Great American evangelists: Rev. Mike Schmitz tops the charts

Over the past 50 years, the percentage of the public who self-identify as Christian
has declined from 90% to 64%
, according to a recent Pew Research Center study. In addition,
less than half
claim active membership in a house of worship.

The decline of religious practice is mirrored by a startling rise of people who profess no religious preference, also known as “nones.” This rise is most
prevalent among younger people
, who are far less likely than older generations to profess a belief in God or the necessity of religious practice. If current demographic trends hold, Christians will comprise less than half of the U.S. population in the coming decades for the first time in its history.

‘BIDENOMICS’ IS A COMPLETELY EMPTY NON-PHILOSOPHY

These shifts coincide with sharp declines in mental and emotional health. The public now self-reports as being more angry, depressed, addicted, and alienated from one another than ever before. They boast a lifestyle of convenience and abundance unknown to the kings and queens of history, and yet they derive increasingly little satisfaction from life. The utopian promises of a post-religious, postmodern secularism have yet to materialize.

However, there are some pockets of growth in the American church thanks to the efforts of certain evangelists (who would, to a person, give all credit to God).

I’ve spoken to a number of them in recent months in order to discover their methods and to shine a light upon the success of their ministries. My aspiration for this series, Great American Evangelists, is to create a repository of best practices for evangelization from across the Christian landscape. Previous installments can be found
here
and
here
.

***

The American Catholic church has long been preoccupied with a single conundrum: how to attract young people and keep them in the pews for the long term. Each generation has attempted to cater to the youth demographic in its own way, either by altering liturgy and parish evangelization programs to resemble what is offered in protestant churches and, in extreme cases, bending teaching to accommodate the passing fads of popular culture.

To say these efforts failed is to say little. The Catholic Church has hemorrhaged young adult affiliation for decades. And despite pockets of success
in communities that offer traditional liturgy
, as well as in vibrant orthodox Catholic university communities such as the
Franciscan University
of Steubenville and
Thomas Aquinas College
, the church’s best attempts to attract the youth have been, as the children would say, cringe.

But in recent years, seemingly out of nowhere, a little-known figure in Catholic evangelism erupted into a full-scale cultural phenomenon among young people in America. The Rev. Mike Schmitz, an earnest and square-jawed priest and campus minister from the University of Minnesota Duluth, saw his podcast The Catechism in a Year (with Fr. Mike Schmitz) catapult to No. 1 on Apple Podcasts this January — not just in the religion category but in all categories. The podcast averages an astonishing 200,000 daily downloads.

The irony that a catechism course, of all things, is the means by which young people are being lured back into the faith at such a scale is not lost on Father Mike.

“I think there’s a need among young people that they really need to know the faith,” Schmitz recently told the Washington Examiner. “They can’t go on saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, I believe.’ They’ve got to know.”

Schmitz recalled the religious education classes of his youth (he’s 48 years old but looks a decade younger), in which students largely turned out and simply went through the motions for the sake of tradition and making family happy. But Generation Z is different in this regard, according to Father Mike.

“I’ve got this theory when it comes to the rise of the ‘nones.’ I’m relatively convinced they’ve always been there, but now they’re finally saying what they actually believe. For so long, people wondered why didn’t parents pass their faith on to the next generation? It turns out boomers did pass on their faith. And even though they were going to church and professing to believe in Christianity, they really believed in something else. But they still checked the box and said, ‘I’m a Catholic.’ But now Gen Z says, ‘I’m not just going to check a box for something I don’t believe in. I need to know what it is that I believe. I need to know who it is I say I believe in.’”

What many boomers truly believed and passed on to their children, according to Father Mike, was something called moralistic therapeutic deism, or MTD, a term coined by sociologist Christian Smith to describe a system of belief that emphasizes being a good person and the therapeutic benefits of religion over repentance, adherence to religious practice, and building character through suffering. The decline in Christian affiliation in recent decades is therefore not the cause of a sudden apostasy but rather the result of generations who slowly came to believe a more convenient truth: that faith demands nothing of the individual.

Father Mike’s theologically robust content, coupled with his infectious vitality — he is perpetually bursting, tripping over his words because he’s so bowled over by the reality of Jesus — is imbuing Gen Z with a desire to attain something far greater than the comfort and convenience of MTD: namely, the infinitely meaningful adventure of a life given to Christ. And yet, the episodes of Catechism are remarkably accessible for newcomers to the faith and the young.

“I’ve always loved C.S. Lewis,” Father Mike said. “I love the way he takes complicated things and makes them accessible and easy to understand. He once gave a lecture to seminarians and said that the last test before getting ordained is he should have to take a difficult theological topic and present it as if speaking to dock workers on a port outside of London. I’ve always taken that to heart. I want to do that; I want to be able to take these complicated ideas and truisms about God and the human person and put them in words that are accessible to anybody.”

Father Mike always finishes
his podcast
by saying, “I cannot wait to see you tomorrow.” It’s impossible not to believe that he means it. And it’s easy to see why his audience feels the same way in return.

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Peter Laffin is a contributor at the Washington Examiner and the founder of Crush the College Essay. His work has also appeared in RealClearPolitics, the Catholic Thing, the National Catholic Register, and the American Spectator.