During a sermon at Saddleback Church, Lake Forest, California, Pastor Rick Warren is seen on the monitor. The woman in the foreground is an usher.

Tocqueville said it first. Religion flourishes in the United States because it is completely voluntary and all religious groups must compete.

Among the country’s religious groups, two models have competed most successfully: “total culture” and “evangelical outreach.” Both have contributed to making the United States the most religious nation of the industrialized world.

The total culture model offers a religious identity that meets individuals’ needs for social location, family values, and meaningful group interaction, by providing a nourishing and complex, if sometimes confining, network of institutions from cradle to grave. The aim is a complete identity—theological, cultural, and sometimes even political (witness the connection of American Catholics to the Democratic Party that perdured until the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s).

Evangelical outreach, on the other hand, has won in the membership sweepstakes by warmly nurturing individual piety and offering an intense cultural ideology to the 40 percent of Americans who claim to have had a born-again experience. The evangelical model has achieved success not primarily through institutional networks, but rather through an appeal to individuals, and through them to their families and friends. Distrustful of popular culture and the media, to be sure, the evangelical tradition nonetheless can claim the slickest and most successful media productions aimed at religiously curious people of any group in North America—far slicker than the Catholic Eternal Word Television Network of Mother Angelica, for instance.

Until the 1960s, Roman Catholicism in the United States opted quite successfully for the total culture model, constructing what the historian Charles Morris has termed a “Catholic mini-state.” To be Catholic between 1800 and 1960 in America was not unlike being Amish in Pennsylvania or Mormon in Utah. As Garry Wills described the experience in “Memories of a Catholic Boyhood,” an essay from his 1972 book, Bare Ruined Choirs:

We spoke a different language from the rest of [America] . . . odd bits of Latinized English that were not parts of other six-year-olds’ vocabulary—words like “contrition” and “transubstantiation.” The words often came embedded in formulae (“imperfect contrition”), and the formulae were often paired in jingles (imperfect contrition and perfect contrition). Theology was a series of such distinctions: ex opere operato and ex opere operantis, homoousion and homoiousion, mortal sin and venial sin, matter of sin and intention of sin.

For good and for ill, Catholics grew up differently from their Protestant neighbors. As Wills recalled, “There were some places we went [that] others did not—into the confessional box, for instance.” Catholicism, Wills observed, was a “vast set of intermeshed childhood habits.” And the habits of childhood, as we all know, die hard.

All of this changed in a dramatically rapid way after World War II. Contem-porary critics of the breakup of “total Catholic culture” blame the so-called liberalizing effects of the Second Vatican Council, or they point to Paul VI’s teachings on birth control in his 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, citing the mass noncompliance that ensued. But in fact the dissolution of the American Catholic ghetto was well under way considerably before 1962, the year Vatican II opened. I would place it in the middle two decades of the 20th century: after the GI Bill of 1944 allowed Catholic lambs to nibble ivy at Yale and Columbia and many Catholic families moved into verdant middle-class affluence, culminating in a cultural arrival of sorts, in the early 1960s, with the presidency of John F. Kennedy. It was at the end of these two decades, roughly 1945–65, that Irish Catholics emerged to become (as they remain today) the wealthiest and best-educated non-Jewish ethnic group per capita in the United States, leaving behind the old subculture in which poetry meant Leonard Feeney, and college excellence meant Holy Cross.

Leaving the ghetto was culturally necessary and appropriate. It was also quite predictable, in light of the experiences of other religious groups in the United States that had once stood apart from the mainstream, including the Quakers, the Methodists, and the Lutherans. And yet, it seems to me, Irish Catholics—followed quickly by German and Italian Catholics—embraced the liberal mainstream values of the post–World War II world with a fervor and devotion that were, in retrospect, far too uncritical and far too celebratory of American culture for the long-term health of their religious community. The abandonment of the Catholic mini-state has left Cathol-icism in the United States with an identity crisis.

The downside can perhaps best be illustrated by contrasting the Catholic community today with a religious community that so far has decided to remain within its total culture: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more commonly known as the Mormons. The Mormons ask that their young believers take two years out from college for the purpose of undertaking what they call “witnessing,” articulating their faith as part of a mission to gentiles in the United States or abroad. Approximately 40 percent of young adult Mormons volunteer for this work—an impressively high portion. Some element of their family life and their cultural experience in the Mormon mini-state leads them to interrupt their educational careers on behalf of their religion.

The Mormon experience stands in marked contrast to the contemporary American Catholic community, where a debate roils on how effective the group has been in “passing on the faith” to its young people. These debates are fraught with emotion—as any Catholic with teenagers knows—and the statistics on success are much controverted. At bottom is a sense among American Catholics that “something has gone wrong” in the imparting of religious literacy to young people.

Four years ago, a report was published titled Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. Its principle investigator, Christian Smith, a sociologist at the University of Notre Dame, mined several national studies of young people, and sent out his own questionnaire to thousands of U.S. teenagers. The findings were mixed: good news for Mormons and for evangelicals, disquieting for Catholics.

The Catholic community, writes Smith, runs more institutions directed at passing on its faith to young people than all the other religious groups combined, and yet Catholic young people are the least likely to be able to describe their personal beliefs or the faith of their Church. The phrase he applies to young Catholics is “incredibly inarticulate.”

Indeed, Catholic young people, Smith says, make up the largest subgroup of adherents to the real faith of the American teenager, a faith he terms “moralistic therapeutic deism.” The creed has five points:

• God is nice.
• Most people are nice.
• Most people—save for Adolf Hitler—go to heaven.
• All other theological and ethical statements are relative, being true primarily if they work for you.
• Whatever.

This faith comes very close to that expressed by my own smart students at Fordham College, and I find it deeply troubling. How is it that Mormon teenagers can articulate their beliefs to others (and willingly do so), while Catholic young people, inheritors of a religion that has been in the business of passing on faith exponentially longer than the followers of Joseph Smith, by and large cannot? I can’t help but think that the answer has a great deal to do with the broader culture in which Catholic young people grow up.

It seems highly unlikely that American Catholics will ever again opt for a ghetto existence—even a nurturing one. Nor should they: Catholics outgrew their confinement socially, culturally, and politically, and in any case, as Thomas Wolfe pointed out, one can’t go home again. And so, the most effective strategy for the Catholic community in the United States for the 21st century would be to become more evangelical.

The Dictionary of Christianity in America describes evangelicalism as being notable for its “stress on the personal experience of the grace of God, usually termed a ‘new birth’ or ‘conversion.’” Evangelicalism tends to emphasize a personal ability to verbalize religious faith, and accentuates the need to spread that faith to others.

This may seem a thoroughly Protestant form of Christianity; and for most of Christianity’s history in North America, it has been a predominantly Protestant expression of religious faith. But we should be careful about equating “Protestant” with “evangelical,” without remainder. My own religious community, the Society of Jesus—the Jesuits—founded by St. Ignatius Loyola in the mid-16th century, is a resolutely evangelical order, with a profoundly evangelical spirituality.

At the heart of Jesuit spirituality is a retreat outline known as the “spiritual exercises.” The exercises are performed in their entirety twice in a Jesuit’s life for 30 days, in silence. Their purpose: “conversion of the heart.” The individual is told to pray explicitly for this outcome, a practice known in Jesuit parlance as “praying for the fruit of the exercises.”

Jesuit spirituality is much like that of many other religious orders, and its exercises are much like many other Catholic spiritual exercises—including the Teens Encounter Christ retreats for high school students and the Kairos retreats for undergraduates. The exercises are explicitly evangelical in that they aim at an individual affective experience of grace, in the context of which a “life choice” is made. The individual who has successfully experienced the fruit of the exercises—or the full force of a Kairos retreat—can verbalize a religious encounter that is intensely personal and can articulate the resulting choices.

This kind of personal religious experience—dare I say, conversion—should be made universally available, in fact normative, for American Catholics. The older Catholic model, with its emphasis on the communal, the mediated, and the sacramental nature of Catholic Christianity, should be balanced by a complementary emphasis on direct experience of the holy.

As I tell my freshmen, “Sitting at Mass doesn’t make you a Christian, any more than sitting in a garage makes you a car.” Life as a Catholic Christian isn’t only—isn’t even primarily—about encountering Jesus in the Eucharist. It is, in the main, about serving as Jesus’s disciple and giving witness to that life of discipleship.

Balancing the sacramental and evangelical impulses within Catholicism would address head-on two major problems within the Church: clericalism and the priest shortage. As anyone who has participated in an Ignatian retreat knows, the majority of spiritual directors at Jesuit—or any Catholic—retreat houses are not priests; in the United States, they are women.

Spiritual direction, campus ministry, and preaching all rest on a model of authority different from that of clerical ordination. As the French social scientist Émile Durkheim pointed out more than a century ago, there is “traditional authority,” which is passed on institutionally through protocols such as ordination, and there is “charismatic authority,” a self-authenticating form that emerges outside of regular institutional channels. Ordination has nothing to do with charismatic authority. If an individual is a horrible preacher before ordination, after ordination, he is simply an ordained horrible preacher. A more evangelical understanding of Catholicism would enable the charismatic gifts present in the Catholic community—especially those possessed by lay men and women—to build up the community.

Catholic Christianity has always recognized charismatic authority, if sometimes reluctantly. St. Dominic, St. Francis, and St. Ignatius—all of whom were originally viewed as suspect by the institutional Church of their day—eventually achieved canonical approval by channeling their charismatic worldviews into discrete religious orders. The time has come to broaden the appreciation of charismatic authority beyond the confines of religious orders and ease some of the burden that the Catholic community now places on its shrinking population of ordained clergy. To do so would also take up the promise of Vatican II, which was built on the in-sight that the Church is the entire people of God, and make the Catholic tradition more accessible (and more understandable) to all Americans.

In the 16th century, the Reformation forced Catholics and Protestants alike into taking theological stances that were polemical and lacking in nuance. Over and against the very real threats inherent in Protestant individualism and the attacks on sacramental realities, the Council of Trent (1545–63) opted for a more communal, hierarchical, and sacramental model of Christianity that came to define Catholic belief as being about dogma and described the Catholic encounter with the holy as being about receiving Communion. But the medieval Church—the “unreformed Church” of the high Middle Ages—had previously done a better job of balancing the sacramental and evangelical, the communal and personal. Lay guilds, lay appointment of certain clerical positions in parishes, the influence of the lay friars of the Franciscan and Dominican orders all gave late medieval Catholicism a much more democratic, pluralistic, and affectively satisfying piety than post-Reformation Catholicism has offered since.

Balancing the sacramental tradition with an evangelical, lay-centered piety would at long last bring a corrective “yin” to the “yang” of a Church I think we can safely say is in crisis.

Mark Massa, SJ, is the Rahner Distinguished Professor of Theology and codirector of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University. He is this year’s Gasson Visiting Professor of Theology at Boston College and the author of Anti-Catholicism in America: The Last Acceptable Prejudice (2005). His essay is adapted from a talk delivered on February 12, 2009, at the School of Theology and Ministry.