It is helpful to keep in mind that some of the core tenets of the SBC are a belief in the “priesthood of the believer” and the autonomy of individual churches. The Convention has absolutely NO say in what an individual church does (including who they call as a pastor or who they ordain). They can exclude a church from membership, but the Convention itself does not have any say in whether a church ordains a woman as a minister.
I’ve belonged to several SBC churches that have ordained women as deacons, ordained women as ministers, and had women as pastors. In fact, one church I belonged to recognized and supported a gay union in the early 90s. Yes, the minister officiated and both the ceremony and the reception were held at the church. Shortly thereafter, they chose to leave the SBC, but they were definitely a member when the congregation voted to celebrate the union and when the ceremony was held.
In recent years,the Convention has taken a much more conservative turn in requiring adherence to the Baptist Faith and Message for member churches.
My great-grandma, who died a month before I was born, was an Assemblies of God traveling preacher. And it I have always been taught that it was often wives who brought their husbands into the faith. It definitely was the case with my grandma and mom.
That said, there still do seem to be gender roles, at least, as practiced. I’ve never actually had a female main pastor, and it is the men who sit on the board of deacons. There will be sermons about a man’s role as the head of the house, and a bigger expectation that the women will cook and such. You call on the older ladies of the church to pray for you (with the implication she will tell all the other older ladies), but you generally call a male elder to pray with you.
That said, I really am not sure I consider the A/G Evangelicals, due to the charismatic leanings. Growing up, I was taught we were Pentecostal, though other Pentecostals disagreed since we let women cut their hair and wear pants and makeup.
I don’t really agree with that. Yes, there was a sense of that historically, but, at this point, the Evangelicals try to separate themselves from the Fundamentalists. The latter are far more about separating themselves from others. They’re the type that is likely to homeschool their kid to keep them out of the sinful world. They hold on to fundamental views, which does not mean the Bible so much as a rejection of modernism.
Evangelicals are comparatively more moderate, to the point that they are the quintessential “American” Christianity. I don’t mean that there aren’t other types of Christians in the U.S., but that Evangelicalism really developed here.
That is, of the mainstream sects. People could argue that Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormonism are far more American grown, but these are, as stated above, seen as having spun off their own thing.
I’d argue that, in American culture, anything you hear about Christians that isn’t Catholic is pretty much Evangelical or sprung from Evangelicalism (like Fundamentalism). That’s not to say there aren’t other types, but most of what you know about Christianity from media will come from either Catholicism or Evangelicalism.
For US folk, I’d direct the reader to the 6 part taxonomy by Christian Churches Together in the USA (CCT): [ul]
[li] Evangelical,[/li][li] Pentecostal,[/li][li] Historic Protestant,[/li][li] Historic Racial/Ethnic,[/li][li] Eastern Orthodox, and[/li][li] Roman Catholic [/ul]I refer to Historic Protestant as “Mainline Protestant”, and include Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic as fellow mainline Christian groupings. I’d also fold Pentecostal into Evangelical. [/li]
The Evangelical wing is detailed here: http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_evan.htm
As alluded to above, only 30% of white evangelicals believed that personal immorality was consistent with ethical performance of official duties in 2011. In 2016 that number shot up to 72%. Situational ethics and US evangelicalism is discussed here: Has Trump caused white Evangelicals to change their tune on morality?
I’ve got kind of a related question: Are Mormons considered to be Protestant? I can think of a couple arguments for and against, but I’d really like to hear from someone who knows. Do Protestants (Lutherans, Baptists, Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, et al) consider Mormons to be in their fold? Do Mormons consider themselves to be Protestant?
I think it’s safe to say that most institutions in modern America that call themselves “Christian” (Christian bookstores, Christian schools, Christian rock, etc.) are mainly run by and targeted to Evangelical Christians.
Churches that have the word Christian in their name (“_____ Christian Church”) are often Evangelical, though they may also be affiliated with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), a mainline Protestant denomination.
This blogger argues that Mormons are Protestants based on the origins of the church, though they acknowledge that most Mormons and most Protestants would disagree.
This is probably a question for another thread, though. Perhaps in Great Debates.
In one extreme, any Christian not Catholic or Orthodox is Protestant. In the other, Episocpalians and Methodists Protestant aren’t because they didn’t come from the Reformation. I’ve heard very few people believe the former and even fewer the latter, though they do have an (overly pedantic) point.
A good example would be paleontologist Robert Bakker. He certainly cannot be described as a fundamentalist, but he IS a Pentacostal lay preacher. Pentacostalism is undeniably an Evangelical Protestant movement. He sees no conflict between the study of paleontology and his beliefs. The wiki article sums it up thus:
I was thinking about this today and ask a small question about Anglicanism. Partly because of some oddities in its historical roots, it sounds like that particular church* has an ambiguous theological identity. Anglicans historically ranged from well, Catholics who couldn’t admit it without being killed, to people who were basically Catholic except they hated the Papacy but probably couldn’t explain why, to Establishment Anglicans, to functional Presbyterians, to Methodists, to complete Evangelicals. Depending on the time and place, of course. It sort of tracks the High-Church and Low-Church sides, though not 100%.
Anglicanism was in the seventeenth century pretty much a genuinely Protestant church, in some regards even ‘lower’ than the Lutherans. Thomas Cranmer for example had a pretty low view of what happened in the Eucharist, and if you seriously follow the 39 articles according to the text on the page, they’re quite thoroughly Protestant. In the nineteenth century, though, the Oxford Movement managed to make a strong case for a more “Catholicizing” perspective on issues like Mary, Purgatory, confession, the veneration of saints and angels, the Eucharist, and so forth. By around 1930 or so there was genuinely a wide variety of belief in Anglicanism. On one side were people who believed in seven sacraments, confession to a priest, marital indissolubility, a purgatorial state after death, the perpetual virginity / dormition / etc. of Mary, invocation of angels and maybe to some extent saints, prayer for the dead, transubstantiation and all that. On the other side were people who believed all the reverse.
Since 1930 with the birthcontrol decision, and more so in the post-1960s era with ordination of women, and later with changed teaching regarding divorce and homosexuality, a new divide has opened up in Anglicanism between “traditionalists” and “modernists”, which doesn’t really track the Anglo-Catholic vs. Anglo-Calvinist divide and is more or less perpendicular to it, so now you could really think of Anglicanism as being an unwieldy spectrum that’s divided four ways rather than two.
Episcopalians/Anglicans sort of come from the Reformation. One example of a modern Protestant church that genuinely predates the reformation is the Moravians though there aren’t that many. (The Czech lands were forcibly re-converted to Catholicism and today are mostly nonreligious, one of the highest levels of nonreligion in the world).
Since Vatican II, some Anglican/Episcopalian churches are somewhat more Catholic than Catholics. Today there are both high and low churches. I’m not sure how to tell the difference by looking at them. Presence and classical quality of stained glass?
How so? Just because of the general “reforming” attitudes at the time?
Pretty much. in an earlier age, Henry VIII would have had to dump Catherine and do a Walk to Canossa or something - the idea of breaking with Rome was practically unthinkable, the Eastern Schism nonwithstanding. By 1529, though, Henry could look across the Channel and see the solution materializing before his eyes. The Church of England’s origin was part of the Reformation, even if it was more about succession to the throne than theological matters per se. The fact that the Acts formally breaking with Rome are usually called the Reformation Parliament is testament to this formulation.
Incidentally, many (if not most) Unitarians also trace the origins of their church to the Reformation, given the example of Michael Servetus, whose disputations with John Calvin were certainly part of the Reformation. As such, Unitarian Universalism might also be grouped in the Protestant bucket, even though that church’s doctrine (or lack thereof) is even further afield from how we would normally understand Protestantism.
Evangelicals firstly are always Protestant. So non-Prorestants get kicked out of the bucket.
Among Protestants, there are generally three main divisions, Mainlines, Evangelical and Historically Black (which have aspects of both Mainline and Evangelical churches.) Evangelical churches differ from Mainline in several distinct ways. Firstly, they tend to be more fundamentalist and charismatic.
Fundamentalist means that they take a very literal reading of the Bible. Adam, Eve and Noah actually existed in their minds and the world is 6000 years old give or take. Mainline Protestants are much less likely to believe this. They see the Bible more as a series of stories that impart truth and provide guidance, but aren’t true in the literal sense.
Charismatic means they believe in biblical charisms which can simply be defined as miracles. They believe in faith healing and people prophesying and speaking in angelic voices and other spiritual manifestations. Mainlines are more likely to say that while the possibility of these things may exist, they are so rare as to mostly be discounted. God tends to work via humanity doing good to others rather than by lightning bolts from the sky.
Evangelicals place less emphasis on social justice. Mainline churches tend to skew liberal and Democrat and place heavy emphasis on making the world a better place. They tend to be more environmentally minded and place large emphasis on poverty relief and economic equality measures. They generally favor gay marriage and are pro-choice.
Lastly, mainlines tend to be more ecumenical. They are more likely to have a big tent version of who is saved. Many (myself included) are universalists who think everyone is going to heaven. This view is generally heresy in Evangelical churches.