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Hi there. I'm a serious Protestant.
It's worth bearing in mind that in the real world, as opposed to the internet, evangelicals are doing a much better job of holding on to faith than Catholics or Orthodox. News stories about youth conversions to Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy are usually looking at a few high-profile outliers rather than the overall demographic trend.
The Catholic Church in the United States, demographically, is buoyed up by large numbers of Hispanic Catholic immigrants, but if you restrict yourself to looking at people born in the US who were raised Catholic, they look very similar to mainline Protestants, i.e. in decline. They have noticeably lower retention than evangelicals. Church attendance is consistently higher among evangelicals than Catholics, as is consistency on moral or social issues. (Go through and compare if you like - 59% of Catholics are pro-choice, 70% support same-sex marriage!) If you compare what Protestants and what Catholics say about why they stay in their church, Protestants are significantly more likely to say that they believe in the religion's teachings and that it gives them spiritual comfort, while Catholics are more likely to say that it's because it's just the religion of their family or community. Note also that 1% of Americans are ex-Protestant Catholics, and 4% of Americans are ex-Catholic Protestants, which seems suggestive.
I'm not American, but I work in a religious field and I will say that just anecdotally I have run into a number of ex-Catholic evangelicals, and I would say that for every person raised a Protestant who felt that they were given a shallow spiritual education, and looked longingly at the riches of tradition and liturgy in the Catholic and Orthodox churches (and I count myself as one such person), I have met a person raised a Catholic who found that faith numbing and deadening, but who came alive on discovering evangelical Protestantism, which gave them the tools to cultivate a more passionate, heartfelt relationship with God.
I don't say this as a triumphant evangelical myself. I'm a mainliner, and I will forthrightly confess that the mainline churches are hollowed out, frequently heretical, and dying. I'm part of what I hope will be a small but devout rump of surviving mainline Protestants. My own institutions are largely betraying the faith and receiving in their own congregations the due penalty for their error.
But I would suggest that if you think that Protestantism in the broader sense isn't being taken seriously any more, or that Catholics have just won, or are in a healthier position overall, you may be in a bubble. Evangelical Protestants are probably the healthiest large church tradition in America.
What’s the point here? If Reddit claimed itself as a Christian church, there would be more Redditors than Catholics too. They could say that posting on Reddit is “attending church”, that being a Reddit moderator is being a “pastor”, claim each subreddit as a denomination even!
The point here is about how seriously a conversion by Vivek would be taken. Vivek attending a mega church every week would move the needle either 0 or negatively.
I'm responding to the idea that "Catholics have basically just won" - no specific comment on Ramaswamy intended.
If Ramaswamy were to convert to Christianity, I agree that he would probably pick Catholicism, because that's a religion more acceptable to elites. Evangelicals are hated by elites, and they generally hate elites in return.
This is just demonstrably not true. How many members of the current President's cabinet are evangelicals? One of the primary debates happening around our politics right now is funding for Israel, which is something almost entirely pushed by evangelical protestants.
I think that there tend to me bore Catholic intellectuals (like members of the Supreme Court); I think that's where the cleave happens.
We might be using different definitions of elites? I'd say that Donald Trump, for instance, is hated by elites, and he's the most powerful man in the country. I think that evangelicals are generally looked on with contempt by the intellectual and cultural elites of the United States.
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