Why I Am Not a Protestant

"Joining a church should not be dependent upon consumerist preferences based upon how well any given Christian community aligns with individual opinions. What matters, most essentially, is which Church is the one Christ founded?"

From Crisis

By Casey Chalk, MA(Theol)

To argue that one cannot become Catholic because Pope Francis may share certain traits in common with liberal Protestants is to engage in a form of individualistic consumerism.

The conservative Presbyterian academic Carl R. Trueman is one of the most important and interesting voices in contemporary Protestantism. His top-selling 2020 book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution, was such an impressive scholarly tour de force it was celebrated by Protestants and Catholics alike (including myself). He regularly speaks at Catholic events, such as the Leonine Forum, where I had the great pleasure of meeting him a couple of years ago. He even writes for Catholic publications such as The Catholic World Report.

So, when the good Dr. Trueman offers his opinions on Catholicism—as he recently did at First Things—one can’t help but pay attention. In a December 12 piece titled “Why I Am Not Catholic,” Trueman begins by noting that “many issues are important in my commitment to Reformed Protestantism: authority, salvation, the nature of the ministry, and the significance of sacraments are just a few of the more obvious.” He adds that the Catholic Church has given Mary “significance that is well beyond anything the Bible would countenance.” But his preeminent concern, he tells us, is with one thing—or rather, one person. Can you guess? 

If you said Pope Francis, you win the luxury, all-expenses-paid trip to the well-trod land of anti-Franciscan Protestant polemics. Francis, claims Trueman, is “a liberal Protestant in a white papal robe.” The latest evidence? The December 2023 Fiducia Supplicans, which permits blessings for individuals in same-sex relationships; and, more recently, Francis’ alleged decision to support a pilgrimage for the LGBTQ+ community in the 2025 Jubilee Year titled “Church: Home for All, LGBT+ Christians and Other Existential Frontiers.” This pilgrimage includes a September 2025 prayer vigil for LGBTQ+ Catholics at a church in Rome. 

For starters, as The Pillar—which is no unwavering apologist for all Francis says and does—has reported, a spokesperson for the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelization told Reuters that the activities of the pilgrimage “are not sponsored activities.” Nor does the pilgrimage appear on the Jubilee website’s “calendar of major events.” Does Pope Francis support such a pilgrimage? It’s unclear; and it is certainly complicated by the fact that as much as he has presented an image of welcoming to LGBTQ+ persons, he has also expressed his opposition to the presence of gay men in the priesthood and even, multiple times, allegedly used a gay slur. 

But, frankly, none of that really matters. For one, whatever the nature of Pope Francis’ opinions on LGBTQ+ persons and their behavior—and I am in no position to divine the mind of a man I’ve never met and whose comments can be confusing and are also often misinterpreted and manipulatively spun by liberal corporate media—the Catholic Church quite demonstrably teaches that our current pontiff is incapable of altering magisterial teaching on sexuality. According to Catholic teaching, Pope Francis could be the most pro-LGBTQ+ bishop of Rome in the history of the Church and he still could not magisterially declare that homosexual acts or transgenderism are moral goods to be celebrated. The magisterium has spoken and cannot be overturned.

Secondly, and far more importantly, there is the problem of what Trueman’s argument actually amounts to. If I were to carefully dissect it, it would appear to be thus: Trueman has read his Bible and come to the personal opinion that the Catholic Church is wrong on various theological issues important to Trueman and that the current pope is taking the Church in what he estimates to be the wrong direction. Thus, Trueman cannot become a Catholic.

This is what my friend and Catholic philosopher Bryan Cross calls “ecclesial consumerism.” By this, Cross is describing a philosophical and theological paradigm in which one chooses a church based on personal opinions related to any number of subjective criteria. Perhaps your redline is a Christian community’s (or leader’s) position on LGBTQ+ issues. Perhaps it’s on the denomination’s conformity to certain Reformation-era teachings on salvation, the sacraments, or Mary. Whatever that redline, its basis is one’s subjective opinions and preferences regarding what is most important, and even decisive, in choosing a church to join.

However important are doctrines related to soteriology, sacramentology, or Mariology, they must all, ultimately, be peripheral to the central decision of the individual seeking to identify “the church” as such. Joining a church should not be dependent upon consumerist preferences based upon how well any given Christian community aligns with individual opinions on such various theological or moral subjects. What matters, most essentially, is which Church is the one Christ founded? 

For, whichever institution is the Church Christ founded, our opinions about the behavior and ideas of any given pope, cardinal, or bishop become, in at least one sense, inconsequential. This is true for the same reason that the opinions of individuals encountering Christ or His apostles were, at least as it related to divine revelation, irrelevant. If Jesus is the Son of God, and the apostles have been designated with authority to teach infallible Christian doctrine on His behalf, our disagreement or dislike of those teachings or the behavior of those promulgating them is irrelevant to the reality of that authority. 

If apostolic succession is a verifiable reality, our opinion regarding the magisterium’s (quite narrowly defined) infallible teachings is also irrelevant. And what an individual bishop or pope does in guiding the Church in one direction or another, while it may be wrong and even sinful, cannot undermine that divinely-instituted magisterial authority. That’s true whether the bishop in question is Pope John XII, Pope Alexander VI, or the “no kneeling while receiving Communion” Cardinal Blase Cupich.

Thus, to argue, as Trueman does, that he cannot become Catholic because Pope Francis may share certain traits in common with liberal Protestants is to engage in a form of individualistic consumerism, which, ironically enough, is the very thing he condemns in his best-selling 2020 book. No one should make his decision about the Catholic Church based on the behavior or opinions of a particular pope. One should make a decision about Catholicism based on a conviction that it is (or is not) the very Church instituted by Christ and miraculously preserved by the Holy Spirit through the centuries. Almost fifteen years ago, when I was a Presbyterian seminary student, I came to the conclusion that only one such institution had a credible, historical claim to that distinction. We should pray that Dr. Trueman, who has otherwise done so much good in the war against the evils of secular, anti-God modernity, soon does the same.