Sectarian bigotry

S.M. Hutchens at Touchstone Magazine's Mere Comments, writes about the Roman Catholic/Protestant divide in the context of growing up in an Evangelical church in a community with many Catholics:

The few Catholic fanatics I encountered, including the Marian ones, looked very much like Protestant fanatics I knew - just with different objects for their fanaticism. A lot of the Catholic nuts clustered around Mary just like the Protestant nuts (in my church, anyway) clustered around end-times prophecy - but a nut is a nut, wherever you find him. The Catholics who hated Protestants suffered from the same personality flaws as their Protestant counterparts. As far as earning their salvation by good works was concerned, I knew no official Catholic doctrine, but did notice that Catholic legalists and bean counters, who really thought they could, were the kind of people who you would expect to: either obsessive types or people who relied on their baptisms for salvation because they preferred this to walking with God. They were a lot like the Baptists who thought their souls were eternally secure because at some time in their lives a preacher got them whupped up enough to get saved. Neither of them seemed to be trusting in the God of the Bible, who clearly was not the kind of salvation machine they took him for.

It does seem that, increasingly, orthodox believers in all Christian denominations recognize the importance of their commonalities in the face of the tenuous and uncertain doctrinal commitments of the theological liberals in their traditions.

Source: Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments: The Touchstone Evangelical