Is this some sort of remnant of evangelical puritan protestant ideology?
I don’t understaun this.
If you ask me, it’d make as much sense as Orthodox and Christians… or Shia and Muslim…
I know not all Christians are Catholics but for feck’s sake…
They’re all Christians to me…
Edit:
It’s a U.S thing but this is the sort of things I hear…
https://www.gotquestions.org/Catholic-Christian.html
I am a Catholic. Why should I consider becoming a Christian?
I now know more distinctions (apparently Catholicism requires duty and salvation is process, unlike Protestantism?) but I still think they’re of a similar branch (Christianity) so I just wonder the social factor
There’s plenty of great commentary here about why Christianity is divided up into different sects, but I think you’re primarily interested in the narcissism of small differences. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences)
Basically, if you’ve read about Dr. Suess’ Starbellied Sneeches, you get the idea. Human brains are exceptional pattern recognition machines, and when a society is so homogenously Christian then those small differences become the cleavages along which identities form. That leads to things like Catholic / Christian divisions and the formation of the best joke in The Guardian history:
Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, “Don’t do it!” He said, “Nobody loves me.” I said, “God loves you. Do you believe in God?”
He said, “Yes.” I said, “Are you a Christian or a Jew?” He said, “A Christian.” I said, “Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?” He said, “Protestant.” I said, “Me, too! What franchise?” He said, “Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?” He said, “Northern Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?”
He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region.” I said, “Me, too!”
Northern Conservative†Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.” I said, “Die, heretic!” And I pushed him over.
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2005/sep/29/comedy.religion
They all generally affirm the same things though, it’s just the Bible doesn’t say exactly how to practice Christianity, so add two thousand years and weird theological technicalities like real presence (and how much real is the presence, it’s a spectrum), church structure and organisation, authority, etc, then you have a bunch of different denominations. Most of them though do actually respect each other in an ecumenical fashion. The “Catholics aren’t Christian” sect would be a fringe minority, the same type who would believe the world is 8,000 years old and that the KJV is the only proper English translation.
All the big (and probably small) schisms happened primarily for political reasons (i.e. material interests, power struggles). It’s just that lots of other issues (including small differences) tend to align themselves along the same lines, because I guess that helps with the polarization. Doesn’t mean this “narcissism of small differences” doesn’t exist, just that it’s not the cause, but rather part of the dynamic.
With all due respect, this is not reflective of the protestant revival movement in the US in the 1800s. The second awakening was absolutely a bunch of rival interpretations of the word claiming they were right b/c (insert reason here).
I probably should have been more specific in my original reply but when we’re taking about US “Catholics aren’t Christians” that’s 100 percent the origin of the trope. I can’t speak to the Irish version but I’d challenge anyone about it in the US. That’s why we needed an Ecumenism movement in the first place after all.
There may be an earlier version, but I know this as an old Emo Phillips joke
Because religion is all about dividing people into arbitrary groups. Catholicism is a specific type of dogmatic Christian theology
Because the Anglosphere was so xenophobic that even the Irish and Italians were too culturally exotic to them and thus demonized their entire belief system.
because historically lumping protestants and catholics together has not ended well.
Catholics believe in a religious hierarchy, Cardinals, bishops, Pope e.t.c.
Christians USUALLY think hierarchy in religion is almost blasphemous. But really it’s just so they can kinda just do whatever the fuck they want and not worry about the Pope excommunicating them.
I’ve never heard someone say this.
It’s a US thing
I live in the US and have never heard someone say this
Schism was the very first thing the Christian church learned to do.
Christian was the case that they gave me
As an American who was raised Lutheran, who was taught a bunch of Romance-Euro-centric world history in school, I always considered Roman Catholic to be the “default” flavor of Christianity. Protestantism in all of its forms are hard forks. It’s in the name, even–the Roman Catholic church is what Protestants are “protesting”.
To unironically “-and Zoidberg” Catholicism out of Christianity while leaving Protestant flavors included feels completely backwards. I’ve never heard anyone do it.
But if I did, I could only assume it was due to some No True Scotsman bullshit. “Only we practice the correct way. Everyone else isn’t just interpreting it differently, but interpreting it wrong.” Sounds like an Evangelical line of thought to me.
Platypuses and mammals.
Platypuses are mammals, but they’re weird enough that you can’t usefully generalise from them to anything else, to the point that lumping them in together could be actively misleading.
Same deal.
Wait do you randomly drop “and platypuses” when you’re talking about mammals??
Kind Sir, please never drop a platypus. I thank you kindly.
(Insert smirk for my dumb joke)
Please never drop a platypus
for that could make it flat-ypus
Nice!
Platypuses are mammals, but they’re weird enough
We probably wouldn’t consider them nearly as weird if they were more numerous than any other mammal species and lived all over the world. So their comparison to catholicism is weird.
Platypuses are mammals, but they’re weird enough that you can’t usefully generalise from them to anything else, to the point that lumping them in together could be actively misleading
I would argue that they’re “lumpable” with other monotremes :)
Sure. But monotremes are a subclass of mammal.
Catholics are Christians, but Christians are not necessarily Catholic. For example, Orthodox Christians are not Catholic. Being Catholic requires, at the bare minimum, agreement with the Holy See and implicitly the dogma he endorses. Even this “minor” difference can be used to find non-Catholic Christians.
Precisely, Catholic ⊊ Christian.
The reason why this is the case has to do with the history of Christianity, specifically the various schisms throughout the ages as the Christian faith evolved. That’s an incredibly complicated topic which I’m not qualified to discuss.
Catholics are Christians, but Christians are not necessarily Catholic. For example, Orthodox Christians are not Catholic. Being Catholic requires, at the bare minimum, agreement with the Holy See and implicitly the dogma he endorses. Even this “minor” difference can be used to find non-Catholic Christians.
I know that, but if you ask me, it’s like saying Sunni and Muslim, one kinda emphasizes, if not “otherizes” (orientalize or occidentalize) the other… usually in a not good way…
One kinda emphasizes, if not “otherizes” the other… usually in a not good way…
Yeah. People have been killed over being Catholic in a non-Catholic Christian society and people have also been killed over being a non-Catholic Christian in a Catholic society.
But that doesn’t mean that we can’t or shouldn’t differentiate at all between the dogmas of Catholics and the wider practice of Christianity.
(orientalize or occidentalize)
I mean there are lots of non-Catholic Churches with European origins, for example Lutheranism and Anglicanism. So I think it’s a bit more complicated than “otherizing” with respect to that specific dichotomy.
Catholics aren’t Christians by many definitions, it is a different religion.
I might quibble about the Catholic Church being the “original” church since Catholicism only came about after Theodosius I made Christianity the official religion of the Roman state in 380. You could argue that Catholicism started a bit earlier under Constantine I at the First Ccouncil of Nicaea in 325, which is when the Roman state started to consolidate the various early Christian beliefs under an official “catholic” orthodoxy. The word “catholic” literally means “including a wide variety of things”. The point being that there was already a wide variety of Christian sects prior to the Council of Nicaea.
The Protestant argument against Catholicism boils down to the belief that the Catholic Church is a corrupted Christianity, not that it is non-Christian. And there is some truth to that. The pre-Nicaean churches were free-wheeling spiritualists with a wide variety of beliefs, but that all changed when the Roman state decided to create an orthodox, singular religion under its control. Protestants argue that this adaptation of religious belief to the needs of maintaining state power is the original corruption of the Catholic Church.
Now, two key facts influenced the early history of Roman Catholicism:
-
The Roman state recognized the descendants of Caesar, the Emperors, as the Pontifex Maximus, or head priest, of the Roman state. They also required that everyone adhere to the cult of the Emperor. This was purely ritualistic and was meant as a bulwark to the power of the state.
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The vast majority of the Empire’s citizens were pagan.
Because of #1, the Roman Emperor became the head of the newly formed Catholic Church, which was a unification of Church and State. This is called Caesaropapism, and is also why the Catholic Church retains a hierarchical structure to this day and its seat is still located in the heart of the Western Roman Empire. The Pope is the spiritual successor of the Western Roman Emperor.
Because of #2, Catholicism is highly ritualistic, like paganism, and early Catholicism adopted the worship of saints, which are basically small gods. Saint worship was the bridge between paganism and Christianity.
During the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, Luther and others made the point that the union of state power with Christianity was a corruption of “original” pre-Catholic Christianity, which was more spiritually-oriented and valued personal conviction over state orthodoxy. Interestingly, the split between Protestantism and Catholicism in Europe also more or less follows the geographic outline of the Western Roman Empire, with southern Europe largely retaining Catholicism and northern Europe largely adopting Protestantism. This implies a political dimension to the schism, not just a religious one. England is the odd man out here because their response to the schism was to create the Church of England, which is basically Catholicism without the Pope, substituting the English monarch as the head of the Church and toning down the saint worship.
The great irony of any Protestant movement that craves Christo-fascist state power is that they are advocating to become the very evil they swore to destroy back in the 1500s.
-
Roman Catholic is the original Church, so you tell me
Fucking bingo dude. The original church was Catholic*. The Christian church came later.
I guess you are trolling man
This sounds like a semantic backflip.
Catholics themselves see themselves as Christian and since they are the largest Christian denomination, saying they aren’t is just No True Scotsman.
Ask a catholic what religion they are and they answer Catholic, while protestants say Christian.
Maybe in your part of the world, not in mine. Christians normally just say Christian unless they’re trying to recruit you (they are less than half the population).
Anyway that’s like saying if you ask me what my meal is and I say “steak” that means it’s somehow not meat because I was specific about the kind of meat.
Try it sometime
Mystery solved, see OP’s edit.
Care to share these definitions?
That is totally new to me.
Can you give me one or two of those many definitions for my understanding?
Many protestant churched consider themselves churches of Christ, Catholicism is the church of Paul, and isn’t strictly monotheistic, trinitarianism and unitarianism aside. They pray to beings other than God as a matter of course. Anglicanism and Orthodox are the same religion as Catholicism. Most of the protestant churches are not. Then you have stuff like Mormons and Jehovahs Witnesses which are a different thing again, if you call those Christian, then Islam is Christian (Jesus is an important prophet in Islam) but no one would say that.
Catholicism is the church of Paul, and isn’t strictly monotheistic, trinitarianism and unitarianism aside.
That is just plain wrong, no two ways about it.
To me it sounds like you listened to some protestant that doesn’t care much for the catholic church and just repeat his rant without questioning it much.
And don’t get me wrong, I couldn’t care less about christian infighting. I was just curious about the reasoning how the catholic church, which is one of the oldest and most “original” christian churches, could be considered not christian at all.
After your post I don’t believe there is much basis to this claim at all.FFS read a book. I am Catholic, btw.
So by your own claim you are part of the polytheistic church of Paul?
That just is not catholicism.
Which is so easy to prove because the catholics love to write down their many rules.So I honestly would just answer right back at you:
FFS read a book.
And btw, while I have been an atheist for many years now, I was raised strictly catholic in a highly religious area by my catholic family that included a catholic nun and the headmaster of a catholic school and I intensively studied christianity before I made my break with this religion.
You can’t bullshit me.
Oh look. An atheist that thinks he’s clever but doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. How original.
Growing up in a “non-denominational”, independent fundamental Baptist house I was always taught that Catholics weren’t Christians because they worship idols. Now that I’ve left the faith I would easily classify them as being Christian.
While I think many people actually do classify them as Christians they do have some significant differences in their beliefs and practices than most Protestant denominations; and being themselves the largest Christian denomination by far it can be useful in some analysis to treat them as a distinct entity (the answer to “percentage of global population that subscribe to a particular religion” is much more interesting when broken into “Christian Catholic: %” and “Christian Other: %”).
If anything Catholicism is much more traditionally Christian, as it’s the stablished status quo outside of the anglosphere.
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Oh shit! Independent Fundamental Baptist! I had to deal with living with that shit, too. At the end of the day, if the king james bible was good enough for Peter and Paul, it’s good enough for me. Also, rock music is the devil.
I went to Bob Jones. There was a kid there got in trouble playing the guitar cause what he was strumming had “that sound.” No lyrics, just him strumming it wrong was sinful. Ain’t no way that kinda teaching gonna fuck someone up for life.
I went to a small private Christian high school too. Our Junior year we did a “college tour” to check out Christian Colleges. We visited Bob Jones, and I was blown away. That place is fucking wild. I’m glad I settled on Penn State in the long run.
What does “non-denominational” mean? Isn’t Baptist the denomination?
In this context it was meant as a joke. Several Baptist institutions incorrectly label themselves as being “non-denominational” even though they are completely ideologically aligned with the independent Baptist movement.
All the non-denominational churches are just a denominational church in denial. Pentecostals use it a lot too, but it’s pretty obvious once you know
You won’t find me using this dichotomy—I just use the blanket term “Assholes.”
Hundreds of years of infighting
Thousands really.
Protestantism hasn’t even existed for a thousand years. Heck, even the Great Schism between Eastern Orthodox and Romans Catholicism churches happened less than a thousand years ago (though that should become no longer true within our lifetimes).
Infighting, as in, within itself.
Sure, but this thread isn’t about infighting among Christians broadly, it’s specifically about the use of “Christian” and “Catholic” in a context where they seemingly mean different things.
To be honest I find most of this thread incredibly frustrating, because so many people are explaining Christian schisms to OP, as though they don’t already know about that. But that’s not what they asked.
I was responding to the thread not the OPs question. May be frustrating for you but that was the context for me.
This thread was still about Catholics and Protestants, not broader conflicts among Christians.
It’s like progressives and liberals 1000 years from now
If any of this recognizably lasts 1000 years I’ll have a better opinion of it, ancient egypt is still smirking at us
Catholics see themselves as the root form of Christianity that other versions forked from. Whilst it’s not technically true, as there are many versions of Christianity that pre-date Catholicism, in most countries where the term “Catholics and Christians” is used, it’s accurate enough
