Intolerance between Christian denominations
Christians, it is needless to say, utterly detest each other. They slander each other constantly with the vilest forms of abuse and cannot come to any sort of agreement in their teaching. Each sect brands its own, fills the head of its own with deceitful nonsense, and makes perfect little pigs of those it wins over to its side.The new Fundamentalist Churches do not consider Catholicism as being a Christian sect. (Even though all Protestant sects rely on the "divine inspiration" that guided the early Roman Church in identifying which books were canonical and which apocryphal, since Protestant Bibles contain a subset of the Catholic canon.)
-- Celsus, 2nd Century CE
Many Fundamentalist Churches are even more extreme and, like Luther centuries before, are determined that the Pope is the Antichrist and that the Catholic Church exists as a means for Satan to swindle away souls from God. There are numerous Evangelical Christian sites which are verbally abusive of Catholicism and those who follow it.
Just like how the Catholic Church has been trying for centuries to convert the Orthodox nations to Catholicism, Protestant (especially evangelical) denominations have in more recent times started attempting to convert Catholic South America, exasperating the Pope:
In three decades of ardent evangelizing, Protestantism in general has been so successful that the world's largest Catholic nation now is home to the second-largest Protestant population, after the United States. Mainline denominations, including Methodists and Baptists, are a growing presence. The 800,000 members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints make Brazil the Mormons' No. 3 stronghold.The country now has 50 million Protestants, according to Espinosa's research, and 41 million of them are claimed by Pentecostal churches. The Assemblies of God alone is said to have 20 million adherents and twice as many congregations in Brazil as the Catholic Church.
In the basement of the Assemblies' Sao Paulo headquarters, an electronic ticker tape touts the tally from the latest bimonthly baptism: 1,423.Pentecostalism did not exactly sneak up on Catholicism. In 1989, the Rev. Andrew Greeley described its growth among Latins as "an ecclesiastic failure of unprecedented proportions" for the Vatican. During the 1990s, John Paul II warned of the spreading "oil stain" of competitors that "threaten the structure of faith," and referred to Pentecostal churches as "rapacious wolves" devouring Latin American Catholics.
Pentecostals gave as good as they got, calling the pope "the antichrist" and the Catholic Church "the whore of Babylon."
The Christian Expositor, an evangelical site, in their article Rome - the 'Whore of Babylon?':
The Pope calls evangelicals 'sheep-stealing rapacious wolves' and 'dangerous sects'
...
We are called to 'offend' Catholics with the truth that they are lost and on their way to Hell
The new fundamentalist Churches have also determined that the Eastern Orthodox Churches are wrong. As an example, they cite Orthodox Christian rituals like Baptism (as a sign of conversion). According to many fundies, merely performing the baptismal rite does not signify conversion to Christianity. Of course, not all the Fundamentalist denominations agree or disagree with this.
Even the Mormon Church has now dispatched missionaries to Greece, to convert members of the Greek Orthodox Church to the "original restored Church" as the Mormons term their recent institution. But they were surprised to find how unwelcome their missionary activities were. In their turn, Mormons are the targets of conversion activity by the Southern Baptists:
Baptists, Mormons Share Some Views - The Associated Press (NY), 06/11/1998
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - The Southern Baptists chose Salt Lake City for their convention partially because of the opportunity to evangelize the Mormons, whom they consider not to be Christians.There is also significant disagreement amongst the various new American Christian denominations on numerous issues. Many don't agree on Christian doctrines pertaining to how salvation is obtained, for instance.
But when it comes to telling women they should "submit graciously" to their husbands, the Baptists are preaching to the converted.
Intolerance of other Christian sects is not merely something the earlier Christian Churches and the later Catholic and Protestant ones indulged in. The fight to claim (or declaim) the label of "True Christianity" is still going on. The modern evangelical sects of today are also intolerant of each other, often extremely so.
The evangelical Churches that have sprung up in Latin America, for instance, don't get along:
"This guy has been sent by Satan," screamed one of the preachers [of an Evangelical Church], Renildo Rodriguez da Silva. He pointed accusingly at a tall, well-dressed man in the crowd, an evangelical of a different stripe, and proclaimed, "He's evil."From: Catholic Crossroads: Latin America - Fight of its life - Philadelphia Inquirer, June 06, 2006
The two soon were locked in a shoving match. Police had to rush in to break it up.
Intolerance is also rampant among the fundamentalist Churches of North America. For instance:
You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist. I can love the people who hold false opinions but I don't have to be nice to them.Though at first this statement by Pat appears to be yet another instance of Fundamentalist logic, "love" in Christianity has a whole different meaning, which makes Pat's pronouncement entirely in keeping with the Bible.
-- Statement made by Pat Robertson on his televised program The 700 Club, January 14, 1991
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When the Christians took their religion with them to their colonies in the New World and in Asia, they didn't get along either:
With no understanding of shared supremacy and authority, missionaries fought among themselves just as had early orthodox Christians who had "wanted to command one another" and lusted "for power over one another." In Japan and China, the Dominicans fought bitterly with the Jesuits. In the Near East, the Franciscans fought with the Capuchins. And in India, the Jesuits fought several wars against the Capuchins. A Seneca chief asked of a Moravian missionary in 1805,"If there is but one religion, why do you white people differ so much about it?"-- The Dark Side of Christian History, by Helen Ellerbe