Originally posted by Starlight
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A significant difference I've personally observed between US evangelicalism (which has a strong representation in this forum) and the international version of mainstream interdenominational evangelical Christianity I grew up with is the above difference. The interdenominational Christianity I am more familiar with focused strongly on character change in the heart of the Christian and thus on the fruits of the spirit - love, kindness, mercy, compassion, self-control etc, and thus implied / agreed with a very utilitarian morality of generalized benevolence toward others that is non-judgmental and tries to promote love and compassion. Whereas I've found that to a degree that repeatedly shocks me that US evangelicals do not seem to be strongly interested in that and instead hold strongly to a rule-based, judgmental, divine-command morality and very high on their to-do list is to hold up their official list of Dos and Don'ts and denounce anyone who isn't following that God-given list. The difference is quite stark, as the former primarily focuses on becoming a loving and kind and non-judgmental person while the latter primarily focuses on being judgmental and if you ask them "but what about being loving?" they literally answer with "the most loving thing I can do is call out people's sin to encourage them to repent". It's quite a jarring difference, and I trace it back to a significant difference in moral paradigm that is being embraced (it could be argued that Christians here are not strictly-speaking embracing utilitarianism and are still endorsing divine-command theory and are simply focusing on different biblical verses to US evangelicals, and are hence following the divine-commands to "love one another" and to bear the fruits of the spirit etc).
I do imagine, though, that people's opinions and statements written here --presumably deemed judgemental by you or others-- are only part of the story, since I would imagine their Christianity is mainly about what they do in real life, so...
One thing that complicates matters greatly when you introduce your "saving souls" idea into the utilitarian paradigm is the question of how much weight does one place on saving souls versus on earthly goods? A common Christian answer in history seems to have been that saving souls has infinite value which means that any focus whatsoever on earthly goods is worth essentially zero by comparison and hence is a utilitarian evil if it takes any time or effort or resources at all away from the only thing that matters which is saving souls. This problem can be alleviated by teachings that diminish the urgency of saving souls (like suggesting everyone might be saved in the end), or that suggest salvation is about character change into being love-filled people rather than about 'faith' or inviting Jesus into your heart etc, though those sorts of Eastern Orthodox and/or liberal protestant teachings seem to be treated with great suspicion by most US evangelicals. Certainly most "social gospel" Christians seem to have tended to be more 'liberal' and significantly de-emphasized the value of 'saving souls'.
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