Hopefully nobody’s that stupid/suicidal.
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Evangellicals can be… These are the same people who keep sending Korean immigrants, or Korean American who are evangelical into North Korea to proselytize to the population there…
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I’m not sure that counts as purely suicidal, since it gets a lot of people besides just the evangelists killed. It’s more like a multiple-murder-suicide. Like a mass-shooting type deal.
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The North isn’t as bad as when I was a kid, but it’s still pretty bad. The paramilitary groups have probably mostly disarmed, but there’s a lot of hateful, bigoted people who those groups enabled. Last summer a migrant family were chased out of social housing because the neighbours thought it should go to one of their relatives by right. And marching season, which is basically the Protestant side of the divide dancing in front of the Catholic side going “Can’t touch me! Nyah nyah nyah” still takes place each year.
I would seriously fear for the safety of any Evangelicals who stray into the wrong area in Belfast
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I may actually know some of these people - my dad worked with a number of evangelical churches in Ireland as a pastor, so I visited quite a few of the evangelical churches in the Republic (and a few in the north, too). Some people in the south were pretty strongly republican, but also I knew one pastor in the north who led his local Orange Lodge. On the whole though, evangelicals on both sides tended to be less sectarian, in my experience. A few years ago one of my coworkers in China happened to be the son of the pastor of another local church about 50 km away. We’d both left the church by then, but had some interesting conversations about the “weird old days” accompanying our parents on these “open airs”.
Of course they do, but nothing’s impossible for God, right? Honestly though, I’ve met a number of true believers who are a lot stupider than that. I know of a number of people who have ended up in prison or who have been killed because they really believed they were doing the right thing. Often this included supporting poor and marginalised people. This woman was a missionary nurse working with Palestinian women in Lebanon - my wife got to know her husband shortly after she died. I knew a number of evangelicals in China - a number of them were heavily involved in caring for orphans and often both supported agencies and adopted/fostered children themselves. While others with their salary would spend it on travel, they lived on a very basic income and put as much as possible into different kinds of charity work. Our local international clinic was run by evangelicals - they spent a third of their time running the clinic itself, a third running a free clinic for foster families and poorer people and a third visiting orphanages, AIDS hospices, old people’s homes and other places where there was a lack of medical care. They were also involved in the church, including some proselytism, because they strongly believed that holistic work had to include that. Some of them were kicked out of the country, but they felt that it was worth it. China recently erected a statue of the Scottish missionary Eric Liddel, who taught Christian values to Chinese people because he thought a Christian influence would improve the country, then chose to die in Japanese internment when he had the option to leave the country because he wanted to serve the other inmates (he made sure that a pregnant woman took his place).
Evangelical history is full of stupid people who have thrown away their lives in this way, both to proselytize and to provide material support to poor people, because they thought the two were the same thing. I think these people are often wrong and sometimes they have wasted their lives from my perspective, but in many cases I can’t easily separate the proselytism and the more positive contributions that they have made. (I’m a lot less balanced in my assessment of mass evangelists, whose motivations are a lot easier to determine).
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Man, the work your folks and their friends do, makes Mother Theresa look practically evil 
That’s a great point, and something I try to apply when I’m talking about religious people. A lot of my friends are very much anti-religion in general, and they frequently tar every member of the clergy with the same brush - equating everyone with those who engaged in covering up child abuse, with the Magdalene Laundries, the Mother and Child Homes, and the child deaths in Tuam. And that’s unfair to the majority of priests, monks and nuns who actually do good works.
And there’s shades of grey as well. One of the most prominent supporters of homeless people in Dublin is a priest, but he’s also staunchly pro-life.
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That’s because the Clerk’s office is issuing licenses to all couples. It she interferes, she’ll be heading back to jail.
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