Post by rosa on Feb 9, 2010 9:08:45 GMT -6
I keep having these really frustrating conversations with people who think "Christian" means "Evangelical". I know Evangelicals use it that way but I run into people
1) who are not American and think most Americans are right wing Evangelicals
or
2) who are American and think the size of evangelical megachurches means those denominations are the biggest.
This leads to a bunch of stuff - the conversation i had last night was with a very reasonable no-longer-QF woman from the NLQ board, because I was surprised as an adult by the number of Christians who have never heard of James Dobson or consider him a fringe figure. After a really frustrating circular conversation I figured out she thought Evangelicals were the Christian mainstream in the US.
I can counter that with numbers - Catholics are still the biggest denomination in this country - but I don't really know that the numbers are collected in a meaningful way for that. For instance, George W. Bush is a United Methodist and was the most Evangelically influenced president we've ever had. There's a wide variance among Presbyterian congregations and the various types of Lutheran, too.
I know Christian liberals have been trying to reframe the discussion. Does anybody have good resources for this? I have to admit I hadn't paid much attention to it since I was in highschool - these days most of the Christians I deal with are crade Catholics from an area so Catholic they forget other kinds of Christians even exist. My partner grew up in a parish in a Catholic neighborhood in a huge Catholic family in a town where even the Protestants eat fish on Fridays because every church & bar has a fish fry.
1) who are not American and think most Americans are right wing Evangelicals
or
2) who are American and think the size of evangelical megachurches means those denominations are the biggest.
This leads to a bunch of stuff - the conversation i had last night was with a very reasonable no-longer-QF woman from the NLQ board, because I was surprised as an adult by the number of Christians who have never heard of James Dobson or consider him a fringe figure. After a really frustrating circular conversation I figured out she thought Evangelicals were the Christian mainstream in the US.
I can counter that with numbers - Catholics are still the biggest denomination in this country - but I don't really know that the numbers are collected in a meaningful way for that. For instance, George W. Bush is a United Methodist and was the most Evangelically influenced president we've ever had. There's a wide variance among Presbyterian congregations and the various types of Lutheran, too.
I know Christian liberals have been trying to reframe the discussion. Does anybody have good resources for this? I have to admit I hadn't paid much attention to it since I was in highschool - these days most of the Christians I deal with are crade Catholics from an area so Catholic they forget other kinds of Christians even exist. My partner grew up in a parish in a Catholic neighborhood in a huge Catholic family in a town where even the Protestants eat fish on Fridays because every church & bar has a fish fry.