This Fox News list of "America's Top Christian Colleges and Universities" is fascinating for many reasons, but maybe especially for the fact that it erases Catholicism from Christianity. i.e., schools like Georgetown and Notre Dame aren't mentioned at all.
The founded-by-Christians Ivy League schools are also missing, but that's less surprising, given that they've dropped their religious affiliations over time. Catholic universities, by contrast, still require students to take theology classes. And yet, they aren't included here.
My husband and I were both raised in heavily Catholic communities in the Northeast, and neither of us can remember any priests, CCD teachers, or family members mentioning that other groups might question Catholicism's Christianity.
I first encountered it 20 years ago teaching in Pomona, California. The Latino Charismatic Storefront Evangelical Churches teach that Catholics are not Christian.
Local recent religious histories in El Salvador, Honduras, and Mexico seem to drive it.
My 81 yo mom knew something like this as her high school boyfriend’s parents (Protestant) made him break up with her as she was Catholic. And then they moved away.
In hindsight, this makes me think about the Methodist Minister's son I hooked up with in high school who said we couldn't officially date because his parents wouldn't approve. I figured it was just a weird one-off case, but clearly there's something much bigger going on!
This is fascinating to me because it is so foreign to my own experience.
I'm not sure I have ever even talked about religion with anyone I've dated, except so that we could mutually understand the other's parents.
The Christian bookshop in the city where I went to college had a whole bunch of tracts and pamphlets for evangelizing to Catholics - trying to "get them to see" that they were being "misled"
Years ago I taught CCD and used to purchase supplies and the occasional gift at a nice Christian bookstore. Until they put up a display of those tracts and titles like “The Problem of Catholics.”
I totaled up all the $ I’d spent there and told them why they’d never see another dime.
