Dr. David Anders is a Catholic catechist, speaker and writer who lives in Birmingham, Ala. His radio program, “Called to Communion,” can be heard daily on Spirit Catholic Radio in Nebraska. Spirit Catholic Radio brought Dr. Anders to speak at Christ the King Church in Omaha Sept. 19, before a crowd of about 600 people.
Before his presentation, he sat down with Dennis Kellogg, director of communications for the Catholic Diocese of Lincoln, to talk about his conversion story, trends in the Catholic Church and the focus of his ministry. What follows is an edited version of that conversation.
Dennis Kellogg, Southern Nebraska Register: You grew up in the Presbyterian Church, went to a Protestant college and seminary. What made you decide to come home to the Catholic Church?
Dr. David Anders, Called to Communion Catholic Radio Host and Author: It began with experiencing a major cognitive dissonance in my Protestant faith…. When I got to graduate school, and I was working on Calvin, and Luther in particular, of course, they constantly referenced the Church fathers... in particular, Augustine of Hippo, fourth-century, North African doctor of the Catholic Church. And they alleged that he was on their side.
So, in doing my reformation studies, I read tens of thousands of pages of Augustine. I read all of Augustine’s major works and came to the disconcerting conclusion that Augustine was Catholic, and that his view of salvation and the moral life was essentially Catholic.
And his understanding of salvation was very different. His thinking was that faith is necessary. Yes, grace is essential. Yes. But what grace does is it transforms your moral life, it transforms your interior life so that you become like Christ. And so that God doesn’t simply account you as righteous, he actually makes you righteous. He changes your life so that you effectively love God and neighbor. And therefore, Christ can say in justice, “well done, good and faithful servant.”
So that understanding, that didn’t make me Catholic overnight, but it really unhinged me because it was a major tenant of Protestantism... To me, the major father that the Reformers cited, didn’t agree with them. And so I kept reading, obviously. I read earlier in the tradition, and the problem was, the earlier into the tradition I went, the less like Calvinism and Lutheranism ancient Christianity appeared. It got more and more Catholic looking, and more and more uncomfortable.
I went back to the study of the Scriptures. I knew the Scriptures very well, but I availed myself of the best in Protestant scholarship... to really try to shore up my Protestant faith. I didn’t want to read Catholics. I wanted to stay Protestant, but when I read modern Protestant biblical scholarship, I discovered that some of the most prominent names in modern biblical scholarship also thought that Luther had gotten the Bible wrong, that he’d gotten St. Paul wrong, and that really, the Catholic vision of the moral life and salvation was the one that was far more consistent to Scripture, and of course, the whole history of the tradition.
So that was a major plank of my Protestantism that was knocked down. One by one, I subjected all the other major pillars of my Protestant faith to critical scrutiny, and one by one, they began to fall. And so I was left bereft, honestly, of faith, and quite confused. And I was independently studying the Catholic faith that began to appear not only true and true to Scripture, but also good, and as more than a viable but as pretty much the only viable alternative. And so that was really what began my move into Catholicism, an intellectual conversion based on the study of the fathers in the Scriptures.
SNR: In your professional career, you wrestle with difficult questions about the Catholic faith and help others to do that as well. How much of an advantage for you is it that you have that Protestant perspective—that you can understand where some of these questions are coming from?
Dr. Anders: Well, in dialoguing with Protestants specifically, I think that a Catholic convert who came out of that tradition, is at a major advantage in dialoguing with Protestants and one of the reasons is that I’ve met Catholics before, when I explained to them what Protestants think, they’ve said, “Oh, they can’t possibly think that. They don’t really think that do they?” Yeah, they really think that.
There’s a whole way of approaching the Bible, the question of the rationality of faith, the nature of morality, there’s so many things that are assumed within Protestantism, in a completely different paradigm—intellectual, spiritual religious paradigm—from the way Catholics operate, such that a lot of times when Catholics who weren’t raised in that tradition, dialogue with Protestants, they give what seems like compelling answers to a Catholic, but any Protestants would say, “Well, that doesn’t move me. I don’t recognize that way of reasoning.” I find that all the time. And so what I do on the show is, I recapitulate for the listeners the pattern of reasoning that was persuasive to me to make me Catholic, and I think that connects very well with Protestant listeners, because they will say, “Yeah, those are the questions that I have and that’s the way of thinking that I use.”
SNR: You’re dealing with the Catholic faith all the time. What do you see as the reason for more people having no religious affiliation, and for Catholic churches struggling to keep attendance at the current levels?
Dr. Anders: I like to read a lot of religious sociology. I like to read about the people who have left the Church, and the reasons that they give and what most of the scholarship says, conformance to my experience; people do not generally leave the Catholic faith because they disagree with the doctrine.
The primary reason that people leave the faith is because they have had a series of unpleasant, frustrating experiences relationally within the Church that stem from an unnecessarily bureaucratic and alienating culture. Oftentimes, people who have made multiple attempts to engage the life of their parish are turned away, time and time again, by one or another frustrating structures, and they eventually get frustrated and give up.
So, if you ask people in surveys, particularly those who leave the Church for another denomination, ‘why did you leave the Catholic faith?’ Seventy percent of the people will answer, ‘I left because my spiritual needs were not being met,’ which I take very seriously to mean whatever ministry they were receiving in the Catholic faith, it wasn’t connecting with them. And this is something that Pope Francis, our Holy Father, has talked about a lot. And he’s addressed some of the structural problems in the Church, unnecessarily bureaucratic organization for example, as well as the way that Catholics present the catechesis. And so, the pope has said, and I completely agree with him, that we have to put first things first... which means making the Kerygma, the announcement of Christ’s death and burial and resurrection for our salvation, has to be the centerpiece of Catholic catechetics.
SNR: You spend a lot of time traveling the country talking to groups. What’s the one message you want them to leave with?
Dr. Anders: It’s good to be Catholic.
Someone asked me, called my show, actually, about a week ago. They heard I was coming out here and they said, “Well, you know, I’m thinking of bringing a Protestant friend, but they’re afraid that your goal is to is to tell Protestants they have to become Catholic.” And my response was, “No, my goal is to get Catholics to become Catholic.”
Watch the full-length interview, including additional questions for Dr. Anders, on the Catholic Diocese of Lincoln YouTube channel. Subscribe to our channel for more Catholic videos from the diocese.
