Re: nominal. Could be a True Scotsman fallacy. Discuss.

I think you are trying to set up a true scotsman as a strawman.

People generally do neither where I come from. So what?

You live in the 21st century. It doesn't make much sense to analyse events from the early 20st century by imposing your 21st century perspective.

In our times the average person didn't replace the social enviroment that churchs provide and is more lonely than his ancestors were. He's postmodern in the sense that he doesn't have a strong loyality to a single framework. A lot of atheists do have some loyality to academic science and spokespeople like Richard Dawkins but that loyality isn't strong enough to die for. In Willpower Roy Baumeister (who's no theist) argues that partly as a result of not believing in God willpower is now lower than it was in the past.

Debating Church v. nothing to replace it is different than debating Church v. early 20st century Marxism (and the institutions that got created after the revolution was "successful"). Answering a question about the effects of believing in God is depends a lot on the zeitgeist of the time you are speaking about.

But to get back to the issue of "true Christian's", the people who go to church because their parents went to church are different than the people who have spiritual experiences and believe in God because of those experiences.

A few days ago I was debating a Christian theology student. He follows in the foodsteps of his father who's a priest. He had to admit to me that he has no good argument for why he prefers Christianity is more true than Islam. He believed that everybody get's to heaven regardless of how he lives his life. According to him there are a lot of people in his faculty who see things similarly. On the other hand those fellow students with spiritual experiences have racidally different views than him.

If you want to speak about the effect of being Christian, self labeling as Christian isn't necessarily the best criteria. Spirtiual religious experiences or spending a lot of time in Christian rituals are likely to be more important than self labling.