I don’t know the origin of this particular meme, but I suspect that it’s part of Ray Comfort’s Way of the Master training rhetoric—there’s a great deal of extremely crystallized propaganda developed from that. I believe that as a hook it tries to cuddle up to a common social dislike or disagreement with what people perceive as “organized religion.” Throughout Western cultural upbringing the folk hero of the masses has been seen sometimes sitting at the bar after a hard day’s labor, drinking and insulting politicians and priests alike for similar behavior.

The Catholic Church and the outgrowths of it, establishments of power and authority—in similarity to the machinery of politics—quickly get seen as corrupt and callous by the street classes. These are the very type of people who are most likely to be evening passersby, not enough money to hop into one of the night clubs (and more attention to spend.) This meme is not part of the spectacle of street preaching, it is only ever pulled out when attempting to one-on-one proselytize.

I suspect that this meme works best for members of Protestant sects; it allows them to mentally segregate themselves from the highly organized structure of Catholicism while maintaining the substance of conservative traditions. Although, I might be missing the cultural atmosphere of modern Protestant communities since it has been a very long time since that schism and it itself has branched hundreds of times.

I am surprised that dishonesty about their sect of Christianity being a religion or not by definition is considered morally proper.

Do you think you are now better equipped to reply to it, or was it never really a problem?

My first reaction came through as, “What else is a religion if not a relationship with the divine?” That, of course, gives way to my actual anthropological reasons for the purpose behind this phrase. It’s just a hook, and amusingly enough it’s designed to pull congregants away from other closely related religions and into their own.

In this particular propaganda, the word “religion” only refers to a very specific form of organized religion—e.g. the Church—and deliberately ignores all the other trappings of religion: the mythology, dogma, doctrine, rules and regulations…

Christianity is a religion, own up to it.