The Anti-Evangelists

A Selection of Online Catholics calling Me Apostate or Commanding Repentance

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The first time I did door-to-door evangelization, it was January of 1996. I was 18 years old, and I’d been staying with the Legionaries of Christ, boarding with the priests and brothers at The Highlands School in Irving, Texas, where I had lived since having been invited to be a counselor at at camp the previous summer.

At the time, Youth for the Third Millennium, one of the front organizations the Legionaries used to recruit for their lay apostolate, Regnum Christi, was just getting off the ground. I think they had done one or two previous missions, and they had figured out how to get young people to sign up: hold the mission in an exotic location.

The January 1996 mission was in the Bahamas.

I had never been to the Caribbean, and I was excited about the idea of going. An anonymous benefactor had paid my way, and I was eager to engage in this exciting opportunity to spread the faith.

The way these missions worked, young men and women would come from all over to a pre-coordinated location, typically based out of a parish that had either some affiliation with the Legion already, or wanted help revitalizing their parish and were interested in the free manpower. Missionaries would get a very rudimentary bit of training, a branded T-shirt, be handed a pocket-sized apologetics book with common questions and answers, and be sent out into the neighborhoods in the designated area to knock on doors and try to convince people to consider coming to the Catholic Church. Sometimes, we had community events to invite them to. Sometimes, the call to action was more general.

The whole thing was based loosely on the way the Mormon Missionary program operated, as was the “co-worker” program where young men and women could volunteer for a 1-2 years at a gender-appropriate house of apostolate, typically at the conclusion of high school. (I also participated in this program in Atlanta, though I only stayed for 6 months before leaving, after which they decided to attempt to destroy my reputation with everyone I knew in a manner common to cults who don’t take kindly to those who leave, leading to my estrangement from the Legion and Regnum Christi as a whole, and very nearly driving me out of the Church at that point.)

The missionary work itself was a ploy, but I didn’t know it then. The whole point of this “apostolate” was to get a bunch of zealous young people who were on fire for their faith into what amounted to an in-person sales funnel, where they could be manipulated into joining Regnum Christi, or even better, pressured into a religious vocation with the Legion or their consecrated equivalent for women.

But that first mission in the Bahamas was before they had all the bugs ironed out, so the experience was more pure. And although I did sign up to join Regnum Christi during that mission, the experience was probably the best of the six total missions I participated in, which took place in four different countries. By the last mission I did in Miami, Florida, I had gained enough experience that I was appointed to serve as Mission Director, which meant I did all the pre-mission site visits, coordination of lodging and food, and overall organization of the two week program.

Me, center-right, with the late Bishop Lawrence Aloysius Burke of Nassau, Bahamas; January, 1996

The first couple times I went door to door was a little bit nerve wracking, but also exhilarating. I had done a small test run mission in the outskirts of Dallas, just for one Saturday morning, but this one was the real deal. And as it turned out, I was pretty good at it. I knew my faith fairly well, I was a natural at talking to just about anybody, and every door I knocked on helped me to learn a little more.

Some of My Missionary Photos From the Mid 90s

I, along with my Regnum Christi teammates, was once admonished in a closed door meeting by one of the Legionary priests that “If you’re not here to recruit people into the Regnum Christi, there’s something wrong with you!” And there was, in fact, something wrong with me.

No matter what they said, my heart was for the people. I was there for the souls I met at every door. I did not give a damn about recruitment. And inasmuch as this was my purpose, this was arguably the one truly good experience I had during my time in this insufferable cult.

The riches were in the ruse.

One of the first things you learn as a missionary — and it may sound cliché — is that you really do have to meet people where they are. The job demands enormous empathy. People leave or resist joining the Catholic Church for all kinds of reasons. Some are theological, some are personal. A number of folks I encountered got yelled at in a confessional or spiritually abused or neglected in some way and simply never came back.

Triumphalism has no place in missionary work. I don’t care if you’re dealing with people who are cohabitating, people who are into the occult, people who are divorced and remarried, people who have succumbed to substance abuse, or those who have just given up on the faith altogether. This idea that seems to have gained so much ground, especially in trad circles, that “admonishing the sinner” is a spiritual work of mercy that requires browbeating and general douchebaggery is the dumbest thing I have ever seen religious people do. You can’t just criticize or accuse or threaten those you perceive to be sinners and expect them to come home. They will slam the door in your face, and that will be the end of that.

Instead, you’ve got to try to understand why they are where they are, and even if their reasoning seems totally alien to you, you have to recognize that you’re not them, and it doesn’t actually matter what you think. Do you want them to “come home” or not? Then it’s your duty to try to really try to see things from their point of view, and from that perspective, try to find a way to move forward.

You also have to find a way to establish common ground. You must find things that you do both agree about, and build bridges from there. It’s a lot easier to try to persuade someone you’ve already forged a bond with over common beliefs than to do Twitter-style rhetorical skull-bashing while expecting positive results.

Although I certainly tend to be combative, I never lost the missionary impulse throughout my work in Catholic media. I had a real problem with dissimulation — people who pretended to be Catholic while not accepting core beliefs and trying to change the whole thing from within — but I could never conjure up real anger towards those who were honest enough to leave because they could no longer believe.

Since my own departure from Catholicism three years ago, I have been really taken aback by the amount of hostility I receive from a number of Catholics who remain; individuals who seem to consider my loss of faith some kind of personal affront.

As the image at the top of this post shows, most seem to think that abrasively calling me an apostate is a surefire way to both shame me and make me re-consider my decision.

This week, a new round of nuisances emerged, among which I found this guy particularly irritating:

This was at least the second or third time he had come at me this way, and I’d already laid into him about how I’d love for him to experience an involuntary loss of faith while people on the internet gossiped about and attacked him for it.

In direct response to the tweet pictured above, I said:

I’m sick of nasty little wagon circlers like you acting like you’re so morally superior because you stayed in the self-falsifying religion that I left.

You are the religious equivalent of a jackboot. You think browbeating someone with terms like “apostate” makes you a better soldier for Christ. You have zero evangelical impulse, just an ugly, warped form of zeal. You’ve somehow convinced yourself that this is the righteous way to act, that you’re engaging in a spiritual work of mercy, and you give not an instant of thought to whether your behavior would push someone like me further away from the Church because you think I deserve to be shamed for my “crime.”

It’s thug behavior. Zero interest in why someone might leave, how you might understand that in order to display empathy and persuasion, a total incuriosity about whether any of my objections have merit and how that affects the situation, just unthinking condemnation.

You are a human representation of the very ugly, merciless, vengeful idea of God I’ve come to reject as incompatible with the assertion of divine love. Consequently, you only affirm for me that my apostasy was based on something inherent in the religion that really is vile and corrupts many Catholics into acting like fiends, and was thus justifiable.

But you’d have to care about something more than your own performative pietism and the little thrill of superiority you get when condemning others and learn to ACTUALLY want to save souls to even consider an effective apologetic.

You’re spiritually stunted and repellent to those outside the Church, but you think people like *me* are the problem, as though we represent some threat to an institution that is so coercively self-reinforcing that even constantly abusing its own members and stripping from them any noble and dignified way of worshiping their god can’t convince them to leave.

It is bizarre to me that yes, as an apostate, I still understand the faith better and how to share it more effectively than these preening, chest-thumping little zealots.

I suspect their bellicosity is rooted in a deep, unspoken fear that they, too, could lose their faith against their will, but it comes across as simon-pure animosity towards perceived enemies of a church they feel they have to white knight for — thus undercutting their animating principle that Catholicism is the true faith, against which the gates of hell will never prevail.

Which is it? An indestructible faith protected by an omnipotent, inviolate God, or a fragile fabrication that requires angry young zealots to rush headlong into battle to protect from being shattered by mere mortals?

Similarly noisome are the bow-tied pseudo-erudite armchair apologists who write with antiquated diction like mid-wits from Middle Earth, who can’t read my own comments well enough not to misrepresent them, but loquaciously hold court, preaching to their little choirs of reply guys, clucking about me having become “a cautionary tale.”

The sneering condescension, the infantilizing explanations of how I have violated some tenet of a faith I know at least as well as they do, if not better, all of it chafes like sand in your swim trunks. It would be hard to argue that I have not done more to champion and spread this faith they love so much than they ever will, and yet all they can do is treat me like some evil fool who is entirely ignorant of our once-shared religion.

Contrary to rumor, I did not leave the faith because of the actions or behaviors of other Christians (including my despicable little pastor with the Napoleon complex), but those actions and behaviors are indicative to me of the inefficacy of grace. If grace does not transform those who have most ready and devoted access to it, this speaks to the implausibility of the supernatural order I once convinced myself to accept.

On a more pragmatic level, I have no desire to be associated with people like this ever again; namely, those who are friendly when you’re championing their pet beliefs, but who plunge their knives in the minute you fall out of their company, no matter how honest your objections.

I left three years ago and I’m still working through what it all means. I’m angry and resentful over the feeling of a wasted life, lived for a lie. I am certain my loud objections are also abrasive to them. But I didn’t ask to lose my faith. I begged God not to let it happen to me, to show me what I was getting wrong, to help me understand how to make sense of it and to find some way to love him despite his appearing to me so unlovable.

My problem is not a lack of knowledge about Catholicism, it’s an incredulity at being asked to accept things it teaches that do not comport with reality, or in other ways seem preposterous or self-contradictory. Even more deeply, my problem is a lack of any experience of divine love, or presence, or existence at all.

God did not answer my tearful prayers. He did not come to my aid in my darkest hour. Those of his followers I reached out to when I was drowning, asking for help, were too busy with their own problems, or too offended by my questions, or too worried about being associated with me as I fell from grace to offer any assistance.

For heaven’s sake, my own parents never even asked me what happened, or how I was, or whether I would be okay. I was nothing but a disappointment to them, another of their children who left the faith that means more to them than we ever did.

I was abandoned by nearly everyone I thought would care, except my wife and kids, and a few close friends and an extended family member or two, most of whom are perplexed by the change in me and have little if anything helpful to say. They only stand by me because they have known me for so long, and we have other bonds than shared belief.

Aside from these, the greatest kindness I have received is from people who are nearly perfect strangers, many of whom have become readers of this Substack. We do not know each other in real life, but your kindness and understanding has been a balm.

I cannot find good reason to believe that God cares about me, if he even exists at all, but I wish those who claim to love him would stop talking about me like an ex they can’t get over and just move on with their lives. Stop gossiping. Stop misrepresenting. Stop trying to use me to gain leverage for your own need to demonstrate moral superiority. Stop using me as your favorite cautionary tale. I do not belong to you, and you do not know me.

Not that any of you care, but your behavior only pushes me further and further away. You make even the idea of a return to the Catholic Church seem as appealing as plunging face first into a den of vipers.

You are anti-evangelists, and you do a great disservice to your cause.