It was brisk last weekend in College Station, Texas, but the weather did nothing to deter students from packing into St. Mary’s Catholic Center, which serves Aggie Catholics at Texas A&M. That Saturday night, 61 students were baptized, while another 67, already validly baptized in other Christian denominations, were received into full communion.

This is part of a broader and now well-documented trend. College students across the country are committing their lives to Christ, and many are turning specifically to the Catholic Church. Fox News, a reliable barometer of the national mood among cable news devotees, which I begrudgingly cite, reported that over 90,000 U.S. adults became Catholic in 2024. I was one of them, leaving my Protestant background to join the Roman communion two years ago this Easter.

Make no mistake. Catholicism has become cool. The Free Press declared as much last year. Dioceses are reporting year-over-year conversion increases. The Catholic Standard reports that in 2024, adult baptisms into the Catholic Church reached 34,552, while receptions into full communion totaled 55,453—both figures up significantly from 2023. The Archdiocese of Newark alone received 1,701 individuals this year, a 72 percent increase since 2023. Pew reports that roughly 59 percent of Catholic converts come from Protestant backgrounds. Indeed, all the students I spoke with—whom I did not hand-select but randomly approached—were former Protestants.

But why are so many formerly-Protestant students converting?

To be sure, the students I encountered had not left Anglicanism, confessional Lutheranism, or the historic Reformed traditions, communions that share much of what draws people to Rome. These include liturgy, creed, intellectual seriousness, and a deep-rootedness in Church history. They had come from what one philosopher I spoke with described as the “low-church” world. Nondenominational congregations, Baptist churches, and other non-liturgical communities have, over time, traded tradition and creed to be, as they themselves would say, a part of the world. Hungering for exactly what those churches had set aside, they looked up and found it in Rome.

A sophomore electrical engineering major, deep into the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA), described visiting his Catholic grandmother in San Jose the previous summer and feeling a holiness he had not encountered while growing up in a nondenominational church. He had been raised to find his own faith and concluded that the Catholic Church was the most historically grounded option available. “It went back to the Apostles,” he said. It had compiled the Bible. And above all, there was “the Eucharist.”

For students looking for tradition, especially in a world that has largely opted for so-called progress at whatever the cost, the Catholic Church makes sense when you consider the Protestant churches these students were exposed to. Certain nondenominational churches, as at least two students told me, have drifted too far toward entertainment. Sunday service can feel like something out of The Righteous Gemstones. Stated plainly, the “low church” had become more like the world and less like the Church.

And that diagnosis echoed across every conversation I had. 

A philosophy major who had graduated the previous August told me he had spent years drifting away from the Protestant services he had grown up in, finding them hollow. He flirted with atheism, which he described as “almost inevitable” in corners of American Protestantism that feel unmoored and increasingly indistinguishable from self-help seminars.

What stopped him and eventually turned him toward Rome was “history,” he said. The Catholic Church “traces itself back to Christ” in a way that nothing else in Western Christianity does, with the possible “exception of Orthodoxy.” What ultimately drew him in were tradition, ritual, and a beauty he found inseparable from truth. There is one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, along with the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, the unity of the Church, and the promise of salvation. That truth is shared across all of Christianity, of course, but what sets Rome apart, in his view, is the seriousness with which it is taken.

Undoubtedly, the unseriousness of certain Protestant denominations is a major factor drawing students toward Catholic pews.

Rock-band megachurches, which one student called “cringe,” have turned the faith into something gratuitous—demanding nothing of you while ensuring you leave feeling thoroughly affirmed. The more serious Protestant traditions—confessional Reformed and high-church Anglican among them—find this just as embarrassing, the philosopher (not the student I mentioned earlier) told me.

No student raised it directly, but as a Protestant to Catholic convert myself, I can attest that certain novelties within “low-church Protestantism” feed precisely the perception these students described. The pre-tribulation rapture is perhaps the most conspicuous example. Though it is a theologically suspect idea, it has, at least, inspired a steady stream of remarkably bad films (i.e., Left Behind)

Then there is the outright capitulation. Some denominations have moved swiftly to align themselves with whatever cultural consensus has most recently hardened on the left. The United Methodist Church, for instance, removed long-standing restrictions on ordaining LGBTQ+ clergy and officiating same-sex weddings in 2024. Some leftist Christian leaders have gone further still, deploying phrases like “Jesus is trans” or describing Christ as a “drag queen” in the name of affirmation. 

Whatever one’s views on those questions, it is difficult to describe any of this as the Church shaping the culture. Rather, the culture appears to be shaping the Church—and that kind of arrangement holds little appeal for the students I spoke with. One described his entire low-church upbringing as, simply, “silly.” The Catholic Church, whatever else one thinks of it, is not silly. (The tall hats and the indulgences are a different matter).

A nun at St. Mary’s, who had watched the night’s events with joy, offered a humble account of what she was witnessing. None of it had been organized from the top down, she told me. There was “no staff campaign and no promotional push.” Students were simply “telling their friends” about the Church, and their friends were coming.

She was not entirely sure what to attribute it to. She mentioned the Jubilee Year of 2025, a year of intensified prayer and intercession. She is probably right. But a few other factors may also be at work.

The Catholic Church in America enters this moment with a remarkable tailwind. Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope, whom the students call “based,” has generated considerable attention. He has weighed in on American foreign policy, recently critiquing the Iran War—a fact that will delight some and irritate others, but which has stirred an awareness of the Church that previous popes had not managed to achieve in America. When the pope is from Chicago and has opinions about American conduct abroad, Catholicism feels less like something inherited from the Old World and more like an active participant in American life. There is also the rise of Catholic media, which is finding a massive audience among young people. YouTube channels like Pints with Aquinas, which recently joined Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, have turned Thomistic philosophy and sacramental theology into digestible videos and podcasts. And, as the Free Press suggests, Catholicism today is countercultural. A generation ago, atheism was the edgy move. Today, the edgy move is to walk into a Mass and make the sign of the cross.

Even so, there are reasons to be cautious about the scale of the revival.

Research by Pew suggests a stabilization in the decline of church attendance rather than a clear reversal. Growth appears concentrated in larger, better-resourced congregations, while smaller churches continue to empty. Still, roughly 30 percent of Americans identify as religiously unaffiliated, Protestants continue to outnumber Catholics in the United States, and fewer than half of those who call themselves Christian attend church regularly. Most American Christians, in other words, are Christians in the same way most people are gym members: nominally, and with about the same attendance record.

But the philosophy graduate (not to be confused with the philosopher) had no patience for the naysayers.

The revival, he told me, is probably understated rather than overstated. “More people are coming to the faith,” and more are curious than anyone is willing to admit. “Even committed atheists want ritual,” he added. They want transcendence. They want to be accountable, and more than that, they want meaning that demands something of them. The problem, he believes, is that when people picture Christianity, they often picture its least serious expressions: celebrity pastors, spectacle-driven services, or those “cringe” concerts mistaken for worship. Many, he said, “have never encountered a Catholic Mass.”

By 2:00 a.m. Easter morning, the pattern was clear. These students are not drifting into Catholicism. They are arguing their way into it, drawn by intellectual rigor, sacramental weight, a history that reaches back to the Apostles, and a beauty they find inseparable from truth.

So why are so many Protestant students converting to Catholicism? The pursuit of truth has a great deal to do with it.

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