Between Word and Icon

Does faith come by hearing or seeing? Why not both?

The Catholic journalist Julia Yost wrote an interesting piece recently about Catholicism among “the TikTok generation.” She is cautious not to strike a triumphalist tone about a “revival” that doesn’t exist, admitting that Catholicism is still losing a dozen deconverts for every convert it gains. Still, she notes that this Easter saw an uptick in converts who are skewing disproportionately young, and she observes the emergence of a Catholic subculture among urban young professionals. What could explain this?

She proposes that there’s the beginning of an answer in how different manifestations of Christianity pair with different stages in the evolution of online culture. In the Age of the Blog, we saw the rise of the Young, Restless and Reformed, because Reformed Protestantism inherently lent itself to long, verbally dense arguments. And Protestantism in general heavily emphasizes the Word. But in a postliterate Internet where Image trumps Word, Catholicism has the edge:

Protestantism, which began as a revolution against idolatry — the whitewashing of church interiors, the stripping of altars — has image-aversion in its DNA. The visual language of American Protestantism is accordingly limited. White steeples, Puritan clothing, snake handling: not much for an influencer to work with. Catholicism has icons and incense; rosaries, chapel veils and ashes; priestly black, cardinal red and papal white. … An old stereotype has it that Protestantism is for people who read books, and Catholicism is for people who want spectacle. Say hello to Gen Z.

There’s an awful lot going on here. I don’t think Yost is on to nothing, but I suspect she might be overselling the “trending” status of Catholicism. I clicked through to one of the Instagram pages she linked where some account was hyping Catholic clerical “drip.” What I found was a wall of chatbot text. Not a terribly aesthetic pitch, if you ask me.

Meanwhile, I also believe Yost short sells the resources of Protestantism. However, a proper discussion of this will require us to establish what we’re talking about when we talk about Protestantism. For any newcomers who don’t know my own background, I grew up in the Anglo-Catholic Church, which began life as a tiny conservative offshoot of the Episcopalian church. This meant that I was exposed early and often to the aesthetics of Anglicanism—with a Catholic twist, but the Catholic twists always felt optional. The Anglican aesthetic was very much its own well-defined thing. At the same time, I understood evangelicalism fairly well, since that was the tradition my parents came out of and since that was where we built most of our local community (because elderly Episcopalian refugees don’t really “do” community). And theologically, I retained a few lower Protestant distinctives.

The upshot is that I have always felt like I have one foot there, one foot in the magisterial Protestant tradition. I’ve jokingly called myself everything from a bad Anglican to a “high-Church Baptist.” I still think the Baptists have it right on some things, yet I’ve found it difficult to enter fully into the spirit of the service when I visit a Baptist church, because I feel no sense of separation between what’s happening on my side of the sanctuary and what’s happening at the front. With no altar, no sacrament, no sense that something different is going on up there, I feel rather adrift. The “stage” could just as well be the platform for a conference speaker.

Given all this, naturally I feel uniquely qualified to chime in on these interdenominational discourses.