For people who say that, "Christian" means what not in that bubble might call "evangelical" or "fundamentalist". It denotes certain churches, e.g. Church of Christ as well as Southern Baptist. So it's not just Catholics it excludes.
One of my grad school friends was from Northern Minnesota, of 100% Norwegian ancestry, with an architypal Minnesota Nice demure demeaner right out of a sketch on Prairie Home Companion. She wound up taking her first full-time teaching job at Middle Tennessee. (For context, this was circa 1989.) She recounted that one of her female students came to her after class and asked in friendly curiosity, "Are Lutherans Christian, I know Catholics aren't..." This young woman had apparently never met a Lutheran before, and it wasn't a hostile question; she seemed to like my friend. So "not Christian" didn't mean "enemy", just, well, "odd".
Absolute truth. My wife was raised Catholic, educated at a Lutheran liberal arts college in the Upper Midwest. First job out of graduate school at Vanderbilt was in 1988, at a middle school in East Nashville, where two students buttonholed her one afternoon and asked "Mrs. O, are you Baptist or Christ"--by which, she deduced after some great astonishment, they actually meant "are you Baptist or Church of Christ." A Catholic or a Lutheran might as well have been a Zoroastrian to them.
For people who say that, "Christian" means what not in that bubble might call "evangelical" or "fundamentalist". It denotes certain churches, e.g. Church of Christ as well as Southern Baptist. So it's not just Catholics it excludes.
One of my grad school friends was from Northern Minnesota, of 100% Norwegian ancestry, with an architypal Minnesota Nice demure demeaner right out of a sketch on Prairie Home Companion. She wound up taking her first full-time teaching job at Middle Tennessee. (For context, this was circa 1989.) She recounted that one of her female students came to her after class and asked in friendly curiosity, "Are Lutherans Christian, I know Catholics aren't..." This young woman had apparently never met a Lutheran before, and it wasn't a hostile question; she seemed to like my friend. So "not Christian" didn't mean "enemy", just, well, "odd".
FWIW
Absolute truth. My wife was raised Catholic, educated at a Lutheran liberal arts college in the Upper Midwest. First job out of graduate school at Vanderbilt was in 1988, at a middle school in East Nashville, where two students buttonholed her one afternoon and asked "Mrs. O, are you Baptist or Christ"--by which, she deduced after some great astonishment, they actually meant "are you Baptist or Church of Christ." A Catholic or a Lutheran might as well have been a Zoroastrian to them.