Uh. If I did a 15k ft view of American Protestantism, left of center Christians exist and have been here the whole time, would that be useful? I am having trouble gauging how much of the "Episcopalians! Who knew?" is sincere.
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Speaking as a former conservative Evangelical -- conservative evangelicals are so used to dismissing mainliners as "not true Christians anymore" and "their church attendance has dwindled to nothing anyway" that encountering a live mainliner in the wild is startling to them.
I appreciate the explainer. I've long had the sense that evangelical Christianity has been more susceptible to grifters without knowing why, and the emphasis on feeling over learning goes a long way toward explaining that
Okay. Some demand for this so: an introduction to American Protestantism. This is not going to be a comprehensive guide of American Protestantism because I hope to leave you with the impression that such a thing would be huge and nearly impossible for anyone to do, let alone me.
As a Baptized & Christened Greek Orthodox & later Received into the Episcopal Church re:☝️
*it's a history not easy to explain here but noble attempt👍
don't think most know Dietrich Bonhoeffer/W Stringfellow/Christian democrat progressive left
or that Washington, Madison & Monroe were Episcopalians
I am also going to try to move beyond the trite "we're not all the same" because sure, every group has outliers. Rather I want to give you a basic toolkit to understand the shape of different denominations and why they are not the same: it often isn't because of theology!
By the end of this you should be able to recognize that the generic Christian that shows up in American popular media is not merely unfair, but an incoherent mishmash of Catholic aesthetics and evangelical beliefs.
We will begin, very briefly, with the Great Schism.
In 1054 Great Schism split most Christians into either Western Christians, obedient to Rome or Eastern Christians for whom Constantinople was the center. The Western Christians became what we now know as Roman Catholic Church. Ish. I'm glossing over a lot of nuance.
The RCC chugged along until ~1517 before enough disputes about theology, conduct, and organization boiled over into the Protestant reformation. Western Christianity is functionally split into Protestants that broke off from the Roman Catholic Church and Catholics who did not.
This sets the stage for American Christianity in two very important ways. First, many Protestant Christians do not call themselves Protestant Christians, some of them because they see themselves as restoring the true, pre-Great Schism, Pre-Roman Empire church. I am simply ignoring that.
Everyone knows that there are Eastern Rite Catholics in full communion with the Pope. What this thread presupposes is, what if we just pretend they don't exist so we can get a move on.
“I knew him back when he was known as the Pretty Good Schism. He owes me one: I threw myself on top of an 18 year old Vietnamese girl and saved his life”
Black churches are pretty significant politically. Rev. William Barber II in particular has spoken at the DNC and has a regular protest schedule. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Barber_II
The only protestants I met growing up in NJ in the 80s were Black or UU. I didn't meet fundies til I was a clinic escort during operation rescue. I don't think younger folks knew there was a time when extreme religiosity was regarded as a little weird in all but small towns in the bible belt.
I mean, it’s been one of the stories of the last 40 years that the mainline denominations have been read out of popular consciousness in favor of evangelicalism.
My theory is that this is related to LA/NYC cultural dominance that sees Catholicism as “normative” Christianity*…
…and evangelicalism as “a weird thing we Need To Understand” and other stuff is missed.
*relatedly: a similar dynamic produces an idea that the NE white ethnic makeup (WASPs, Italians, Irish, Jews) as normative and white Southerners as “a weird thing We Need to Understand”, leaving out other stuff
Don't sleep on the Unitarians. Much depends on the particular congregation, but the one I attended as a teen was basically a socialist book club with some singing on Sundays.
I think many on the left could use a reminder on this as much as folks on the right. Understanding that a thread of goodness has always been there in tension with our original sins is critical to combatting the Trumpist narrative.
I teach World Lit and Intro Philosophy courses at our local comm college, and my students are usually fascinated by learning about non Christian religions and thoughts, and long for Comparative religion courses....in podunk Arkansas.
Episcopalians are generally my “go to” example for progressive Christians. Perhaps bc one of my closest friends from college is a devoted Episcopalian whose mom flirted with converting to Judaism and who ended up marrying a Jew herself. She’s also very committed to social justice.
We're so bad at getting in the news, and sufficiently removed from the standard political connotations of "Christian," that we lack object permanence and only exist to mass culture when the right is thinking about us
I think most of it is sincere from people who are relatively disengaged from American Christianity. I think the general American imagination of Christianity is dominated by right wing “evangelical” or “born again” Christians who are basically functionally a stand in for Southern Baptists.
I think I might go further- I suspect that the "born again"/"fundamentalist" image (a mashup of Southern Baptists, megachurches, Pentecostals, and snake-handlers) is so potent because for many American Christians, religion is integrated in daily life and this is another religion that's overt.
These are "Christians" because they're high-key about being Christians (just like high-church Catholic ritual is) and most American Christianity is not high-key in the same way. Certainly not mainline Protestants, though it's also part of daily life at the same time...
It's the Great Sort: American Christians are putting themselves in only two camps, separated not by (very real!) theological distinctions, but by politics, and those outside can only see it as *another* place of politics, and you can be a "fan" without being a part of the team.
This is a good thread--very accurate. I like how you do something I have a hard time doing --saying "henceforth we'll ignore that part". I always go down the rabbit hole of all the left out details.
I was going to say “I was raised Catholic & I knew this” but maybe some of it is because I’m old enough to remember pre-Moral Majority ‘80s evangelism—mainline liberal Protestantism was all over the place as a cultural force when I was a kid, maybe not so much for younger generations.
speaking for myself, a Jew who grew up in a place with nearly no Jews, I had only a very vague sense of the differentiations politically, theologically, or socially between Protestant churches until quite recently.
Honestly, though there are definite differences, there are a lot of convergences which make these things hard to see from the outside. Especially as denominational identification seems fairly slippery for a fair number of American Protestants.
In other words, both the American Episcopalian Church and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) endorse progressive causes at their top level, but because of internal governance differences Episcopalian preachers are more consistent and outspoken, but you can't tell the congregants apart generally.
Indeed, depending on the specific local situation, some people might drift back and forth between a local Episcopalian and Presbyterian church simply due to logistical factors or personal disputes with other members.
I'm an Episcopalian who years and years ago was confirmed in the Presbyterian Church USA, and there are big differences between the two denominations, from church organization to liturgy to theology. Plus, our ecclesial forebears literally fought and killed each other in the English Civil War.
My Catholic mother, who dated a Very Brooklyn Jew on and off for 35 years, used to tell me: You can marry a Catholic or a Jew, but no one in between. Who knows what those people even believe? And they change their minds every 5 minutes. (RIP mouthy little Mom)
Heck, I grew up (Westminster) Presbyterian and it's all gobbledygook to me. Probably because Presbyterianism itself is all People's Front of Judea/Judean People's Front (excepting, perhaps, the North/South schism, IIRC).
Honestly the only reason why I know Episcopalians are like that because the Episcopal church a friend of mine went to had a schism and the (conservative) ones who stayed at the building went Anglican.
Americans, even educated ones, are religiously illiterate for the most part. They know Judaism, Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism (black), and Protestantism (white). A lot of this is bc of a general taboo about speaking in any granularity about religion in public schools.
I was very lucky, in that my public high school history class had a semester on religion in America. The instructor’s take was that you can’t truly understand American history without knowing our religious history. It has turned out to be extremely useful.
It would be nice to have high schools cover the sociology of American religion, but people have a very very hard time distinguishing the study of religion as cultural phenomenon and study of religion as theology.
I've said similar things up here in Canada for similar reasons but I've conceded that there's only so much space in the curriculum and it won't make the cut. Which is too bad. I loved it university and would've loved it in high school too
I remember someone being outraged with me on Twitter/X when I said I have a Masters in Jewish History and Culture, until I pointed out that it was literally historical and literature based with no theological input.
It surprised me the number of people who asked: “oh, are you Jewish then?” No, in the way that people who studying equine studies are not actually horses (tbf we did have one Jewish guy in our MA group of 8 or so)
I think people, especially in the New World, if you will, tend to not-quite-consciously see study of group X as a way to connect with your heritage of group X.
Where they do this is Episcopalian schools. My HS religion classes (in AL!) visited diverse sites of worship, we studied the Bible as literature, and my essay on the hypocrisy of heaven published in the student literary magazine. It forced me to think in the context of multiple beliefs.
Yep, agreed. When my parents took me out of public school (because it was physically unsafe) and put me in an Episcopalian school, my mother was excited about the religion component. Lets just say that a critical examination of world religions did not have her hoped for result.
Someone I admire and learn from who can also help anyone looking for engaging “progressive” Christian content is Diana Butler Bass @dianabutlerbass.bsky.social
Thank you for such an engaging thread! I grew up in a conservative evangelical church and turned my back on Christianity for a long time. Learning about “progressive” churches who follow the teachings of Jesus has been so welcome for me.
I've spent a long time explaining to friends "how" I could "possibly" be a Christian. Some people just grow up under an iron Jesus boot and they understandably can't imagine anyone who does it otherwise is telling the truth.
I think it's an attitude probably most common amongst exvangelicals. Growing up in a "this is the one true church" environment restricts your exposure and also leaves you kind of traumatized when you leave.
My impression was the same. Whenever people ask me what church I go to (a question I am still baffled is allowed in polite conversation in the South), the reaction when I say the UU Fellowship is bafflement because they usually don't know what it is.
You're not learning much about them (other than that they have abandoned the strait and narrow due to their stance on abortion/LGBT) but you're definitely aware of their existence.
Same here with the UCC. We even did field trips to Orthodox Christian services to learn how they do things. No surprise UU and UCC were similar since they basically arose from the same New England Congregationalists.
I'm Catholic and am appalled by the direction the Church has taken in the US and recently wrote the Vatican to express general support of the positions the Pope has taken on many issues. But I don't get to go to Mass all the time and btw if u go on any day but Sunday it's much nicer
People who are secular liberals are completely removed from the Christians who still radically try their best to practice it according to what it says in the Book (which is not “make other people’s lives living hell in order to gain political power”
As an Episcopalian who was raised evangelical, it was a long time before I knew that there was a way to be Christian and not conservative. I think much of it is sincere; I still frequently run into people who am surprised that I'm queer and a Christian or progressive and a Christian
The only left-of-center Christians I was aware of (as in that I was aware of both their Christianity and their left-of-center-ness) until I actively sought out progressive Christians and progressive Christianity were John Green, Pete Buttigieg, and a couple of my high school teachers.
And I was not a disengaged evangelical kid/teenager—I'm the child of evangelical missionaries who was active in every part of church life I could be. I just had no idea that there were actual denominations with progressive ideals and wouldn't have even known to look for them
those raised evangelical or fundamentalist are raised without real knowledge of either denominational history nor the existence of the mainline - sometimes because they have wild tales told about the progressive / left mainline, and sometimes they have no knowledge whatsoever
(I was raised in the mainline and became a Pentecostal in HS, and I still remember meeting evangelicals in college who had no idea what a Methodist was)
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*it's a history not easy to explain here but noble attempt👍
don't think most know Dietrich Bonhoeffer/W Stringfellow/Christian democrat progressive left
or that Washington, Madison & Monroe were Episcopalians
https://christchurchphila.org/history/
We will begin, very briefly, with the Great Schism.
(Glossing over = excellent call.)
There's a *lot* of folks who seem to have been unaware.
Do you plan on covering the Black Church in this?
The Black Church is...
Sui generis is probably the best way to put it without going into the various sins of my and other denominations over the past ~400 years.
But the debates within and of the churches and such are different. (I really need to read Warnock's doctoral thesis which partly gets into this)
My theory is that this is related to LA/NYC cultural dominance that sees Catholicism as “normative” Christianity*…
*relatedly: a similar dynamic produces an idea that the NE white ethnic makeup (WASPs, Italians, Irish, Jews) as normative and white Southerners as “a weird thing We Need to Understand”, leaving out other stuff
There is a reason a ton of social justice politicians have a Rev. before their name…
It's disgusting, and very much part of the problem.
It's sort of funny how even as we're going to weather various slings and arrows of misfortune, a lot of Republicans are going to not know this.
ugh, stancil'd again.
that sense is still pretty vague
Just hard to do in a compulsory setting where you can't assume everyone is in a spot to have core beliefs potentially challenged.
I grew up in a New England town where you were either Jewish or Catholic, with Protestants being a bit exotic
(My dad was raised Episcopalian so it’s not a surprise to me personally….)
But compassion, sanctuary, and empathy are all Bad Words to MAGA.