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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32405 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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Because America kinda hates Mormons

This is more "America barely understands religion", isn't it? "Christianity" is rated 19 or more points higher than any subset of Christianity? Jehovah's Witnesses' "we shun people who leave" (or more likely "we knock on your door and annoy you") is rated lower than FLDS' "we kick out teen boys to reduce the competition for child brides"?

"Christianity" is rated 19 or more points higher than any subset of Christianity?

This makes sense to me. All Christians will associate their own church most strongly with Christianity and thus rate it higher than any other faction besides their own. Also, people mostly associate weak Christians with Christianity and stronger/more pushy Christians with their particular denomination.

I think the FLDS church benefits from the association with the LDS church, and the LDS church is hurt by that association, which might explain why the FLDS church is rated higher than the Witnesses and barely lower than the LDS church.

I’m guessing recognition is a pretty big factor. Americans approve of Christianity especially because it’s a synonym for their particular sect and have reservations about that other one over their. Fundamentalist church of Latter Day Saints? If I didn’t know what it actually referred to, I’d have assumed they were a Calvinist or Pentecostal group(very few Americans use the term Latter Day Saints in ordinary conversation).

Every devout Christian is going to say they love Christianity; they just hate those heathen apostate Baptists or papists or Eastern Orthodox. Most nations have an ethnically rooted "state" religion, even it isn't one officially, so for most places I would imagine you'd find that approval of Christianity would mirror closely the approval of whichever sect prevails in that locale. Few places have the diversity of cohabiting beliefs that the USA has, and Mormons in particular are pretty universally reviled or at least discounted by most major Christian religious institutions, since they have fundamental dogmatic disagreements that most other Christians consider fundamental tenets to true belief. Additionally LDS and its offshoots as well as JW have, in my experience, the most vituperative exbelievers of any (US at least) semi-mainstream religions. Whether that's for good cause or not is left as an exercise to the reader.

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