I have the dubious honour of being considered batshit crazy by everyone else. I'm wondering whether you're the only person with a higher education there. Okay, this has all the craziness of a double misunderstanding. First, evangelical churches are not the same as mainstream Protestant churches such as the Lutherans, the Anglicans or the Calvinists. Baptists, Pentecostal churches and the like are a subgroup of the Protestant church and are called 'evangelical', because they believe in spreading the Good News to all and sundry. (I've been told that the word Evangelium means 'Good News', though I've never bothered to check that out.) Secondly, I didn't mean that the people in my church think I'm batshit crazy (though there's that, too), but normal agnostic mainstream Catholic/Protestant church members or atheists, who can't understand why anyone would actually believe the tenets of the religion that they are affiliated to. Being a member of an evangelical church is quite the in thing in the US (Obama is a Baptist, I believe, while George W Bush is a Methodist or something like that; most of the members of the Tea Party movement belong to evangelical churches), but in the Old World it's generally considered rather wacky. Members of evangelical churches tend to have very rigorous views on abortion, homosexuality, etc., while other Protestant churches, as you say, tend to be a lot more liberal.
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Date: 2012-06-12 08:08 pm (UTC)I'm wondering whether you're the only person with a higher education there.
Okay, this has all the craziness of a double misunderstanding. First, evangelical churches are not the same as mainstream Protestant churches such as the Lutherans, the Anglicans or the Calvinists. Baptists, Pentecostal churches and the like are a subgroup of the Protestant church and are called 'evangelical', because they believe in spreading the Good News to all and sundry. (I've been told that the word Evangelium means 'Good News', though I've never bothered to check that out.) Secondly, I didn't mean that the people in my church think I'm batshit crazy (though there's that, too), but normal agnostic mainstream Catholic/Protestant church members or atheists, who can't understand why anyone would actually believe the tenets of the religion that they are affiliated to. Being a member of an evangelical church is quite the in thing in the US (Obama is a Baptist, I believe, while George W Bush is a Methodist or something like that; most of the members of the Tea Party movement belong to evangelical churches), but in the Old World it's generally considered rather wacky. Members of evangelical churches tend to have very rigorous views on abortion, homosexuality, etc., while other Protestant churches, as you say, tend to be a lot more liberal.