I just answered a Twitter poll about religious identity. It’s no secret that I’m a Christian. And many of you know I’m an Episcopalian.
I’ve found recently that when I get worked up over an issue, it’s best to “write it out” rather than attempt to “sleep on it” since I just wind up tossing and turning anyway. So welcome to my “nightmare”.
I haven’t taught our World Religions survey course in many years. I honestly can say that I don’t miss it. I much prefer the Philosophy of Religion course and the Nature of Religious Experience course just because they lend themselves to more philosophical content. However, I did feel that I was doing a service to my country (and to God, frankly) when I taught the World Religions course. I fought back bigotry (yes! at SF State). The ignorance busting was not a happy chore, but someone had to do it.
Things somewhat devolved into only teaching the most basic elements of the religions. I only had time to do “The Big 5″ – Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Predictably, a few Christian students would have the view that the history of Christianity went something like this:
God–>Adam–>David–>Jesus–>Pastor Bob’s teachers in seminary–>Pastor Bob
Some students failed to grasp the fact that Martin Luther had anything to do with “Protestantism”. But I digress.
This Twitter poll has a lot of people answering “other Christian” 12%. Protestants are 5%, Catholics are 13% and Orthodox are 1%. I immediately flashed back to the bigot who said that Catholics weren’t Christians. (sigh) Maybe the high percentage of “others” were “Evangelicals”. Since many aren’t credal or in any other respect denominational, I imagine they think they aren’t Protestants. But then I calmed down a bit and realized that some of the “others” might be Mormons.
I think I would actually break down into a puddle of tears if after inviting me to speak to their college group’s Bible study, this hypothetical student would go on to declare adamantly that she was not a Protestant. (Catholics don’t have this problem that I’m aware of. They seem very clear that they’re Catholic and not “other”!) Again, I think the difficulty is that they have little knowledge of Christian history. That, or simply a pernicious, deliberate, anti-intellectualism. For my part, I’m confident that either Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, or the Wesley brothers’ tag team, could smack down a thousand Pastor Bob’s with no problem. (It wouldn’t be a fair fight, of course. Not very charitable of me, I grant you. But I calls them as I sees them.)
So as not to be guilty of the same kind of deliberate ignorance, I invite any reader to engage with me on this issue of Christian identity with respect to one’s identifying (or not) as a Protestant. I really want to understand this phenomenon.