Christian Smith’s How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps is fairly predictable. His criticisms of evangelicalism are on target in the main, and his Catholic arguments are pretty standard. Smith is careful about his audience: He is addressing “normal science evangelicalism,” and he knows that other varieties of Protestantism exist. Unfortunately, like most Catholic apologists, he doesn’t really spend much time talking about those other varieties. His arguments glance off of liturgical Protestants who are not “allergic” to Mary or ignorant of church history or hostile to the medieval church, Protestants who are already disenchanted with the linear and overly cognitive approach to Christian faith among some evangelicals, Protestants who have already read their share of Newman, Vatican II, and John Paul II and like de Lubac more than many Catholics do. Targeting normal evangelicals makes his job considerably easier.

Along the way, though, Smith makes some intriguing observations.

1) He stresses that Catholics are serious about words, but that Protestants and Catholics differ in their understanding of what words do. He brings this same point up in talking about papal infallibility. “Catholicism . . . recognizes a gap between words and what the words express or represent. For Protestants, the words are the truth .” He overstates the contrast when he says that “There is not in Catholicism a literal, exact, univocal correspondence or identity between words and truth,” as if Protestants all lack a notion of analogy. For Catholics, he says, “the truth is God. And God is not words.” In a footnote, he hastens to qualify by saying that he’s distinguishing between “human words and Christ as the Word.” Protestants, of course, all believe that God is the truth, and of course words and realities are not the same, but Smith’s insistence that there is no identity between words and truth suggests something more than a common-sense signum-res distinction. But the way Smith expresses Catholic teaching is sounds as if there’s some slippage between God as the Truth in Himself and His communication of that truth through created language. Besides, “your word is truth” is a Scriptural claim. But Smith is right to detect a big issue here. This is a point that needs to be highlighted more frequently and more deeply in Protestant-Catholic discussions.

2) He has some wise counsel for evangelical converts to Catholicism: Don’t convert expecting certainty; don’t be “more Catholic than thou.” And this important sociological observation: For evangelicals, the church is not merely a place of worship, but the center of social life, but “Few Catholics today expect their parishes to serve as once-stop-centers of their fulfilled personal and social lives. . . . Church is about a shared identity in Christ, sacramental life, and formation in right Christian living. That does not require that everyone know each other well, much less experience ‘intimacy’ together.”

3) At one point, I found Smith misleading. Step #86 is to “get clear on the official Catholic view of Protestants.” He quotes at length from Unitatis Redintegratio , which emphasizes that there is blame on both sides of the Reformation split, that today’s Protestants are not guilty of “the sin of separation,” that everyone who is justified in baptism is “incorporated into Christ” and considered as a brother, that there are “many elements of sanctification” found outside the Catholic church, that the Spirit “uses these Churches and ecclesial communities as means of salvation,” and that the church acknowledges it is joined in many ways with those honored by the name of Christian. From this, Smith concludes that in becoming Catholic, one does not declare “the evangelicals you ‘leave behind’ are inferior, guilty, worthless Christians - or anything like that” and insists that the Catholic church is generous to separated brothers.

Evangelicals are certainly not considered “guilty or worthless,” and Catholics do not consider individual evangelicals “inferior.” But it’s not accurate to say that the Catholic church does not regard Protestant evangelical churches as “inferior.” For Catholics, evangelicals constitute “ecclesial communities,” not churches, because they lack a true Eucharist and episcopacy in apostolic succession. A community of Christians that lacks a true Eucharist cannot help but be inferior to a community that has one. Without union with the Catholic church and communion with the Pope, evangelicals must, from a Catholic perspective, live an impoverished Christian existence. Smith’s explanation smooths over these points.