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I think the internet has just been devastating for Protestantism. I don’t really think there are any “serious” Protestants left.
If Vivek “converted” to some pointless Evangelical mega church, it would just feel hollow and unserious.
Catholics (and I include the orthodox in this) have basically just won. Protestantism isn’t taken seriously anymore, and so a “conversion” to Protestantism would similarly not be taken seriously.
I don't know what you mean by "serious" Protestants. There are clearly plenty of Protestants who are serious about their beliefs. If you mean that Evangelicals are tacky and unintellectual, I won't argue, but I don't see why that would make it unserious (plus, I think the main difference between megachurch evangelicals being tacky and Roman Catholics having ornate gravitas is about 1500 years). I'm also unsure on the role of the internet in this - Evangelicals started on their current trajectory well before the internet. And, of course, Evangelicals are not all American Protestants.
I don't think it's true that Protestantism isn't taken seriously. Rather, Protestantism lacks the centralized hierarchy, unified style guide, and Ancient Traditions^tm of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, which puts it at a disadvantage with people who really like those things. The aesthetics/values/ideas of American Protestantism (especially capital-L Liberal Protestantism) are heavily conflated with general American aesthetics/values/ideas, and, much like American culture as a whole, lives in an eternal present. The power of Catholic identity is not that it is inextricably tied to America, but that it isn't.
What I mean is they Protestants are not intellectually serious, and that most of the claims keeping people in their church don’t stand up to basic scrutiny.
“The Church is hiding the Bible from you they don’t want you to read it only WE have the true words of god!” was a convincing argument when it wasn’t easy to find out that this is just very literally not true.
As far as conversation to Protestantism being unserious: not only could I become a Protestant tomorrow if I wanted to, I could become a Protestant pastor, and so could Vivek.
Vivek Could announce tomorrow that he is starting a church, could call it a “Christian” church, and go around trying to convince people in Ohio that he’s a very serious Christian if some kind.
But this would all take 5 minutes, and be meaningless.
If he wanted to become Catholic, there’s a process to it, he’d need to get his marriage convalidated, baptize his kids, etc. If he wanted to become a priest (to contrast this with the seriousness of becoming a Protestant pastor), it would take him around a decade of philosophy and theology classes, he’d need to leave his family, etc.
That’s the point I’m making. It Vivek went through OCIA, got confirmed, convalidated his marriage, went to mass at least weekly, and baptized his kids, I think people would see it as more likely to be genuine.
If he showed up at some mega church or revivalist thing a few times and bought a Bible, I think it would read as performative.
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Just your daily reminder that in the US, the average Roman Catholic Sunday mass is tacky, and does not particularly follow unified style guides. That isn't even trad griping about things which aren't my preference like altar girls and the like; I am the Lord of the Dance Said He is a much more common hymn than anything like Faith of our Fathers, let alone the lovely classical music that inspired so many composers. Mass prayers may differ much less in verbiage, but when sung they are often set to cheesy folk music, or evangelical praise-and-worship light. Guitars are more common instruments than organs. Catholic churches vary strongly in architectural quality but the average Catholic goes to mass in an uninspired pseudo-amphitheatre decorated with designed-by-committee religious art that has nothing in common with the historical churches of Europe that nobody goes to, in a brutalist style if they're unlucky. The typical vestments look, literally, like burlap sacks. The 'ornate gravitas' that you speak of is uncommon enough in America to have special names for it(and is far less available than the other common strong liturgical preference- 'charismatic style' which apes evangelical worship services much more strongly. The majority of deeply religious Catholics in the USA imitate Evangelical outward forms). It's popular with Hollywood because it's easy to show on a screen looking and sounding cool. Most American Catholics have never heard Gregorian chant in a church service, see incense a couple of times a year, and dress worse for mass than protestants do.
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Confessional protestantism and fundamentalist evangelical-adjacent protestantism are going strong, and they don't restrict the internet anymore than hardcore Catholics do. They're hard to track and more geographically constrained but they do exist.
Can you link me to an example of a church where, if Vivek Ramaswami converted to it, Americans would see this as a strong signal that he was all in on America?
Southern Baptist. Evangelicalism as a whole heavily enmeshes Protestant Christianity with a certain flavor of American nationalism.
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The Mennonites don't count? I mean, Anabaptists are very much Protestant (a product of the "Radical Reformation"), and they seem rather "serious" about it to me.
Doesn't this prove my point pretty cleanly? The Mennonites are not using the internet.
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