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But as the OP says, this year it was on the date of Easter only coincidentally. Easter, as we know, is a movable fest - on a different date each year - while this particular day has been on March 31 since it was first declared in 2009.
Incidentally, one might note that Trump team itself managed to use the highly curious statement "Catholics and Christians" ("We call on Joe Biden's failing campaign and the White House to issue an apology to the millions of Catholics and Christians across America who believe tomorrow is for one celebration only — the resurrection of Jesus Christ"), which sounds like, well, that they don't consider Catholics to be Christians.
More likely Trump is making a play for the Catholic vote specifically because it was a relative weakness in 2020 and he has a specific pitch(basically Biden's surveillance of actual IRL tradcaths and democrats are extreme on abortion). The dominant strain of conservative protestantism in the US considers being a real christian to be the result of an individual conversion which is entirely compatible with Catholicism.
Saying "Catholics and Christians" as though they were separate groups isn't the way to play to the Catholic vote. That's an obvious sign that the messaging is from an Evangelical who thinks we're heretics. As for TradCaths, they're a marginal group who are almost all voting for Trump anyway. I was raised Catholic (though my dad is a non-practicing Protestant), served as a Eucharistic minister, went to a Catholic college where half the faculty were priests and a lot of the students were conservative Catholics (and many of my friends became priests, or at least seminary dropouts), continue to attend mass semi-regularly, and I didn't even know TradCaths were a thing until a few years ago. I may have known vaguely of them but I couldn't differentiate them from the wackaloons who think that every pope since the Middle Ages is an antipope or the other wackaloons who ordain female priests. I went to a Latin Mass once when on vacation in South Carolina and while it was an interesting change of pace it wasn't something I'd want to replace the normal mass, more an interesting historical artifact that deserves preservation. The idea that this is a growing force in the Catholic church seems more an invention of internet conservatives than anything that has any serious influence in the church at large. My mother's much more devout than I'd be surprised if she's even knows these people exist.
It can be, but it doesn't have to be. The sacraments of initiation begin shortly after birth, and confirmation is more a question of "do you want to continue being Catholic and complete your initiation" than "do you accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior". Most practicing Catholics are born into it and just go with the flow, and conversions aren't dramatic and require months of RCIA classes. My SIL converted from some Evangelical strain about ten years ago and she said the difference between the churches is stark, most notably the lack of altar calls, which most Catholics find weird as they put people on the spot and create subtle pressure to conform; she liked being in an environment where she could sit and mind her own business without feeling pressured. When I was a kid my mum would take us to "Road to Jerusalem"-type living history things, some of which were at these kinds of churches. My mother was pretty naive about Evangelicalism since it didn't really have a presence in Pittsburgh when she was growing up, and she was pretty taken aback by how aggressive the calls for conversion were if there was a prayer service involved. These were in stark contrast to the mainline protestant services we'd attended for various reasons over the years that were different but not outside our expectations for what church was supposed to be like, e.g. liturgy slightly different, more/less singing, longer sermons, different prayers, etc.
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A sore point with some Evangelicals/Fundamentalists, because of strong Protestant anti-Catholicism. The Roman Church fell away from True Christianity (date at which this happened varies, some will go all the way to Constantine) and filled the pure Gospel message with man-made additions and traditions. The Reformers stripped all these away to get back to True Christianity (again, dissension over which denominations remained too Papist-influenced) and so long as Catholics continue to deny the Reformation and hold to their false doctrines, they can't be considered true Christians.
The traditional strain of American Evangelicalism is definitely not a fan of Catholicism, but it competes with a more ecumenical strain that sees Catholics either as perfectly valid Christians who happen to be wrong about some things (as all sects of Christians consider the others to be), or at least good allies against things opposed to their shared fundamental beliefs -- precisely the sort of situation being talked about here.
The big issue is, with the rapid rise of non-denominational Protestantism in the US, there really isn't a term that you can use to describe all Protestants that they would actually identify with except "Christians." And even that gets pushback from the "I'm not a Christian, I'm a Christ-follower" people. By far, the largest Christian group in the US that seems to still identify with a particular Church first is Catholics, thus the clunky term "Catholics and Christians," which really just means "Catholics and undifferentiated Christians." The trend elsewhere, outside of the LDS church and confessional Protestantism, is towards rebranding churches as just "X Church," instead of "X Baptist Church" or "X Bible Church" or even "X Methodist Church." And it's important to note that, if anything, evangelical Protestantism is more friendly towards Catholics than confessional Protestantism, who have explicit and very long catechisms and creeds that speak firmly against Catholicism and come from a time of literal warfare between the two groups.
If Trump's team wanted to pander to Catholics (as it seems he wanted to do) while communicating more effectively, they might have said "Catholics and Christians of all kinds," or something like that. But as it is I don't think it was designed to exclude Catholics, but explicitly to include them. It just sounds very clunky.
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Papists or Romanists are a specific sort of Christian. The ecumenicism of current year contrasts with the sectarianism of much of our shared history.
Latter Day Saints and Jehovah's Witnesses are frequently on the outside. Would Luther include them in the synagogue of Satan with the Papists?
I mean... if we're going to go with the "Christians and other" framing (which we really shouldn't but whatever), it seems to me that it should be "Christians and Protestants". Since Catholicism is both the OG and the largest Christian group.
Catholics claim to be the OG. Some of the eastern traditions would like a word.
They are the largest.
I'm not competent to litigate the dispute of whether the Catholics split from the Orthodox or vice versa, so I will leave that be. But either way, they are the OG in comparison to the Protestants.
Certainly older than the Protestents. I wasn't thinking specifically about the schism but I'm reasonably confident the churches in Antioch or Alexandria predate Rome. I'm not sure the distinction of first is particularly useful in this context.
One could say that Catholics are the oldest group celebrating Easter today anyway.
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As I recall, the ACX poll has categories of Catholic, Protestant, and Other Christians (e.g. Eastern Orthodox). That seemed basically fine.
I haven't listened to the audio, but a likely interpretation from Trump's comment is: This is an important holiday! It's important to Catholics! And it's important to other Christians too! That seems in keeping with his speech patterns that have made for uncomfortable sound bites before.
I checked and there's a Mormon category as well. I would certainly be interested if Scott would drill down even more, I'd like to see stats on EO vs OO -- and does he have any Church of the East peeps in his readership? (probably not)
(also I want to cross-reference this with Scott's "Have you thought about the Roman Empire in the past 24 hours" question)
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