I often wonder what my grandmother—Mamaw, as I called her—would have thought about her grandson becoming Catholic. We used to argue about religion constantly. She was a woman of deep, but completely de-institutionalized, faith. She loved Billy Graham and Donald Ison, a preacher from her home in southeastern Kentucky. But she loathed “organized religion.” She often wondered aloud how the simple message of sin, redemption, and grace had given way to the televangelists on our early 1990s Ohio TV screen. “These people are all crooks and perverts,” she told me. “All they want is money.” But she watched them anyway, and they were the closest she usually came to regular church service, at least in Ohio. Unless she was back home in Kentucky, she rarely attended church. And if she did, it was usually to satisfy my early adolescent quest for some attachment to Christianity besides the 700 Club.

Like many poor people, Mamaw rarely voted, seeing electoral politics as fundamentally corrupt. She liked F.D.R., Harry S. Truman, and that was about it. Unsurprisingly, a woman whose only political heroes had been dead for decades didn’t like politics as a matter of course and cared even less for the political drift of modern Protestantism. My first real exposure to an institutional church would come later, through my father’s large pentecostal congregation in southwestern Ohio. But I knew a few things about Catholicism well before then. I knew that Catholics worshipped Mary. I knew they rejected the legitimacy of Scripture. And I knew that the Antichrist—or at least, the Antichrists’s spiritual adviser—would be a Catholic. Or, at the time, I would have said, “is” a Catholic—as I felt pretty confident that the Antichrist walked among us.

Mamaw seemed not to care much about Catholics. Her younger daughter had married one, and she thought him a good man. She felt their way of worshipping was rather formal and peculiar, but what mattered to her was Jesus. Revelation 18 may have been about Catholics, and it may have been about something else. But the Catholic she knew cared about Jesus, and that was all right with her.

Still, Mamaw looms so large in my mind—she still, more than a decade after her death, is the person to whom I most feel indebted. Without her, I wouldn’t be here. And the uncomfortable fact is that the Christ of the Catholic Church always seemed a little different from the Jesus I’d grown up with. A little too stodgy, too formal. Sallman’s famous portrait of Christ hung upstairs near my bedroom, and that’s how I encountered him: personal and kind, but a little forlorn. The Christ of Catholicism floated high above you, as a grown man or a baby, wreathed in beams of light and crowned like a king. There is no way to avoid the discomfort a woman like Mamaw felt with that kind of a Christ. The Catholic Jesus was a majestic deity, and we had little interest in majestic deities because we weren’t a majestic people.