out I’d converted—they might see a Christmas tree in a Facebook picture of my living room, and, at the very least, I’d have to get married in a Catholic Church. Any of those things would out me, and I’d be declared “disassociated” and shunned. Why not, then, pursue my dream of military service while there was still time?
Honor, courage, and commitment—those words rang in my ears after my call with the recruiter, and so I knew I had to join the Marines. When the day came to ship off to boot camp on Parris Island, I finally revealed to my parents both my plans to enlist and my newfound faith. They were devastated and shocked, not least because I was leaving the next morning. It seems a cruel way to spring such a thing on someone, but I maintain it was the least bad option. Just a few months earlier I had been allowed to participate in my sister’s wedding. The shunning would’ve commenced at whatever time they learned of my plans, and so by waiting until the last possible minute to tell them, I ensured that we would have as much time together as possible.
I was reeling from the final farewell with my family, but I had little time to process it. Before I knew it, I was running, marching, and screaming my way through Marine Corps boot camp. I went with my best friend, Levi Broyles, who had also grown up Jehovah’s Witness. I like to think the Marines finally helped me complete my transformation into a grown man. The values (and many of the Marines themselves) were deeply Catholic and chivalric. The unit I was assigned to deployed to Eastern Europe, and I finally found the adventure I had yearned for.
I got engaged while in the Marines, but on deployment an unexpected desire surfaced during daily Mass: what if I was called to the priesthood? After a good deal of indecision, and not a little heartache, I broke my engagement and entered the co-sponsorship program, wherein my home diocese and the Archdiocese for the Military Services would split the bill for my seminary education, with the prospect that I would serve out a contract as a military priest-chaplain after ordination. Once the Marine Corps and Navy had settled how the remainder of my contract would look (the Marines use Navy chaplains), I was put into a reserve status and shipped to seminary at the Pontifical College Josephinum in Columbus, Ohio.
Seminary was another of those signal moments in my life: I was given two years, in a beautiful Flemish Gothic castle, to study philosophy and theology, to develop close friendships with like-minded young men, and to throw myself into a deeper prayer life than I had ever thought possible. I had rarely ever prayed for more than ten minutes at a time, and here I was being encouraged to attend a daily holy hour, not to mention the public singing of the Divine Office with the seminary community! But I gave it a shot, and what I found was a life-changing deepening of my relationship with the Lord. In the midst of my struggle with discernment, I experienced God’s mercy and presence like never before. Truly, He was leading me.
The 4th Conversion: The Imagination
Because of the abundant grace flowing from my seminary experience, I was able to discern that I was not called to priestly ordination. After two years, I returned to Tennessee and used my GI Bill benefits to pursue a master’s degree in city planning. I met and married my wife during this time (2020), and we now have two beautiful children. You could say I’ve finally found my place after a long sojourn, both physical and spiritual. Yet conversion is a never-ending process, and God is constantly shedding light on unconverted parts of my soul.
Under the influence of modern culture, I’ve realized that I’ve viewed reality much like a materialist for most of my life. That’s not to say I haven’t believed in God and angels and demons for much of my life—I have, but it’s almost like those elements were “tacked on” to a larger scientistic worldview. Science is of course made by God and a wonderful tool for exploring creation, but it’s simply in the air we breathe nowadays to view it as the ultimate form of knowledge, at least implicitly.
Witnesses are probably more afflicted by this type of thinking because we are taught to reject the idea of God’s providence. Much is made of the verse “the whole world is lying in the power of the wicked one” (1 John 5:19), which Witnesses take to mean that God has relinquished control of the flow of events to Satan. Therefore, reasoning that God has “taken” a loved one in death or that God could possibly bring good out of an evil is seen as insulting to God by Witnesses. Rather, Satan is responsible for the course of world events, and God will merely fix the mess Satan has made at the end of time.
The orthodox Christian view is rather that, even taking into account our freedom, God remains mysteriously in control of events through either His active or passive will. God never wills evil, but He may allow it out of respect for human free will and with a view to a greater good He intends to bring out of it.
For a Witness, then, though God would ultimately sort out the mess, the emphasis was on the randomness and brutality of the current system of things. This was to encourage greater longing for God’s New Order that was to come in the future. Practically, though, it led to an understanding of the world much like that of an atheist’s: material atoms bouncing around and colliding in sometimes very tragic ways. We were basically alone out here, unless God specifically decided to intervene in some extraordinary case.
As a Catholic, my mindset has had to shift from conceiving of the universe in this very empty, lonely way to one more compatible with what our faith tells us. That starts with an act of faith, namely: everything can be used by God for my salvation (cf Romans 8:28).
This category of everything also includes His angelic servants and His glorified saints. Learning to see God’s providence in the course of events has gradually led me to an awareness of the actions of His delegates and the participatory nature of His reality. God desires to share His life with creation. To that end, He has placed spirit beings in authority over the world, to tend and keep it. His glorified human servants, the saints, now share in these powers as well ever since the opening up of Heaven by Our Lord. As Catholics, we get to truly experience this reality: we are encouraged to entreat our guardian angels for protection, and we can call upon the prayers of saints—who act as patrons of people, places, and activities—for help, depending on the circumstances of our need. Indeed, all creation, on Heaven and Earth, is truly alive: it is in the keeping of innumerable intelligences and perfected servants of the Almighty.
As a Catholic in a world that seems increasingly opposed to the ancient faith, it has been an overwhelming comfort to recapture some of this sense of the “enchantment” of all reality. The various traditions surrounding the feast days of the liturgical year provided much of the impetus for this conversion. I recently compiled a list of many of the practices my Christian ancestors handed down. They have proved an invaluable resource in re-enchanting the days of the year with the beautiful beliefs that sprang up from Catholic culture.
Developing a Catholic imagination has been therapeutic in more ways than one. Understanding spiritual warfare as the fundamental root of conflict in the world has helped me persevere throughout various trials, the greatest being my continued shunning by my family, which has been ongoing for over twelve years now. They must shun all normal contact with me or risk being shunned themselves. And they are forbidden from reading or studying anything that could cause them to question the Jehovah’s Witness organization. The system of control in which they are enmeshed is truly formidable from a human standpoint. Therefore, I ask that you pray for them and for me. Nothing is impossible for the Living God, as the story of my many (and no doubt unfinished) conversions undoubtedly proves.
