Make sure it's one that defines itself that way. Having you define them is nicely pointless and arrogant beyond belief. These things are best left to the people involved.
I'd like to find the "Council on American Christian Relations." There
The large group saying that there is only one Xian religion and which, when something like a Xian kills somebody denies that he was ever a Xian. There was a World Council of Churches--I assume it still exists, but it wasn't popular in many quarters and much of its work was ignored by most people in the trenches.
So you really won't find many like that. Why? Because we have a long-standing tradition of denying that other Xian groups "are part of us." They're Xian, sure, but because they say they are. Everybody self-defines, and when push comes to shove the Baptists don't recognize the Pope's authority, and he doesn't recognize the authority of the Episcopal council that rendered a verdict on gay marriage a few years ago. When the Puritans left England, it wasn't because they felt a deep kinship with their fellow Xians in England.
In other words, we have different confessions. We know that there are different confessions. Our history is built on having different confessions. And when a member of one group does something, we don't expect the Pope to apologize for what a Jehovah's Witness does, nor for the Mormons to apologize for what a Southern Baptist does. Any more than the Catholics felt a deep kinship with the Huguenots.
There's a double standard because there are two quite distinct, quite different situations and contexts.
But as soon as there's a Muslim-related incident, there's a rally-round-the-Qur'aan moment where it's Islam that's under attack, a singular, unitary Islam. In fact, one of the problems that many Muslims have with the Salafists isn't that they're Salafi but that they're takfiri. They go around calling other Muslims "kafir" or "infidels."
It's squirrelly with Shi'ites and Sunnis and the cross-cutting Sufis. They fight and kill each other, but as soon as there's an outside threat again pull together to say they're in unison. There are different schools of fiqh or interpretation in Sunni Islam. There's the Shi'ite/Sunni split. There's traditional versus mystical. But there's one Islam, and when a Sunni bombs a Sufi shrine, when a Shi'ite attacks a Sunni, the newspapers still say, "We're all one faith."
But to the extent that they have to decry people like Farook as "not having a religion" instead of being part of some oddball hate-filled sect of Islam--a dodge that doesn't seem to work very well when in most cases the dorks doing the killing say they're doing it for Islam--they feed the meme. There's one Islam; you're Muslim or you're not-Muslim. Since Xians self-define, it's self-defeating to say that a self-defined Muslim "has no religion", just as it's self-defeating to after the fact say that the killer is kufr. You're takfiri or you're not, saying "we can't say somebody's not a Muslim" until he does something that brings shame to your religion makes you look like you're lying or just suddenly a convenient truth only after it's inconvenient to stick with the former truth.
I still vaguely consider myself Xian. The Pope? He'd have problems thinking of me as Xian. We have sufficiently different ideas of God and Jesus that apart from a few surface similarities, they're distinct deities. His Jesus was resurrected on a different day, commanded different things. It's like confusing MLK and MLK Jr. because they have the same name--they're just that different.
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and that's exactly what CSUS wants to do to the country--put an end to the United States and replace it with a Christian version of Iran.
