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Notes -
Abbott is not an evangelical anyways. He’s a Catholic.
That’s surprising to me for some reason. But, (afaik) it’s evangelicals who are most supportive of Israel among Christians in Texas
Abbott has practical political reasons for supporting Israel, he doesn’t need to be an evangelical for it. Most likely he converted to Catholicism under pressure from his wife(who is an IRL tradcath); he certainly seems less religious than she is and while going to a Christian church is necessary to be a successful republican politician at a high level, that church being evangelical is not; mainstream evangelical theology holds that religious Catholics have no reason to convert because the church is an invisible brotherhood of true believers in Jesus Christ and not a singular institution.
Do Evangelicals really not believe in converting Catholics?
To add on to the other responses, there is a subset of evangelicals who are anti-Catholic because they believe that certain Catholic teachings contradict the gospel. In particular, Catholicism teaches that you need both faith and good works to be saved, rather than just faith (although it's actually much more complicated than that). I've known people who think Catholics do not even count as Christians based on this criteria - because true Christianity is unique in being a religion where you don't get saved by doing good things.
My church happens to have a lot of ex-Catholics, including myself and also several of the pastors - for those guys, converting Catholics is not very important, not nearly as important as spreading the gospel to unbelievers. But they will certainly preach in such a way as to correct what they see as the false teachings of the Catholics.
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They might, but it tends to be significantly less important. In general, Protestants tend not to assert that their denomination is the One True Church, preferring a communion of believers across denominations. In interpersonal compromises, this will obviously lend itself towards the one who cares less about a specific church being more willing to compromise on that. This is augmented by the fact that evangelicals are often more minimalistic with regards to doctrine.
This is a shame; Protestantism is worth fighting for.
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Most don’t care and see it as an essentially aesthetic difference; evangelicals who attempted to evangelize to me usually stopped upon finding out that I was a believing, churchgoing Catholic because from their perspective I was already ‘in’. Evangelicalism is heavily orthopraxic and big tent and in practice sees any conversion experience within trinitarian Christianity as basically as good as any other, and in evangelicalism, it’s the conversion experience that counts.
There are a few Protestants who care, a lot, about converting Catholics. Most of them are not evangelicals- although I suppose many of them are adjacent to evangelicals and I don’t think it’s possible to collect the data on whether confessional Lutherans or oneness Pentecostals are more common.
In Texas specifically there’s a minor phenomenon of white evangelical men marrying Hispanic women and either going to Catholic Church without converting or formally converting for the sake of keeping a family together, because evangelicals will generally go to Catholic services but not Vice versa. Abbott falls into this group and has used this fact in his campaign materials, most famously with the mother-in-law ad.
Interesting, thank you. ‘All trinitarian Christianity’ is a broad grouping indeed.
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