It is useful to understand that, in the US, the decentralization of Christian power in the post-Reformation era produced a hundred or more small centers of organization - the denominations; each of which reflect the era in which they crystallized; the cultural heritage of the ethnic group to which the originators of the denomination belonged, and the peculiarities of the personalities who formed the ideas and traditions that constitute the crystalline structure in consciousness that is copied by its adherents from generation to generation.
It is as if, when the originating organism - the Roman Catholic Church, broke into pieces, each broken piece grew anew, but with only fragments of the code of the parent organism, and incorporating new instructions from elements that it synthesized from competing and proximal religious systems; and from mutations that were introduced by individuals and smaller collections as they replicated; so that, decade by decade, an entirely diverse set of child organisms, like so many breeds of dogs, appeared - all of them still called Christian.
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