The ones who didn’t convert

Some very well-known 20th-century writers converted to Catholicism. Two who did not were C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot. In Lewis’s case, he was, as a son of loyalist Protestant Ulster, unable ultimately to find a way past deep, ancestral instincts and prejudices. Escaping the past isn’t easy in Ireland. Eliot converted to Anglicanism in 1927, four years ahead of C. S. Lewis. Lewis, as it happens, strongly disliked Eliot’s poetry and felt equal antipathy toward his form of religion, which he saw as “trying to make of Christianity itself one more high-brow, Chelsea, bourgeois-baiting fad.” (The two actually became good friends later in life.)