Actually, David, it’s been my observation that the Fundamentalist Protestant set makes voting Republican a matter of faith and morals. The Catholic Church, aside from a hard core that the rest of us consider a bit peculiar, does not. If you speak well of a liberal political candidate, no matter how upstanding, or ill of a conserviative one, no matter how sleazy, in the hearing of a group of Fundamentalist Protestants, you are lucky if all they do is give you dirty looks and move away from you as though fearing some vile contagion…
And no, this is not just an outsider’s perception. I went to a fundamentalist Baptist school during Junior High and my freshman year of high school, and they actually sponsored a schoo “field trip” which consisted of hauling the students out into a semi-rural area, where we were made to distribute campaign literature for a Republican congressional candidate.
Of course, I suppose that you could consider the conservative priests you mentioned to be Fundamentalists, but they are more of the stripe of the Fundy Prots than representative of the Catholic Church. Fundamentalists seem to cut across all denominational lines, though most of the Prots will refuse to recognize the Catholics as Christians.
TheaLogica, I’ve been involved in several churches on the “fundamental” side of mainline Protestant; including Southern Baptist, non-demoninational evangelical, and the home-church shepharding movement. I used to watch the 700 Club fairly regularly. I spent quite a few years at a private, very fundamental, Christian school. Never in my life did I ever get the slightest hint that Catholics weren’t Christians.
Sure, there might be some real loonies out there affecting a fundamentalist veneer while they hide in the woods or behind Websites and bash Catholicism, but I do not believe this is a part of very many Protestant creeds, fundamental or not.
As Rysdad indicated, down South there are still very many Protestants who would rather keel over right now than vote for a Republican. True, that is changing as the political parties realign in the South, but the “yellow-dog” Democrats still exist.
Hmmm. Don’t have a lot of experience with Fundamentalists of the Southern variety, except for what I’ve seen on TV, being a Yankee girl and all, but the transplants from the South I knew were pretty staunch Republicans. The Northern Baptists pretty much divided the world up into Democrats and Christians, even though Jimmy Carter, a professed born-again Christian, was President at the time. The faculty and staff at TCB heartily endorsed Reagan. Of course, word hadn’t gotten out about the astrologers that Nancy consulted on his behalf…
And at the Baptist school I attended, we were, in fact taught that Catholics were not Christians. I almost walked out of devotions one morning because an invited guest speaker stated as much, and I considered myself Catholic at the time, even though I wasn’t practicing. The administrator said nothing to the contrary, so I assume the statement had his endorsement. I found a Chick Tract on my desk once, and it scared the bejeebers out of me. And these folks weren’t hiding out in the woods. The church was in a city of over 100,000.
Leaving aside all the examples for a second, Satan, if I understand the topic it might also be asked “who decides what a label means?”
If a set of people, A, is characterized by having some defining set of characteristics (like beliefs), then anyone NOT having those characteristics is not a member of A. The debate seems to be how to decide what the characteristics are. Does being a Democrat mean being pro-choice? If so than anyone not prochoice is not a Democrat. This either is or is not obviously the case, depending on who you ask. The right to decide the characteristics that define the group A only becomes an issue after the label takes on a life of its own and can survive redifinitions, hence the attempts of various political parties to “reinvent” themselves.
I would say that in practice, everyone has to decide for himself what the labels he applies to himself mean. If he then finds that using that label has no communication value because other people assume it means something else, he usually fights to redefine the term in other people’s minds or stops using that label. The latter is usually easier.
I have had this experience with calling myself an atheist. To me, that means I think the existence of God is extremely unlikely, if formally possible. “Atheist” seems more accurate than “agnostic” to me, because I put the probability so low (below, say, 1%); agnosticism seems to me to be a term for people who are more on the fence about it than I am. But most people assume “atheist” means that I assert with absolute conviction that there is no God, and start demanding “proof” from me. So I need a new label; just haven’t found one yet.
