Evangelization in the Deep South

By Jennifer Fitz

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In 1988, My barely-Catholic family moved from Metro DC to a small town in South Carolina. My mom had been trying for years to get our family back to Mass, and now she pounced: “Everyone in this town expects you to go to church. We’re going to church.”

We did. In 1991, I graduated high school with a plaque from the Knights of Columbus declaring me “Catholic Student of the Year.” Within weeks of starting college, I quit attending Mass.

College, even in the South, is a great place to lose your faith. By the time I graduated, I was entirely non-Christian and happy with it. My husband Jon and I married in a civil ceremony—I could have gotten a picturesque church wedding at my parent’s historic home parish, but it would have been fake. I had too much respect for the Church to claim to be something I wasn’t.

But I wasn’t really happy. I spent several years trying this and that in the spiritual cafeteria. We attended the local Unitarian Universalist congregation, but it never really took. On a trip to San Antonio, I discovered the depth of my departure from God when I visited one of the historic mission churches, still an active Catholic parish; I entered the church and could not feel the presence of God.

I knew then that I had gone terribly, terribly astray. Something had to change.

Later that year, driving home by myself from a road trip in Virginia, I prayed to God in desperation. I received an immediate response: An inner voice told me to quit doing nothing and to jump in and practice whatever faith was at hand. Buddhism came to mind. Back home, Jon observed: “This is the South. It’s Christian. Let’s start there.”

A friend attending the local Evangelical seminary patiently answered our questions and gave us some pointers. We visited churches and landed at a nondenominational Evangelical congregation that Jon and I both loved instantly. “Nondenominational” felt safe to tell all my liberal friends. It didn’t sound churchy. I wasn’t ready to go public as a fundamentalist just yet.

I went to Mass on my own a few times a month, and Jon and I settled in as Evangelicals on Sunday mornings. I felt at home and, if you had asked me, I would have said I was a Christian. But I was praying, “Jesus, are you real?”

In the meantime, I began researching the differences between Catholics and Evangelicals. On a Wednesday morning in February 1999, I walked into a colleague’s cubicle for our regular monthly business meeting. He was a Baptist deacon in his spare time and we’d talk about religious things. I knew he was praying for me.

“I think I’ve figured out how to reconcile the Catholic and Protestant views of salvation,” I announced. I started to launch into an account of my latest reading, and he stopped me mid-sentence. “Hold on,” he said, grabbing his pocket New Testament off his bookshelf. “We need this.” He led me to the cafeteria to talk.

We didn’t chat about theology—though I read in Catholic Answers shortly after that I’d pieced together roughly the same vein of thought as the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification and felt vindicated.

Rather, my coworker led me down the Romans Road, straight out of the Evangelical playbook. His Bible was highlighted with all the essential quotes, to make his evangelizing that much more efficient. “Do you accept Christ as your Lord and Savior?” he asked me.

The power of the Holy Spirit was palpable. I knew that this was my moment: I could say “Yes” to Jesus now, or say it never.

We went outside to the picnic tables, and I said the Sinner’s Prayer.

And from that moment, I felt Death vanish. Gone. No longer a threat. I was saved.

And as I walked back into the office building, I was filled with an overwhelming desire to get to Mass as soon as I possibly could.

Back at my desk, I flipped through the Yellow Pages. The next Mass in town would be at eight o’clock the next morning. I made plans to arrive late for work. I would have given up my job to be at that Mass. There was no resisting. It was God. He’d answered my prayer. I was in.

What happened to me after I returned to the Catholic faith is that I learned how to think.

Before I became a Christian, I divided the world of ideas into three categories: facts, concepts, and arguments. “Facts” were things like the answers to math problems. “Concepts” were fluid—things that were true because you believed them, not because they were facts. “Arguments” were the machine that chewed up facts and concepts and spits out persuasive opinions.

Several years before my conversion, I had been confronted with the desperate inadequacy of a world without objective truth. It happened in my first-year accounting course. As is common in school, our instructor divided our class into three groups and assigned each group the job of arguing a different position on a question of how to handle an accounting transaction.

I knew, after studying the problem, that the position my group had been assigned was not the best way to represent the financial situation. But I had been trained to argue and argue well, so that’s what I did. I came to class and presented the arguments for my group’s assigned position. To my horror, my instructor, who had previously held the position I knew to be the correct one, was persuaded by my arguments into accepting the wrong answer.

It was sickening.

That incident didn’t cause me to pull religion into the realm of truth-or-falsehood, but it did make me painfully aware of how dangerous it is to toy with the truth.

Thus, years later when I returned to the Church, it was first along the path of spiritual exploration, yes, but a path that finally funneled into a single question: Is this true? Jesus, are you real?

God is a person (three persons, technically), not a force of nature, and so the proofs for the existence of God are like the proofs for the existence of any other person. My initial moment of conversion was when God opened the door and said, “Come on in.” It was an experience, an encounter; not something you can hold out as evidence to others.

No sooner had I re-entered the Church than evidence was demanded of me. My still-Protestant husband had decades of doubts about the Catholic faith, and many well-meaning friends sought to dissuade me from what they viewed as a horrible mistake. I had to learn how to reason: how to identify the truth and how to present it to others.

Arguing ceased to be a tool for swaying opinions and became a tool for discovering and proclaiming what is objectively true. Arguments could be built on logic, on hard evidence (such as historical proof for the existence of the Church), on experience—but always they had to be built on the truth and ordered toward improving our understanding of the truth.

For the first time in my life, I learned how to think straight. All the tools for building arguments that I had acquired at school had been given to me to use however I wanted, for my own ends. Now my mind was finally introduced to the end for which it was created.

Other changes, of course, flowed from that. When you become serious about seeking the truth, you start realizing there are ways you need to change your life. But at the foundation, the first and most potent gift I received with the gift of faith was the gift of reason.

Jennifer Fitz is the author of Classroom Management for Catechists from Liguori Publications. She is a contributor to many books, websites, and magazines on catechesis and Catholic spirituality, including The Catholic Mom’s Prayer Companion and Word by Word: Slowing Down with the Hail Mary. She blogs for The Catholic Conspiracy and on her personal website, JenniferFitz.com.