# Evangelical vs Catholic: Born Again, Baptism and the Bible Compared

Source: https://christianpure.com/learn/catholic-vs-evangelical/
Publisher: Christian Pure (https://christianpure.com/)
Published: 2026-09-30
Updated: 2026-10-20

Evangelicals and Catholics share the faith of the creeds: one God in three persons, and a Savior who died and rose again. Both tell every believer to spread the gospel. They part over how a person is born again, by personal faith or in baptism, and over who has the last word on the Bible.

Both take the words "born again" from Jesus himself, from his conversation with Nicodemus, and they hear different things in them. The two names also stand for different kinds of thing. "Catholic" names one church, the communion of churches led by the Pope. "Evangelical" names a movement inside Protestantism that runs through many denominations, from Southern Baptists to Pentecostals to independent congregations. In Pew Research Center's 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study, 23% of American adults belonged to the evangelical Protestant tradition and 19% were Catholic.

| Topic | Evangelical | Catholic |
| --- | --- | --- |
| What it is | A movement across many Protestant churches | One church, led by the Pope |
| Last word on doctrine | The Bible alone | Scripture and Tradition, taught by the bishops with the Pope |
| Being born again | God's work, received by repentance and faith | Given in baptism, usually as a baby |
| Justification | God declares the believer righteous, through faith alone | Forgiveness and inner renewal together (see [Catholic vs Protestant](https://christianpure.com/learn/catholicism-vs-protestantism-a-comparative-study/)) |
| Baptism | Believers only in Baptist churches; infants too in the PCA and EPC | Infants and adults; a valid baptism is never repeated |
| Lord's Supper | Baptist: a memorial. Presbyterian: Christ present "really, but spiritually" | The Eucharist, Christ's body and blood, at every Mass |
| Knowing you are saved | Believers can be assured of forgiveness now | Hope and trust, but not certainty of faith |
| Spreading the faith | The duty of every believer | Every baptized Catholic a "missionary disciple" |
| Mary and the saints | Remembered as examples of faith | Honored, and asked to pray for the living |
| Share of US adults | 23% (2023–24) | 19% (2023–24) |

To see what Catholics teach beside what nondenominational and evangelical churches teach on 55 questions, open our free tool, [Compare Christian Denominations](https://christianpure.com/compare-denominations/?one=catholic&two=nondenom).

## One church and one movement

The Catholic Church is a single communion of local churches in union with the Bishop of Rome, and they share one Catechism. Evangelicals have no single church and no single head. The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) describes them by four marks it takes from the British historian David Bebbington: a stress on conversion, on the Bible, on the cross and on spreading the gospel.

Evangelicals are Protestants, so the old Reformation disputes stand between them and Catholics just as they stand between Catholics and every Protestant: Scripture alone, justification by faith alone, the number of sacraments, Purgatory and the papacy.

## Born again: by faith or in baptism

"Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God," Jesus told Nicodemus, and a moment later, "unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God" (John 3:3, 5). Evangelicals and Catholics read the same two sentences.

For evangelicals the new birth is God's work in a person who turns to Christ. The Southern Baptist Convention's confession, the Baptist Faith and Message, calls it "a change of heart wrought by the Holy Spirit through conviction of sin, to which the sinner responds in repentance toward God and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ." Paul put that response in one sentence: "if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved" (Romans 10:9). In Baptist churches baptism follows, as "an act of obedience symbolizing the believer's faith."

The Catholic Church hears "born of water and the Spirit" as baptism, and teaches that the new birth happens there. Its Catechism calls baptism "the washing of regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit," the words of Titus 3:5, and says it "signifies and actually brings about the birth of water and the Spirit without which no one 'can enter the kingdom of God.'" Children too, the Church holds, "have need of the new birth in Baptism," so it baptizes babies, a practice it calls "an immemorial tradition of the Church." And faith is meant to keep growing: "For all the baptized, children or adults, faith must grow after Baptism."

## A personal relationship with Jesus

Evangelicals often speak of faith as a personal relationship with Jesus. The Pentecostal Assemblies of God says in a 2017 position paper that at the new birth the Holy Spirit comes into believers, "bringing assurance of forgiveness of sins, spiritual renewal, and a personal relationship with God."

That hope has drawn many Catholics into evangelical churches. When Pew Research Center surveyed Latin America in 2014 and asked former Catholics who had become Protestants why, the reason they gave most often was that they were "seeking a more personal connection with God." Many also wanted "a different style of worship."

Catholics speak of a personal encounter too. Pope Francis, in *The Joy of the Gospel* (2013), invited "all Christians, everywhere, at this very moment, to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ." Catholics look for that encounter above all in the sacraments; the Catechism calls the Sunday Eucharist "the foundation and confirmation of all Christian practice." The words differ. The longing to meet Christ himself is shared.

## Baptism: believers only, or infants too

Baptist churches baptize only people old enough to profess faith. The Baptist Faith and Message defines Christian baptism as "the immersion of a believer in water in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit," and makes it "prerequisite to the privileges of church membership and to the Lord's Supper." A Catholic baptized as a baby has not received believer's baptism by that definition, so a Southern Baptist church would normally ask a former Catholic to be baptized before joining.

Not every evangelical agrees. Evangelical Presbyterian bodies such as the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) and the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC) baptize the children of believers as well. Their officers vow to "receive and adopt" the Westminster Confession, which says that "not only those that do actually profess faith in and obedience unto Christ, but also the infants of one, or both, believing parents, are to be baptized."

The Catholic Church never repeats a valid baptism, so an evangelical who becomes Catholic is normally not baptized again. Canon law says that those baptized in another Christian community "must not be baptized conditionally unless ... a serious reason exists to doubt the validity of the baptism." And the Catechism says that Christians baptized outside the Catholic Church "have a right to be called Christians, and with good reason are accepted as brothers by the children of the Catholic Church."

## The Bible and who interprets it

Both receive the Bible as the word of God. The Catholic Church urges its members to read it, and its Catechism repeats a line of St. Jerome that any evangelical could say: "Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ."

The difference is over who settles what the Bible means. Evangelicals hold that Scripture alone has the last word. Catholics hold that the bishops in communion with the Pope interpret Scripture and Tradition with authority. Evangelicals and Catholics Together put the choice in one line: "The sole authority of Scripture (sola scriptura) or Scripture as authoritatively interpreted in the church."

## Can you know you are saved?

The First Letter of John speaks to it directly: "I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life" (1 John 5:13). Many evangelical churches teach that a believer can have that assurance now. They disagree among themselves about whether salvation can be lost. The Baptist Faith and Message says, "All true believers endure to the end," while the Assemblies of God disapproves of "the unconditional security position which holds that it is impossible for a person once saved to be lost."

The Catholic Church teaches that a believer cannot have that kind of certainty about his or her own state of grace. The Council of Trent said in 1547 that "no one can know with a certainty of faith, which cannot be subject to error, that he has obtained the grace of God." The Catechism says "we cannot therefore rely on our feelings or our works to conclude that we are justified and saved," and then adds that reflecting on God's blessings in one's life "offers us a guarantee that grace is at work in us." Catholics also believe that grace lost through grave sin is restored in the sacrament of Penance.

## Evangelism and evangelization

"Evangelical" comes from the Greek *euangelion*, "the good news," and evangelicals are known for telling it. The Baptist Faith and Message calls it "the duty and privilege of every follower of Christ and of every church of the Lord Jesus Christ to endeavor to make disciples of all nations," after Jesus' own command: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (Matthew 28:19).

The Catholic Church uses the same word for its own mission. Pope Paul VI wrote in 1975 that evangelizing is the Church's "deepest identity. She exists in order to evangelize." Pope Francis wrote in 2013: "In virtue of their baptism, all the members of the People of God have become missionary disciples." Here the two speak almost the same language.

## Sunday worship and Communion

Catholics are bound to attend Mass every Sunday and on holy days of obligation, and every Mass includes the Eucharist, which Catholics believe is Christ's body and blood. Southern Baptist churches celebrate the Lord's Supper less often and understand it differently. In a 2012 LifeWay Research survey, 57% of Southern Baptist churches observed it quarterly and 1% weekly. The Baptist Faith and Message calls it "a symbolic act of obedience" by which church members "memorialize the death of the Redeemer and anticipate His second coming." Baptist churches treat baptism and the Lord's Supper as ordinances that show a faith already received. Evangelicals and Catholics Together named the question underneath: are sacraments and ordinances "symbols of grace or means of grace"?

The two do not share Communion. Catholic rules ordinarily keep other Christians from receiving at Mass and Catholics from receiving the Lord's Supper in evangelical churches, and an evangelical service does not satisfy a Catholic's Sunday obligation; the details are in [Catholic vs Christian](https://christianpure.com/learn/catholic-vs-christian/). Evangelical tables are usually more open: 52% of Southern Baptist churches in the LifeWay survey offered the Lord's Supper to "anyone who has put their faith in Jesus Christ."

## Other questions people ask

### Are Catholic churches evangelical?

Not in the sense the word has in the United States. The evangelical movement is Protestant, and Pew counts Catholics as a separate tradition. Yet the Catholic Church does call itself evangelizing by nature.

### What is an evangelical Catholic?

A Catholic who stresses conversion, friendship with Christ and mission while holding the whole of Catholic teaching. The Catholic writer George Weigel, one of the 1994 signers of Evangelicals and Catholics Together, made the phrase the title of a 2013 book, *Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church*. The first of the ten marks he listed in *First Things* that year reads: "Evangelical Catholicism is friendship with the Lord Jesus Christ."

### Can an evangelical and a Catholic marry?

Yes, with the Catholic bishop's permission. The Catholic partner promises to do all he or she can to have the children baptized and raised Catholic, and that runs straight into a Baptist church's practice of baptizing believers only. The rules are set out in [Baptist vs Catholic](https://christianpure.com/learn/baptist-vs-catholic/).

## Evangelicals and Catholics Together (1994)

On March 29, 1994, a group of American evangelical and Catholic leaders published "Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium." Charles Colson of Prison Fellowship, an evangelical, and Richard John Neuhaus, a former Lutheran pastor who had become a Catholic priest, led the drafting. It began in talks about Latin America, where relations between the two were, in the statement's words, "marked more by conflict than by cooperation."

Its heart is one plain sentence: "All who accept Christ as Lord and Savior are brothers and sisters in Christ." Together the signers affirmed "that we are justified by grace through faith because of Christ." They condemned "the practice of recruiting people from another community for purposes of denominational or institutional aggrandizement," and went further: it is "neither theologically legitimate nor a prudent use of resources for one Christian community to proselytize among active adherents of another Christian community."

They did not pretend their differences away. They listed the ones they could not settle, among them baptism "as sacrament of regeneration or testimony to regeneration." "Evangelicals hold that the Catholic Church has gone beyond Scripture, adding teachings and practices that detract from or compromise the Gospel of God's saving grace in Christ." Catholics hold "that such teachings and practices are grounded in Scripture and belong to the fullness of God's revelation." And they were careful to say the document "cannot speak officially for our communities."

Some evangelicals objected. John MacArthur, writing for his ministry Grace to You, argued that the line on proselytizing put churchgoing Catholics "off limits for evangelism," and that the shared sentence on justification said "nothing that the Roman Catholic Church has not consistently affirmed for the past 450 years." For him the real question was whether God declares a sinner righteous or makes the sinner righteous, which he called "the essential theological difference that underlies every other point of disagreement between Catholicism and evangelicalism."

The signers took up that very question in a second statement, "The Gift of Salvation," agreed in New York in October 1997 and signed on the Catholic side by Neuhaus, Avery Dulles and others. It says: "In justification, God, on the basis of Christ's righteousness alone, declares us to be no longer his rebellious enemies but his forgiven friends, and by virtue of his declaration it is so." What they affirmed, they wrote, "is in agreement with what the Reformation traditions have meant by justification by faith alone (sola fide)." They also named questions still open, among them "the historic uses of the language of justification as it relates to imputed and transformative righteousness."

Those questions were left open. Yet both sides still read the same words to Nicodemus, and both confess that the new birth is the Spirit's work: "a change of heart wrought by the Holy Spirit," in the Baptist confession, and "renewal by the Holy Spirit," in the Catechism.

## Related reading

- [Protestant vs evangelical](https://christianpure.com/learn/protestant-vs-evangelical-whats-the-difference/)
- [What does it mean to be a born again Christian?](https://christianpure.com/learn/born-again-christian/)
- [What are evangelical church beliefs?](https://christianpure.com/learn/evangelical-church-beliefs/)
- [Why do Catholics "pray" to Mary?](https://christianpure.com/learn/catholics-pray-to-mary/)
- [Is "once saved, always saved" biblical?](https://christianpure.com/learn/biblical-debates-is-once-saved-always-saved-biblical/)
- [What Do Catholics Believe? God, the Mass, the Pope and Mary](https://christianpure.com/learn/what-do-catholics-believe/)

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