“Fundamentalism sets you up to lose your faith over things that a mature Catholic would barely notice,” says Oswald Sobrino in his Catholic Analysis blog review of Michael Rose’s 1998 book, Darwin the Protestant Fundamentalist (Princeton), which discusses Darwin’s loss of religious faith.

If you have jettisoned Tradition and have the isolated text of the Bible only, as is common among fundamentalist Protestants, you tend to buckle when your literalism is undermined.

Catholic tradition, on the other hand, provides centuries of sophisticated biblical commentary by great (and possible the greatest) minds in the West among the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, such as Augustine and Aquinas. Such commentary and analysis can immunize knowledgeable Catholics from such shocks.

I am reminded of the non-believer I met at U. of Iowa in my ordination summer, 1963, at the Writers’ Workshop, who had noodled American religion and concluded that Catholics had a “cosmic” religion, as opposed to the narrow-scoped fundamentalist Protestant.

Taking that further, I’d say mainline Protestants have sought “cosmic” reality but without Catholic tradition such as Sobrino alludes to, which I do believe is its trump card in religious argumentation such as it is in our day.