From Tim Stewart on ADS-L, a posting linking to a 1/25/13 report on a project on his Dictionary of Christianese site (“The casual slang of the Christian church… authoritatively defined”), on “blended denominations”:
The church that the Simpsons attend is “The Western Branch of American Reform Presbylutheranism.” Presbylutherans are a product of Matt Groenig’s imagination, as far as I know. But fundagelicals, evangecostals, and presbycostals are totally not make-believe.
Those Christians really exist. Along with bapticostals, baptigelicals, cathodoxes, evangecostals, fundevangecostals, methobapterians, pentebaptists, baptimethocostals, and other tongue-twisters. I’ve catalogued at least 31 of these “blended” denomination names so far, one for every flavor in the Baskin-Robbins display case.
… Now these denomination names don’t, in the strictest sense, represent bonafide denominations. For the most part, these blended denominations are descriptive labels that people use to indicate a mixture of influences. Suppose you grew up Baptist and have since gone Pentecostal. You’ve got roots in both traditions, and so you might refer to yourself as a Bapticostal. Or maybe you attended evangelical churches for years before you switched into the emerging/emergent church stream. Bingo: evangemergent.
Stewart gives a number of entries in his emerging dictionary of “blended denominations” (with blend serving as a synonym for what I prefer to call portmanteau, to distinguish these deliberate inventions from the fairly common inadvertent errors). So: Christomanteaus.
March 22, 2016 at 8:42 am |
A good compendium. My favourite blended denomination is the portmanteau word that some Baptists and Methodists (teetotallers mostly) have christened Episcopalianism: Whiskeypalians (referring to their rumoured bibulousness).