I don't remember any triumphalism, that we got the answers and everyone else goes to hell. Given how and where we were raised, anyone who said that would either be smacked or laughed at.

What I remember more forming their conversations and, by extension, me, was talk about unions and "bosses" and how the only way to deal with a boss is with a union. My father was 18 when the stock market crashed and he went through the Depression as a young adult. That experience permeated everything, from having the money to go on a simple date, from having a job, from being able to make any kind of future, and all the rest that economic cataclysm brought into everyone's daily life.

So, when we went to church, and I heard the gospels, the beatitudes and the rest, I heard very much the message and import of loving and caring for each other. I heard almost nothing about who was going to hell.

My parents had a cow if I dated a Catholic. I was raised to believe that Catholics were going to hell.

I'm ELCA and DH was Catholic, his mother had a problem with it, my folks were ok "as long as he went to church." In truth, he didn't until our daughter was born and then he joined my church when she was baptized.

By the time I was in junior high and in confirmation classes, that view had moderated a bit. Or, it may have been my pastor, the one who confirmed me. I asked him outright if he thought all Catholics were going to hell.

He had been a missionary in various places, most notably, China. He had a PhD. He was rather liberal in his secular views, and perhaps a bit more liberal than many LCMS pastors. He told me that all Catholics were not going to hell. It might be harder for them to get into heaven, for various doctrinal reasons, but they were not damned.

He was Dr. Martin Simon, father of senator to be Paul Simon of Illinois.

In confirmation class as a kid (8th grade) my pastor taught a "comparative religion" class of sorts in which he compared ELCA (LCA back then) with LCMS and Catholic doctrine. He gently taught that while no one approach to Christianity is "correct", we were more so.
Check out LCMS websites and comments for who they think is truly misguided and going straight to hell (many of them anyway) it's us "other" Lutherans!

dad was from a Southern Baptist family, but he didn't go to church. He was a Free Mason, so that was sort of his religion. I went to Catholic school because both parents felt I needed the discipline as I was an only child. I was a handful. They never really pushed religion on me. I actually went to different denomination church services with various friends on Sunday and occasionally to the Temple with my Jewish neighbor friend for Friday night services although I could have been suspended from the parochial school if the nuns had found out that I was doing what would have considered religion shopping. I wasn't. I was trying to understand how others thought.

I attended Catholic school all the way through college. Funny I think it turned me away from religion, all religion, forever. I'm not an atheist, but nor am I a believer in the conventional Abrahamic deities, nor others from other religions not associated with Abraham. I'm of the school that there is something really wondrous out there in the universe that we haven't discovered yet and Bronze Age theological thinking doesn't have the answer to what it is for me, anyway. I believe scientific discoveries will eventually lead mankind to the Truth. Of course none of us will probably be alive when it happens.

As to your question, not all church goers shun or exclude those who don't believe as them. Unfortunately, too many do.

There were Catholics, who were doing it RIGHT.

There were Jews, who were NOT doing it right, but who were okay anyway because they were persecuted and sincere. (Remember, WWII and the Holocaust were a very fresh memory.)

There were Pagans (basically everyone who wasn't any kind of Christian or Jew) who were NOT doing it right, but could be saved by missionaries, so they were OK.

And there were Protestants (of any/all variety,) who were doing it WRONG. Period. Just WRONG.

This was in the short interval between the end of WWII and the beginning of the Vatican II conference.

But that's pretty much the impression that the kids were given at my Catholic grade school by the nuns, during that period.

amusedly,
Bright

heard some stuff from her about those sinners in other religions.

Although he was pretty religious, Dad didn't talk about religion, he talked about his union and labor experiences on big, really big, construction projects. He had been to WWII, had been part of the leading edge of the liberation of Europe and had seen the most horrific things in captured Nazi concentration camps, so his experience of other American soldiers of different Christian denominations and seeing those horrors gave his naturally more tolerant temperament more of an accepting attitude toward others that he didn't risk showing around my mother.

From his stories about drinking escapades in Europe, my guess is that he came back to the USA pretty profoundly depressed by his war experience, but happened to encounter a populist, workers' rights preaching priest in the little midwestern town where he and my mother decided to start our family. I think it was that priest who imparted at least a general understanding of the thoughts of the Jesuit scientist-theologian Pierre Tielhard de Chardin, who wrote about similarities between theology and scientist (and was ordered to stop by whoever the pope was at that time, Pius X, I think). de Chardin explicated a view of reality that amounts to: all things, all persons, all of creation is in one step or another of processes that are evolving toward an ultimate expression of divinity in creation. He didn't say those things directly, but liked to drop Pierre de Chardin's name when he talked about troubles on the job and his union. I later looked de Chardin up to read and find out what my Dad was so impressed with.

I don't recall the nuns in my grade- and high- schools ever mentioning Protestants or other religions. They were mostly concerned about Communists, but they never talked about the economic traits of Communism. They were concerned with Communistic atheism and told us that the atheists would persecute us for believing (which appears now to be true to some degree) and that we should prepare to become martyrs for Christianity, something that I always knew I'd fail at.

I came into my intellectual maturity as a teenager during Vatican II, a time of great ecumenical fervor, so the nuns and priests were saying that, though it was much harder for some faiths to get it right, because of their errant institutions, it is possible for individuals to live as honestly by their best understandings of what is right so completely that they too would "go to heaven" AND that even applied to people who had never heard the name of Jesus. I believe this was referred to as Baptism by the Holy Spirit.

My friends were alternatively ashamed of being Catholic and conceited about it. We 7th & 8th graders used to visit the closest Public School junior highschool once a week for Home Economic classes which our school didn't offer and there you'd see certain ones of us altering the configuration of their clothing and talking in a looser manner and trying to avoid appearing to be from somewhere else, especially with the public school boys. There was also pretty close to universal assent that those others were going to hell. I'm sure there were things about our school and churches that elicited that judgement from my friends, but I also think that their parents had at least as much to do with that attitude, and probably significantly more, than the nuns and priests.

who were Pentecostal. You raised you children Catholic and that was it.

The long version of the story goes back when my late grandmother was still a young woman.

Supposedly she was fairly religious when she was younger. However, this changed when my uncle and my 2nd cousin were playing near one of our family's oil field and a gasline exploded burning both of them badly. The experience soured my grandmother on religion and affected the way she raised my uncle and mother from that point on. She would not allow either of them to go to church until she felt they were old enough to understand religion and then let them go around to the various churches and decide for themselves what religion they wanted to follow.

This brings me to my mom. When she was allowed to go to church she went to all of her friends churches and supposedly they all had one thing in common that she hated: They all bashed the other churches in town. The Baptist would trash the Lutherans, the Lutherans the Episcopalians, the Episocpalians would bash the pentacostals, and so forth. Finally she came across the Catholic Church which did not even acknowledge the other churches in one way or another. That is what convinced her to become a Catholic. However, she never went through with the religious instruction until she met and married my father (born a catholic). Even then, she told the priest she was not big on confession so she has never been confirmed by the bishop.

I went through sunday school and communion, but other than that and showing up to church on sunday we were very liberal catholics. My grandmother (the one from above) even got me a crucifix as a young child. Beyond that, however, we did not agree much with the churches actual positions on the issues. We were pro-choice, pro-contraceptive, and pro-gay. Most of the rest of our family was Lutherans or Baptists, but it was not a big deal regardless. When she came down with MS we slowly stopped going and when asked about religion back in high school I would say we were catholic but not very good at it.

I now identify as an agnostic atheist, but most of the forms I have filled out throughout my life have me listed as a catholic. Im still slowly fixing that. I also still wear the crucifix my grandmother gave me as a memento of her.

Interesting. This was in the 90s for me. My town was about 1/3 Catholic and 2/3 some variety of Protestant (mostly Lutheran). Catholicism thus obviously didn't dominate the town but also wasn't small enough to be unique or made you feel like part of some close knit minority. It was just one of many denominations.