The Last Court of Appeal

Why Protestantism Keeps Splitting, Where the People Went, and How Catholics Can Receive What Comes Next

Protestantism has failed, and that failure is measured in 50,000 denominations, sects, affiliations and independent communities that it has produced in 500 years. It’s not failing. No. It failed — past tense. This 50,000 reasons why Protestantism failed is according to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (Todd M. Johnson and Gina A. Zurlo), published through the World Christian Encyclopedia. Protestantism did not fail because Protestants stopped loving Jesus. It failed as a system because it made every believer the last court of appeal and then acted surprised when the court never adjourned. That is the whole story in one sentence. The rest is history, numbers, and a choice now sitting in front of the Catholic Church.

The sequence looks like progress if you squint. Catholicism… Then Protestantism… Then Evangelicalism… Then Nondenominationalism, Pentecostal fire, post-evangelical drift, and a growing pile of people who will tell a pollster they are “nothing in particular.” It is progress, just not the right kind. It is a series of subtractions. Each stage kept something precious and threw away the thing that could have kept the precious thing from eating itself.

What was subtracted

Catholicism claims the whole deposit: a visible Church, apostolic succession, seven sacraments, Scripture and Tradition, a living Magisterium that can bind the conscience when interpretations collide. Worship is liturgical and objective. Salvation is incorporation into Christ in His Body, not a private verdict rendered in a living room with a study Bible.

The Reformation of the 16th-century was the first great subtraction. The fight was authority and justification. Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide removed the Magisterium and reduced the sacramental system. Luther, Calvin, Cranmer, and the radicals did not intend fifty-thousand denominations. They intended a purified Church. What they built instead was a principle that cannot stop. Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, Anabaptist — the fracture was immediate. Anglican priest, St. John Henry Newman, later put this historical fact as bluntly as it can be put just before he walked out the door and became Catholic: “whatever history teaches, whatever it omits, whatever it exaggerates or extenuates, whatever it says and unsays, at least the Christianity of history is not Protestantism. If ever there were a safe truth, it is this… To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.” (John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Introduction, Section 5, 1845) He went on to be ordained a Catholic priest, then bishop and finally cardinal. He was canonized as a Saint in 2019, and as a Doctor of the Church in 2025. What Newman so bluntly put must be said now with focused clarity. Protestantism is, simply put, the principle of private judgment applied until the next split.

Evangelicalism is not merely “Protestantism with a louder choir.” It is an eighteenth-century intensification. German Pietism, the Evangelical Revival in Britain, and the Great Awakenings in the colonies produced a trans-denominational type. David Bebbington’s quadrilateral still names it best: biblicism, crucicentrism, conversionism, and activism. The born-again experience became the center of gravity. The visible Church receded. The individual decision with the Bible-in-hand advanced. Confessional Lutheranism and old Reformed Protestantism are not the same animal as modern Evangelicalism, even when they share the same zip code.

Then came the “beyond.” Pentecostalism added experience of the Spirit on top of the quadrilateral. The nondenominational megachurch treated the denomination itself as the problem. Post-evangelicals treated the subculture as the problem. Some of the weary Evangelicals swam the Tiber or the Bosporus. Many more became “Nones.” The method did not change. Only the object of dissatisfaction changed.

The root is not a mood. It is a rule.

The root error is epistemic in nature. Once the living Church is no longer the public, binding interpreter of revelation, the last court of appeal is the individual conscience reading the Bible. Newman called that “private judgment.” Keith Mathison tried to save the Reformers from their children by distinguishing Sola Scriptura — Scripture as the only infallible authority, with church and creed still real but fallible — from Solo Scriptura, the “me and my Bible” of modern Evangelicalism. The distinction collapses at the only point that matters. Who decides when the church or the creed is wrong? The individual’s interpretation? Confessional Protestants only delay the split until the next generation.

The supporting claims do not survive contact with the evidence. Perspicuity — the idea that Scripture is clear enough on the things necessary for salvation — cannot explain why the people who accept it still cannot agree on baptism, the Lord’s Supper, predestination, church government, or whether a man can lose his salvation. 2 Peter 3:16 already warned that some things in Paul’s writings are hard to understand and can be twisted to destruction. The usual Protestant reply is that the other fellow is reading badly. That is just special pleading dressed up as humility. It’s also a bit amusing because they all do it, to some degree or another.

Newman saw the pattern while he was still an Anglican. The Reformers used private judgment to break with Rome, then tried to shut the door they had opened and impose their tradition on everyone else. Anabaptists walked through. Pietists walked through. Revivalists walked through. Pentecostals walked through. Nondenominational pastors walked through. Post-evangelicals are walking through that door right now! That is not a series of new mistakes. It is one principle refusing to arrest itself.

Louis Bouyer, a Lutheran pastor who became a Catholic priest, was fairer than any cheap Catholic sneer. The positive Reformation instincts — grace as gift, the supremacy of Scripture, personal faith — are Catholic. The negative principle attached to them is the rejection of a definitive teaching Church. That negative principle eats the positive ones. Hence the cycle: decay, revival, new denomination, decay again. Catholicism is not the enemy of those instincts. It is the only structure in which they do not cannibalize themselves.

Private judgment is a decent searchlight on the way to the Church, but it is a fatal constitution for the Church. A revelation that cannot authoritatively interpret itself in public is not functioning as a revelation.

The twentieth century put the principle on a graph

American Protestantism at mid-century still looked like an establishment. The Mainline “Seven Sisters” — Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans of the ELCA type, the United Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ, and American Baptists — were the civic religion of a Protestant country. Then they liberalized doctrine, stopped reproducing, and discovered that private judgment works in both directions. If the Church cannot bind, the children leave.

Pew’s Religious Landscape Studies are the cleanest national ruler. Mainline Protestants fell from 18% of U.S. adults in 2007 to 11% in 2024. The General Social Survey puts them even lower in recent waves, near 9 percent. The United Methodist Church went from 5.1% of adults to 2.7% in the same Pew span. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is hovering near a million members after years of 3 to 5 percent annual losses. Retention is the silent killer. In the 1970s, most people raised Mainline stayed Mainline. In recent decades barely half stay, and a large share become Nones rather than Evangelicals.

Evangelicals looked like the winners from the 1970s through the 1990s. They passed the Mainline in the 1980s. Then the share stalled. Pew had Evangelicals at 26% of adults in 2007, 25% in 2014, and 23% in 2024. Southern Baptists, the flagship, fell from 6.7% of adults to 4.4%. PRRI has white Evangelical identity down from about 17% in 2013 to 13% in 2025. They still retain members better than the Mainline, but they are no longer growing as a share of the country.

The actual growth vehicle inside American Protestantism is Nondenominational Christianity. Pew: Nondenominationals rose from 4.5% of adults in 2007 to 7.1% in 2024 — the only major Protestant family that grew in that timeframe. They now outnumber the Mainline in several datasets. They are net gainers from switching. Assemblies of God is the rare large denomination that grew across decades. Most of the energy is independent. Ryan Burge has called the rise of the Nondenominationals the second-biggest religious story in America after the rise of the Nones.

The unaffiliated Nones exploded: 16% in 2007, 23% in 2014, about 29% in the 2024 Landscape Study. Christian identity overall: 78%, then 71%, then 62%. Pew says the slide may have flattened since about 2020. Still, flattened is not reversed.

The pattern is clear. Mainline decline is what happens when a Protestant body keeps the institution and drops the conversionist heat, then cannot bind anyone when the next generation judges the institution as “optional.” Evangelical growth was the same engine: “This church is dead; I will go where the Bible and the Spirit are taken seriously.” Nondenominationalism is the engine with the last brakes removed. Post-evangelicalism and “None” are the next turn of the crank. In five-centuries, Protestantism has progressed from branches to splinters.

Where the century is going

Nobody has a clean census for the year 2100. The serious models stop at 2050 to 2075. They are enough.

The World Christian Database and the Status of Global Christianity project Pentecostals and charismatics near 1.03 billion by 2050 and about 1.14 billion by 2075. Evangelicals, overlapping that category, approach 620 million by 2050 and about 710 million by 2075. Protestants as a WCD category move toward 860 to 880 million by 2050 and toward a billion by 2075. Independents — the global cousins of American Nondenoms — move from about 410 million now toward 610 million by 2050 and 700 million by 2075. Catholics remain the largest single communion, on the order of 1.5 billion by mid-century. In Protestantism, the combined Independent–Renewalist world becomes the conversion and attendance engine with no brakes.

The geography flips. By 2050 roughly 38 percent of all Christians live in sub-Saharan Africa. Europe and North America fall to about a quarter of the Christian world. Gordon-Conwell’s longer look to 2075 still has Christianity growing in absolute numbers — toward 3.7 billion — because Africa grows, not because the West revives. Islam grows faster still. The Christian story of the late century is Southern, young, and heavily Renewalist.

Pew’s American scenarios to 2070 are colder. If recent switching among the young continues, Christians fall from the low sixties percent now to something like 39 to 46 percent by 2070, with Nones at 41 to 48 percent. Inside that smaller Christian minority the Protestant remainder is Evangelical, Nondenominational, and Pentecostal. The Mainline becomes folklore with an endowment. Many Mainline church buildings have already been renovated into Evangelical worship centers. Many more will follow.

Who gains traction is already visible: Pentecostal and Neo-Pentecostal networks, Independents and Nondenoms, African Independent Churches. Global South Anglicanism and a thin shell of disciplined confessional bodies — PCA, LCMS, Global Methodist, ACNA, Assemblies of God — that survive in the West as remnants and in Africa as large churches. House-church networks in Asia will continue to grow if the political weather allows.

Who does not grow? The old Mainline churches, as a mass movement. Classic American Evangelical denominations, as the center of the map. Western Post-Evangelicalism, as a church rather than a way out the door. And almost every little sect that showed up on YouTube last Tuesday. Private judgment can spawn thousands of little groups. Almost none of them become a movement.

By the end of the century, “Protestantism” in the Reformation sense — confessional churches of Word and sacrament with a shared public confession — will be a minority inside of the “new” Protestantism. The living majority will be Renewalist, Independent, and Southern. The West will still have Protestants. They will not set the mean. The root error does not get solved. It gets exported, splintering all the way, then outgrown by populations that never needed Wittenberg to become Christian.

The people who will not stay there

That brings us to the only part of this story Catholics can actually do something about: the Nones who are not finished, the Evangelicals who are exhausted, and the Nondenominational Christians who have already left one institution and are wondering if that last institution was even a church.

Two ancient communions are receiving them. However, the stock numbers and the flow numbers do not match.

Catholicism already holds most of the converts. Pew finds that 1.5% of U.S. adults are converts to Catholicism — about four million people, which is 8% of all U.S. Catholics. Fifty-nine percent were raised Protestant. Twenty-two percent were raised with no religion. That is the pipeline. Converts practice harder than cradles: 38% attend Mass weekly against 28% of cradle Catholics; 58% receive Communion every time they attend against 34%. Confession and daily prayer are closer to even. About half of converts still name a spouse or getting married as the main reason they came. The Newman-reading intellectual convert is real and useful. He is not the median convert. The offset is brutal. For every adult who joins Catholicism after being raised something else, 8.4 adults raised Catholic no longer identify as Catholic. Former Catholics are a large tributary of the Nones.

Orthodoxy is tiny — on the order of half a percent to one percent of U.S. adults — and suddenly crowded. After 2020, parishes reported something like a 78% jump in converts in 2022 versus pre-pandemic years. The Orthodox Studies Institute has estimated 16,000 to 18,000 received at Pascha 2026 alone, and 20,000 to 30,000 for the year if other feasts are counted. In a communion with about two-thousand American parishes, that is a shock. Convert samples from places like Dallas run roughly half former Evangelical, a quarter former Catholic, and a quarter unchurched. American Orthodox adults are more male than Evangelicals and younger. Sun Belt liturgies are hitting fire codes. Priests are tired. Parking lots are full. The internet did what immigrant bishops never could: it made the “Eastern Church” findable to a young man in a studio apartment who was done with laser beams and fog machines.

Campus Catholicism is the other live flow. A Hallow survey of fifty-nine universities found people seeking baptism and confirmation through campus ministry up 87.6% in 2026. Texas A&M, Arizona State, Illinois, Oklahoma — the numbers are not subtle. Young men are overrepresented. That is the same demographic walking into Newman Centers that is walking into Antiochian and OCA missions.

They move for the same reasons the principle predicted. They want a Church that can say “no” and mean it. They want sacraments that are not a metaphor. They want liturgy that is not a concert. They want history that does not begin in 1517 or 1965. They want a moral world that is not improvised every decade. The convertible None is rarely a village atheist. He is “nothing in particular” who hit a wall. The disaffected Evangelical is often the best catechumen in the room. He already believes Scripture, the Trinity, and sin. He is finished being his own pope. The Nondenominational Christian has already performed the last Protestant act — leaving a denomination — and is looking for something that still looks like a Church.

Orthodoxy wins the intensity contest among a subset of young men. The product is undiluted: fasting, standing liturgy, a male priesthood with no live American debate, no press conference rewriting the moral law. However, online boosters oversell it. The parish sometimes under-delivers on English and on a priest who is not already working eighty hours. Capacity is at the ceiling. You cannot scale twenty or thirty thousand a year into a replacement for tens of millions of Protestants when many counties have zero parishes.

Catholicism wins the volume contest and ought to win the strategic contest. A parish in almost every county. English, OCIA, universities, hospitals, and schools; multiple on-ramps that still look like the ancient Church. If one can find a reverent Roman rite, the Personal Ordinariate built for Anglican and Evangelical converts, the Eastern Catholic Churches for those who want Byzantium without leaving communion with Peter. Marriage is already half the Catholic convert flow. Orthodoxy cannot match Catholic wedding and family density. The intellectual bench is unmatched: Augustine, Aquinas, Newman, the Catechism. Evangelicals who read their way out of Sola Scriptura usually read toward Rome first. They go East when the local Catholic parish looks just like a Mainline denomination but with a crucifix.

That is the warning. Orthodoxy is, in part, a protest vote against a Catholicism that has learned all the wrong lessons from Protestantism.

Snowball, not miracle

Neither communion is about to harvest the Nones as a class. Most Nones are low-engagement and low-institution. The convertible slice is the restless minority already showing up in OCIA and Newman Centers.

Orthodox growth can double a small American flock over a generation in the optimistic models their own analysts sketch. That is still a pastoral crisis if buildings and priests do not appear.

Catholic growth among this type is possible on campuses, in the Ordinariate, in parishes that confess and preach the faith, and among young men who want order. It will not offset 8.4 leavers per joiner unless cradle practice changes. Converts cannot outrun a Church that catechizes its own children into “None.” It does this by imitating the Mainline Protestant example.

What Catholics must do

Do not invent a new product. Stop hiding the old one.

Teach the authority question first. These people already know the fragmentation story of Protestantism. OCIA that is “your journey” loses them. OCIA that is “here is the Church Christ founded, and here is why private judgment failed” keeps them.

Put them next to the sacraments, not next to a hospitality committee that is afraid of doctrine. Weekly Mass, confession that exists, is staffed, and is used. Communion that is treated as God physically touching man. Converts already outpace cradles on Mass and the Eucharist. Use them as leaven.

Do not punish the aesthetic that converted them. Reverent liturgy, chant, silence, beauty: the Traditional Latin Mass is not an obstacle. It is proof that the seeker was not crazy. Suppressing it is the most efficient way to donate young men to the nearest Orthodox mission. Don’t suppress it. Use it! And use it as an example too. Local Catholic parishes that implement traditional expressions of the 2002 Missal grow.

Form men without apology. The live market is young and male. Brotherhood, asceticism, intellectual seriousness, fatherhood: the complaint about “feminized Evangelicalism” can be crude. The sex-ratio data is not.

Treat the marriage pipeline as mission. Half of Catholic converts already come through a spouse. Make marriage preparation doctrinal, not merely therapeutic. A mixed marriage is often a Protestant’s off-ramp.

Put the energy on campus first. Newman Centers are where the 87% spike is. That is cheaper than planting two thousand missions from scratch.

Then do the thing that actually changes the 8.4-to-1 ratio. Use converts to raise cradle fidelity. The prize is not four million more identifiers. The prize is a Church that keeps its own children. A convert who attends Mass every Sunday is not a trophy. He is a rebuke — and an asset — to a parish that has forgotten how.

The principle that broke Protestantism will keep breaking Protestantism. Africa will carry the numbers. Nondenominational networks will carry the American remainder. Orthodoxy will carry a sharp minority of the intense. Catholicism will carry whoever walks through a door that still looks like a door to the Church rather than a door to another theater or convention center.

The seekers are already reading. They have already left the last stage. They do not need another brand. They need a parish that believes what it says at the font, at the altar, and in the confessional — and a people (a parish family) willing to keep them there after the novelty wears off.

Sources

1. Pew Research Center, Religious Landscape Studies (2007, 2014, 2023–24)
2. Pew Research Center, Modeling the Future of Religion in America (2022)
3. Pew Research Center, profiles and short reads on U.S. Catholic converts and religious switching (2025–2026)
4. Pew Research Center, The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010–2050
5. Pew Research Center, The Changing Global Religious Landscape
6. Todd M. Johnson and Gina A. Zurlo, World Christian Database; Status of Global Christianity; World Christianity statistical updates
7. Journal of Religion and Demography, Johnson and Crossing, global religion projections
8. David W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain; The Evangelical Quadrilateral
9. John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine; essays on private judgment
10. Louis Bouyer, The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism
11. Keith A. Mathison, The Shape of Sola Scriptura
12. Called to Communion, analyses of sola and solo scriptura
13. Westminster Confession of Faith, I.7 (perspicuity)
14. PRRI, Census of American Religion
15. Ryan Burge, General Social Survey analyses of mainline, evangelical, nondenominational, and nones
16. Orthodox Studies Institute / St. Constantine College convert reports
17. Hallow campus ministry conversion survey (2025–26 academic year)
18. U.S. Religion Census / ARDA congregational membership comparisons
19. National Catholic Register and Catholic News Agency summaries of Pew convert data
20. New York Times, New York Post, Associated Press, Religion Unplugged reporting on Orthodox convert surges

Shane Schaetzel is an author of Catholic books and he is an Evangelical convert to the Catholic Church. His articles have been featured on LifeSiteNews, The Remnant Newspaper, Forward in Christ, and Catholic Online. You can read Shane’s books at ShaneSchaetzel.Com