Apparently Catholic->Protestant converts have outnumbered the reverse for quite awhile!

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Little TIME article I stumbled across: https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,819765,00.html

The Herald's estimates, summarized in a report by Author Will Oursler: as against 1,071,897 people converted to Catholicism during the last ten years (most of them presumably ex-Protestants), some 4,000,000 Roman Catholics have become Protestants.

And...note the date it was originally published. Wow.

Kind of undermines one of the Atlas talking points commonly used in the past here that people may regularly often leave Catholicism now but in the past this basically NEVER happened which I always thought was weird...there's notable examples of people converting Catholic->Protestant in the 19th Century like Thomas Nast.

Anyway just an interesting little piece to come across.

[Blue3]

I mean, hasn't this always been the case?

[afleitch]

This is an article, about a survey inviting responses from Protestant ministers...

From 1954.

You need to let this go.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

This is an article, about a survey inviting responses from Protestant ministers...

From 1954.

You need to let this go.

That's the point. 1954. It's not a recent thing as some here seem to believe.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     it doesn't surprise me that that was the case in the 1950s, as Catholicism was seen as quite strange and converting to Protestantism was a way that one could integrate into American society.

[Torie]

My aunt forced her husband to convert from Catholicism to Episcopalian as a condition of marriage in 1950, so that was probably in the 4 million stat. My aunt like the whole clan going back forever was not religious, but she was a social climber and liked the high class demographics of the sect, and the sect was not that heavy a lift for an indifferent Catholic to convert to. So it was a good compromise.

[100% pro-life no matter what]

That's been the case for a long time.  Related, there are more Protestants of Irish descent than Catholics of Irish descent in the United States today.

https://www.irishcentral.com/news/irish-americans-are-more-protestant-than-catholic

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

You need to let this go.