Confused about Miers
So I'm listening to NPR this morning, and they're talking about Harriet Miers. No big surprise there. Except this part: Apparently Miers was Catholic 'before she converted to Christianity.' Er ... not to beg the question, but as a medievalist I have to ask ... WTF?
Repeat after me, class: Catholics are Christians. Arguably the original ones. Not that I have any personal stake in this.
8 comments:
I had exactly the same thought yesterday listening to NPR. At one point they said she'd converted from Catholicism to evangelical Christianity; okay, that's fine. But then for the rest of the story it was just about becoming a Christian. I know that the rhetoric of evangelical Christianity is that one isn't a Christian until having a "born again" experience, but I thought that the reporter wasn't very careful about not falling into the evangelical rhetoric.
Thanks, ADM. This has been annoying me for several days, and I've been waiting for a Catholic leader to speak up on the issue, but no one has. Instead, the media has adopted the rhetoric of James Dobson hook, line, and sinker. Ergh.
I'm right with you, ADM. I've heard this before from other Catholic-to-evangelical converts (and other variations on the same theme) and it makes me want to tear my hair out. Argh!
Right with you when I heard the broadcast. Oddly, this came up @ school the other day when I heard someone talking about why "Catholics and Christians dont get along." I experienced it once in grad school, too, when a very evangelical woman assured me that "Even a Catholic can become a Christian."
We're passing it on to our children, too. When I was teaching a few years ago several kids informed me that Catholics were not Christian. They were all good Presbyterians and Methodists and such, and apparently their churches were teaching them that anyone who wasn't Protestant wasn't Catholic. They weren't even fundamentalists. Nice to see the divisions are moving to another generation.
where I grew up anyone who wasn't Catholic was "public" and there were way more Catholics than publics!
I've always found this perplexing, both when evangelicals talk about "Catholics and Christians," AND when Catholics say, as several of my friends have done, "I'm not Christian, I'm Catholic." Huh? I think it's sometimes a language problem of using "Christian" when one really means "Protestant."
At least that's my theory. :)
terminal has hit the nail on the head. Christian has come to stand for any one of the 30,000 protestant denominations in this country.
I grew up with, "well, it's possible for catholics to be christian (ie "saved") but they aren't necessarily christian."
So generous.
Anyway, this really annoys me. On the brightside, I told my last class that Roman catholicism is a form of Christianity and their response was, "are there people who think it isn't?" Very refreshing.
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