Back in the early days of my blogging at The Calvinist International, I posted a snippet of a really excellent essay by Adam Gopnik on G. K. Chesterton. Written in 2008, this was surely the twilight of The New Yorker. Anyone under 40 will struggle to believe this, but The New Yorker was once one of the absolute best journals in the country. And Gopnik is as good of a writer as anyone. The essay in question is here. Certainly appreciative of Chesterton’s literary talents, Gopnik also makes a number of criticisms, especially of Chesterton’s overly idealistic politics. The part that I found especially helpful for church discussions is what Gopnik calls “conversion sickness.” Here’s the key paragraph:

In these books, Chesterton becomes a Pangloss of the parish; anything Roman is right. It is hard to credit that even a convinced Catholic can feel equally strongly about St. Francis’s intuitive mysticism and St. Thomas’s pedantic religiosity, as Chesterton seems to. His writing suffers from conversion sickness. Converts tend to see the faith they were raised in as an exasperatingly makeshift and jury-rigged system: Anglican converts to Catholicism are relieved not to have to defend Henry VIII’s divorces; Jewish converts to Christianity are relieved to get out from under the weight of all those strange Levitical laws on animal hooves. The newly adopted faith, they imagine, is a shining, perfectly balanced system, an intricately worked clock where the cosmos turns to tell the time and the cuckoo comes out singing every Sunday. An outsider sees the Church as a dreamy compound of incense and impossibility, and, overglamorizing its pretensions, underrates its adaptability. A Frenchman or an Italian, even a devout one, can see the Catholic Church as a normally bureaucratic human institution, the way patriotic Americans see the post office, recognizing the frailty and even the occasional psychosis of its employees without doubting its necessity or its ability to deliver the message. Chesterton writing about the Church is like someone who has just made his first trip to the post office. Look, it delivers letters for the tiny price of a stamp! You write an address on a label, and they will send it anywhere, literally anywhere you like, across a continent and an ocean, in any weather! The fact that the post office attracts timeservers, or has produced an occasional gun massacre, is only proof of the mystical enthusiasm that the post office alone provides! Glorifying the postman beyond what the postman can bear is what you do only if you’re new to mail.

Living in South Bend, I get to see the difference between smart Protestant converts to Catholicism and more normie or “cradle” Catholics. (There are also normie Protestants who convert to Catholicism for normie reasons, though they understandably draw less attention.) Rome is a big place, and there are a lot of things and people to be found in it. But the thing that people should understand is that all of them are “the real” thing. Roman Catholicism has really smart thinkers, beautiful old buildings, powerful ecclesiastical organs, rowdy football fans, pro-choice politicians, social-justice-obsessed activists, nominal attendees, radical traditionalists, fundamentalists, evolutionists, and confused otherwise secular Americans.

I don’t think this observation necessarily “means” anything in regards to the Roman Catholic Church as such. If it does, it just means that it is a normal place. But I do think it means something in regards to the apologetics industry. “Conversion sickness” is a real thing. A lot of people are trying to make a living by selling it to you. And many people will catch this sickness at a relatively early age and make foolish decisions because of it.

Anglicans get this too. Young guys are hoping for the height of The Episcopal Church experience as a state church. Or perhaps Anglicans get to fly above the fry of the unwashed evangelical masses. “We’re not like other Protestants.” I’ve been asked about my “sacramental worldview” and have had to break the news to the poor soul that I don’t have one. Knowing the problem of conversion sickness is key to getting out of it.

Chesterton is a funny writer with some clever and beautiful turns of phrases. But he is also often full of nonsense. The Gopnik piece, which still holds up after all of these years, gives us a handy way to summarize the problems.