That's not a religious problem though. It's a personal choice. Why would any of the 83% give a hoot what the 17% are doing. Christianity as cited in this example is a homogenous blob of lots of different beliefs and practices tentatively connected to one focus. The Evangelical in South Carolina will have no affinity with the Amish in Mass. Or the LDS in New York. Even less the Church of Englsnd flower arranger in Margate. You can't define Christianity as a catchall for all religions. There is enough difference in itself let alone the other faiths of the world.

@Geoffrey51 Yeah it's a gray area. Christians have a habit of citing their sheer numbers (a third of the world population, if you accept self-identified cultural Christians as the criteria) when it suits them and then treating most of those people as reprobates when THAT suits them. I'm sure most liberal Christians really don't see the evangelicals as "their" problem or part of "their" tribe but the reality in my view is that they have to own the crazy uncle in the basement and keep him from exposing himself to the neighborhood children, if they are going to ever cite some imagined "big tent" Christianity marching inexorably toward ushering in the kingdom of god on earth and the reconciliation of all things to Christ and so forth.

Of course they're not going to do that, what is actually going to happen is the liberals and the conservatives will continue to disavow each other and pretend that they are the natural heirs of the kingdom of god. At best, the other faction are "weaker brothers in Christ" and at worst, as you suggest, not really even the same religion. Actually if liberals want to stake the claim that evangelicals are heretics, I'd feel better about it than their mostly silent complicity in the way evangelicals undermine civil society.

@mordant certainly Mrd Jones who cleans the charge In Ckeethorpes and Mr Smith who runs errand Le for the vicar in Portsmouth wouldn't care about the militants in America or Jesuits in Patagonia. They probably wouldn't even know about them. Christianity is not likely to unite under one banner as there are too many banners!

@Matias I am probably influenced by the fact that I was very interested in those "tenets", to the point of being formally educated in them. While I recognize that even my one year of full time theological studies are way more than the vast majority of pew-warmers, I must say that my fellow laypeople were instructed in doctrine on a regular basis. It was an emphasis of my quasi-denomination (IFCA). While no layperson apart from my Bible Institute cohort to my knowledge owned their own complete set of Chafer's Systematic Theology, I did regularly encounter theologically literate people who could hold their own in theological debates. Most could for example list the names of the seven "dispensations of grace" that our sect taught and understood the differences between Calvinism and Arminianism and the way in which we modified Calvinism from the straight-up version. It was part of what defined us. It does appear, based on the low quality of discourse I've had with most fundamentalists, that this was unusual, though.

As to the self-transcendence / third dimension thing, that manifested for us in a sort of hokey enforced jollility, which we called "the victorious Christian life". It never really floated my boat, as it highlighted a lot of hypocrisy, and in practice, a lot of the church leadership was actually quite dour and defeatist and one-foot-in-front-of-the-other, "enduring to the end" anyway.

@Matias Well, less colloquially: "As for your self-transcendence remark, we had a sort of insincere "joyfullness" which we called "the victorious Christian life". I never subscribed to it or liked it, as people were hypocritical about it, and in fact, in practice, our leadership was actually quite dour and spoke of the need to "endure to the end".

Put another way, I suppose we had a sort of "reverse transcendence" where we trudged through life, suffering misunderstanding and persecution and mishap and constant tests of faith, with no hope of improvement until the afterlife. It was a sort of delayed, promised, eventual transcendence, displaced into the afterlife. I never had the patience for it myself, and didn't care to see myself as a noble martyr. I put up with it because it was expected, but had the temerity to think that god actually DID bless the righteous and confound the wicked, in THIS life.