There seem to be a lot of fundamentalist protestants on FR who have a very narrow world view. They live in regions that are 90% protestant, and probably haven’t encountered many non-protestants in their everyday lives. When they encounter non-protestants on the Internet they don’t see them as real Christians, but probably weird cults.
It would probably shock them to learn that fundamentalist Protestants are actually the smallest of the three major types of Christians in the world, after Catholics and Orthodox (both of which predate protestantism by 1500+ years)
Part of the reason they ignore Orthodox Christians is that the orthodox are only 3.5% of Christians in the U.S., though worldwide there are least 300 million orthodox, and Eastern Orthodoxy is the second largest Christian communion in the world.
It would probably shock you to learn that Protestants vastly outnumber the Orthodox globally, Pentecostals alone might already outnumber the Orthodox.
America started Protestant, is still mostly Protestant and the very foreign Orthodox never caught on among the vibrant, diverse, religious American people, the actual percentage of Orthodox in the United States is only .06% , almost non existent and they don’t seem to be going anywhere in new places in the world like Africa and Latin America.
Orthodox seems closer to 225 million than 300 million world wide, with Protestants being much larger and growing rapidly in diverse corners of the world from Africa to Latin America, and Orthodox is largely limited to old closed societies, as examples. Eastern Orthodoxy is the largest single religious faith in Belarus (85%), Bulgaria (83%), Macedonia (65%), Cyprus (80%), Georgia (89%), Greece (98%), Moldova (98%), Montenegro (74%), Romania (87%), Serbia (84%), Russia (80%), and Ukraine (80%). The number of Eastern Orthodox adherents represents about 36% of the population in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In Albania the adherents number around 25% out of a 40% Christian population, the other being Roman Catholic. As the dominant religion in northern Kazakhstan, it represents 40% of Kazakhstan, and 4% of Lithuania, 9% of Latvia.
I don’t know the religious makeup of FR but I don’t agree with your attempts to portray a lot of them as some kind of backwards Protestants that live in isolated enclaves of religious ignorance where the knuckle dragging Methodists and Episcopalians and Southern Baptists, and Presbyterians all share a “very narrow world view”.
There was a thread awhile back where they tabulated the results. Of course we can't be certainly since the numbers were only tallied from those who opted to participate in the survey, but the results were pretty close to what the USA as a whole is. The largest denomination on FR is Catholic, though all the other denominations combined outnumber them. Fundamentalist protestants make up a small percentage of freepers, and do not represent this forum as a whole.
>> I don’t agree with your attempts to portray a lot of them as some kind of backwards Protestants that live in isolated enclaves of religious ignorance where the knuckle dragging Methodists and Episcopalians and Southern Baptists, and Presbyterians all share a “very narrow world view”. <<
I said nothing of the sort. I specifically said that the YEC types are probably types who live in isolated communities where the only types of Christians they see in their everyday lives are fellow "bible literalists" and they rarely, if ever, encounter Catholic or Orthodox Christianity. And I demonstrated that by showing you there are many portions of the bible belt that are well over 80% protestant, but less than 5% Catholic and probably less than .05% Orthodox.
I certainly didn't say ALL Protestant freepers as a whole are unfamiliar with other types of Christianity. Most protestants in the U.S., if I had to guess, encounter Catholics on a regular basis and have a good understanding of other denominations. But there is a very SMALL faction within protestantism of "only fundamental protestants who follow a literal interpretation of the King James version of the bible are Chrisitans" mindset (for example, this guy) , and my guess is they think that way because that's the only "Christians" they interact with.
I live in a region of the country that is over 60% Catholic (though far less lopsided than the 80%+ protestant regions of the nation), and even though there are plenty of protestants in town I was never really deeply familiar with protestant teachings until college. I was really shocked to learn many protestants think Jesus had brothers and sisters. I had always assumed the vast majority of Christians taught Jesus was an only child.
How else do you explain comments on FR like Catholics never use the bible during mass and Catholics are the only Christians on the planet who have Mary devotionals? Anyone with the very basic understanding of the major denominations within Christianity knows that's false. It would be like me claiming all Protestants pray to Martin Luther. Sheer ignorance that shows you know nothing about other kinds of Christians.
I'm sure they could learn about other kinds of Christians if they wanted to interact with the 4% of the population that is in another denomination, but they choose not to.