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Some Catholics lump evangelical and fundamentalists together under the broad term of Protestant. Most fundamentalists would call themselves evangelical in terms of their agreement with Christ’s command that Christians go out tinto the byways of the world and “evangelize” which some would also call prosletize(if one were casting aspersions).

So that is why I called for more clarification of definitions. I’ve read of a lot of Episcopalians joining the Catholic church with the terms both protestant and or evangelical being applied to them. I have not read of a lot of Assembly of God members leaving and joining the Catholic Church(in deed they are experiencing member growth supposedly documented by the same “neilsen” service that documents Catholic conversions, who ever documents these things). Yet Assembly of God members would call themselves evangelical and fundamentalist Bible believing orthodox Christians. So who has the authority to actually define what an evangelical is?

If one were to stay true to the socialized accepted meaning of the term “fundamentalist”; Roman Catholic believers believing that the Vatican is the only Christian authority on Earth and shunning all else who believe differently, might be described as “fundamentalist” in their view of their church and its practises!

The lumping of evangelical and fundamentalist into Protestant is no Catholic invention! “Protestant” meant someone who “publicly declared” their differences from Catholicism, initially referring to their objections to the Diet of Speyer in 1529. Calvinist, Lutheran and Anglican movements all identified with the movement, as did successive groups emerging from those traditions, such as Methodists, etc.

Various non-Catholic groups do not fit, or may not fit, into the term, “Protestant”:

1. & 2. Orthodox and Oriental churches predate doctrinal separations from the Catholic church, and therefore are regarded by just about no-one as Protestant.

3. Anabaptist churches dubiously claim that they have existed since before the Nicene Council in the fourth century, representing “primitive” Christianity, and hence rejected the notion that their faiths are protesting against anything. Following them, several Baptists churches have rejected the “protestant” label, although most schemes of categorizing churches regard Baptists as Protestants.

4. Restorationist churches, such as Mormons and 7th-Day Adventists, while not insisting as Anabaptist churches do, that they persisted throughout the Christian era, nonetheless do claim that they represent a restoration of primitive Christianity.

5. Many Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox churches reject several religious movements, such as Mormons, as lacking critical elements of Christianity, such as Trinitiarianism. For this reason, they are counted as quasi-Christian, and therefore outside Protestantism. This is made still less controversial by the fact that many such churches are Restorationist, and reject the label “Protestant,” anway.

6. Lastly, two movements within the Anglican church have led it to be placed outside Protestantism by many, despite its historical and doctrinal similarities. Many Anglican apologists, confronted with a movement back towards Catholic sensibilities, differentiated themselves from Catholicism by maintaining that the papacy had only recently asserted authority over England (11th century) at the time of the 16th century schism. (This is ironic, since Canterbury was established precisely as a means for Rome to reign back in the Irish Religious Orders, who, like modern religious orders, answer to their own “ordinaries,” rather than the “secular” bishop.) Also, as their theological and ecclesiastical affililation to the Catholic/Orthodox churches grew, they saw themselves as neither Catholic, nor Protestant, but as the middle way, the “Via Media.”