This makes complete sense. American religion is much more influenced by frontier Restorationism or mid-century Jesusism than it is what some dead German guy nailed to a wall nearly 500 years ago. American religious movements have largely rejected denominational labels in favor of ecumenism.
Posters who want to die on the hill that “Protestant” identity is something worth protecting can go back to their established churches an ocean away
You act like Mainline Protestants have been some historic minority and oddity in America’s history, rather than a clear majority for the vast majority of it and not that much smaller than Evangelicals now … if the whackier branches of Christianity want to have their fun, go ahead, but it seems rather strange and classless to insinuate normal older churches are somehow “less American.” Frankly, it wreaks of a South-centric view.
lol, you're just perpetuating the myth that America is some uniquely *Protestant* country, a pseudo-history invented by Yankee WASPs in the 19th century to marginalize newer Irish and Italian immigrant stock. The 13 British colonies (to say nothing of Spanish Florida or French Louisiana, lol) were always pretty diverse, never monolithically Protestant settlements.
And the other history you're trying to employ as a smear against American religion isn't even right, lol. Six of the "seven sisters" of Mainline Protestantism weren't founded until the 20th century, and the only one that wasn't (the Episcopal Church, founded 1785) was the one most dominant in the South, lol.
You're the one classlessly deriding the quintessential inventions of American Christianity: evangelicalism, fundamentalism, Restorationist theology, Pentecostalism, the Holiness movement, etc. This is the shape Christianity takes when you have a settler/pioneer population living far away from established European hierarchies. You can join the bishops and cardinals of Old Europe in turning your nose up at it if you wish, but don't masquerade as the protector of legitimate "American" Christianiaty in doing so LOL
I don't think the founding dates of the very specific Protestant denominations really help illuminate anything historically.
For instance the mainline Presbyterian denomination, PCUSA, was founded in 1983 because older denominations merged. But the Presbyterian church has been in this country since the 17th century. Likewise with Methodists: regardless of whenever the UMC was "founded" Methodism has existed in the American religious tradition since the 1730s.
America was not uniquely Protestant or only Protestant, but it was majorly Protestant for a long stretch of its history
Methodism would have been perceived as Evangelical in "style" by most people in nineteenth-century America despite its relatively tightly structured theology and ecclesiology. The firm distinction between Mainline and Evangelical denominations is relatively recent and has always been at least as much political as theological.
