General Discussion

So... the Catholic Church, well known for traveling the world to shove Jesus down everyone's throats, is an American institution now? Got it.

Yeah, there's a lot of history to this, but it's a part of why there's so many unusual or distinctive off-shoots of Christianity that come from the US: Jehovah's Witnesses, LDS, Seventh Day Adventists, Evangelicalism, etc...

It's not just the Puritans, in fact, it's mostly not, though they've given us plenty of other cultural baggage.

Because we weren't our own nation, we didn't have our own bishop in the church of English, so for ministers to get ordained they had to go to England to be trained and then come back.

This gave rise to a conflict between the New Lights and Old Lights. The New Lights were basically proto-evangelicals and they determined that the proof of qualification to be a minister wasn't a degree, education, or some church approval from overseas, but the ability to gather a church.

This meant that charisma became the defining trait for a successful minister. This is why evangelicals have such terrible theology. There's all these ideas that are mainstream evangelical ideas that never existed before this period.

The rapture was created during this period. That's right, for nearly 1800 years Christians wouldn't even know what you meant if you said "the rapture" and now evangelicals wander around telling everyone to be prepared.

Heh, and before the 15th century it was the American Christians that went on Crusades, yeah?

Well us and Africa… and Russia

For real though

It's all the fun banning puritans who got booted out of the country after their coup and subsequent dictatorship finally got overthrown who were the bulk of the Thirteen Colonies, which largely just left the "love thy neighbour" Christians who actually campaign against racism, homophobia, climate change and whatever else can be seen as people insulting "God's creation" which frankly I can completely get behind even if I don't believe it as such.

Frankly I don't get the mind bending logic to ignoring all the "everyone is God's child, he has made them as he sees fit, he loves them, you should love them too" stuff in the bible and skipping past to a small subsection which says that men shouldn't sleep together, especially when they ignore the fact that the same section says that anyone who works on a Sunday should be put to death along with a bunch of other wild and wacky stuff that we just all collectively agree was a product of the time it was written...