American Christianity

[denny]

Ex perl hacker and now Christian missionary, Simon Cozens has an interesting take on Christianity versus American Christianity

Comments

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

One of the (now re-directed) linked articles from time

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1191826,00.html

Has a very good take on this as well.

[romauld.livejournal.com]

That is very interesting indeed, and thank you (I'd never heard of this guy). I grew up in the African mission field, which is (as you might expect), *very* heavily influenced by US culture and politics: probably about a third of all missionary families I knew are American, and at least half of those were Southern Baptist: ie. Texans, Georgians and Arkansawyers with all of the Confederate cultural trappings that implies.

I wasn't really old enough to have arrived at any kind of subtlety in my socio-political analyses, so I missed this point although I was reaching for it, and instead came to a conclusion which I believed for a very long time: that there were two seperate religious entities within the 'Christian' umbrella: Christianity and the Church.

Not an original observation, I know: but I was very young.

Observing the syncretic and identity-based development of American fundamentalism, particularly since the Dominionist movement (http://informationclearinghouse.info/article8499.htm) began to see real grass-roots success, does suggest that there are in fact three different religions within that whole: possibly four, if (as most American fundamentalists seem to believe) Catholicism is a different religion again.

Once again, I'm very strongly reminded of the current cultural civil war within the international umbrella of Islam: they've had their own 'protestants' for quite a while (they actually got started before the Christians did, as early as the 1080s there were three different Islamic religions) and there is definitely an observable parallel between the development of the Islamist, "Universal Sharia" cultural and political movement within its own religious context, and that of the American Fundamentalist movement within Christianity. Not least because the Islamist movement is just as divorced from the religion of peace, hard work, charity and loyalty that is mainstream Sunni Islam as the Dominionists are from the religion of ... um, peace, hard work, charity and compassion which is non-Fundie Christianity.

[mindcrime.livejournal.com]

open source leads to all sorts of zealotism.

[jezzifishie.livejournal.com]

It is interesting to compare English denominations with American denominations, as they are often completely different. Many people assume that American (southern) Baptists are the same as English Baptists, but this is definitely not the case.

By the way, All Nations Christian College is in my home town :) They have an excellent library :)

[romauld.livejournal.com]

The Baptists are a particularly complex denomination: in the world as a whole, the British Baptist Council pretty much get on with most other Baptist Councils, but in the States they don't even get on with each other. The First Baptists and the Southern Baptists, for example, are major denominations who would quite happily rain fire and brimstone on each other's country clubs and massage parlours.