A number of high-profile Christians have converted to Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. What is driving them away?

In recent decades, there has been a significant and sustained trend of Protestants converting to Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. The most notable figure recently is J. D. Vance, the vice-presidential running mate of former president Donald Trump.

But he’s not alone. Vance is just one name in the growing list of high-profile, theologically conservative Christians who have made public shifts away from their Protestant backgrounds (often evangelical) to these more liturgical or “high church” traditions.

A previous president of the Evangelical Theological Society, Francis Beckwith, became a Catholic in 2009, and former Anglican Bishop Nazir Ali, has lately returned to the Catholicism of his youth. Other recent Catholic converts include Cameron Bertuzzi of Capturing Christianity (a popular YouTube channel), historian Joshua Charles, and John Richard Neuhaus, founder of First Things journal. Past prominent converts to Eastern Orthodoxy include Hank Hanegraaff (the “Bible Answer Man”), Lutheran scholar Jaroslav Pelikan, and English bishop Kallistos Ware.

Of course, there are always exceptions to every trend—as is the case with former Eastern Orthodox priest Joshua Schooping, author of Disillusioned: Why I Left the Eastern Orthodox Priesthood and Church, and the Catholic-turned-Protestant Chris Castaldo, who published Why Do Protestants Convert? with Brad Littlejohn last year.

This phenomenon appears less notable in nondenominational churches, since a previous CT article reports that former Roman Catholics have gone from comprising 6 percent of unafilliated congregations to 17 percent in the past 50 years. Also, a 2014 Pew Research Center study highlighted a reverse trend of Catholics converting ...

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Jesus told us not to worry, but worry is our culture’s parenting default. It’s harming our kids.

As my daughter dangled 10 feet above the ground, legs wrapped around the thick, smooth trunk of a vine in the middle of the Belizean jungle, I stood below her and considered how far she was from solid ground, a paved road, and the nearest hospital.

Needless to say, this had not been on my agenda for the day. We were visiting a small village on a mission trip to western Belize with friends from our church who’ve been coming annually to the same town for more than a decade. Our task was to help in the village school, support community development projects, share the love of Jesus, and deepen friendships with people who live in a totally different cultural context from our own.

It was that last part that put my daughter up the tree. We took a morning walk to see some little-known Mayan ruins but detoured to a no-safety-harnesses jungle adventure course led by Crocs-wearing Julio, our local friend who clearly didn’t find it worrisome to let a child free climb.

Back home in the States, we’re constantly worried about our kids. It’s well-documented and generally accepted that smartphones, social media, and a lack of childhood independence and free play contribute to creating what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt famously dubbed an “anxious generation.” But in all this collective handwringing, we tend to overlook a closely related and equally pervasive problem: unchecked, socially normalized parental anxiety and the smothering parenting style it produces.

There’s nothing new under the sun, and I’m sure, to some extent, that’s true of parental worries. Throughout the ages, parents have feared losing their children to sickness, accidents, or violence. Right ...

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Natural disaster costs have overwhelmed the market for carriers, which are raising rates or dropping policies for congregations in high-risk areas.

John Parks was taking his first sabbatical in 40 years of ministry when he got a call from his church’s accountant with some bad news.

Church Mutual, the church’s insurance company, had dropped them.

“This does not make sense,” Parks, the pastor of Ashford Community Church in Houston, recalls thinking at the time. “We’ve never filed a claim.”

Five months and 13 insurance companies later, the church finally found replacement coverage for $80,000 per year, up from the $23,000 they had been paying.

“It’s been an adventure,” said the 69-year-old Parks from his home in Houston, where the power was out after Hurricane Beryl. “That’s putting it politely.”

Parks and his congregation are not alone. An ongoing wave of disasters—Gulf Coast hurricanes, wildfires in California, severe thunderstorms and flooding in the Midwest—along with skyrocketing construction costs post-COVID have left the insurance industry reeling.

As a result, companies such as Church Mutual, GuideOne and Brotherhood Mutual, which specialize in insuring churches, have seen their reserves shrink. That’s led them to drop churches they consider high risk in order to cut their losses.

Hundreds of United Methodist churches in the Rio Texas Annual Conference learned they’d lost property insurance in November last year, leaving church officials scrambling. More than six months later, some churches have found new insurance, often at a steep increase. Others still have none, said Kevin Reed, president of the conference board of trustees.

Reed said the conference had about a month’s notice that its property insurance policy, which local congregations could buy into, was being ...

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