Christians who hate Christians

Three or four times throughout my life, I have met Christians who think that the vast majority of other Christians are judgmental, nasty, prideful people who take every opportunity to be ugly to non-Christians and Christians who they think are "fallen" or something.

Maybe these few peoples' opinions don't really matter, but I find them upsetting. They haunt me, each of these Christian people I've known who feel they need to be defensive against Christians. I cannot figure them out. They are usually sensitive and nice, and seemingly knowledgeable about the Bible, but when you come to defining who Christians are, you find that these people almost hate them, and think we'd all be better of without them, even though they share their fundamental beliefs.

Maybe someone, or some church, has been mean to them or someone that they love. Maybe they wish Christianity were something that it's not. Also, they usually have a strong dislike for tradition. I guess Christianity has traditions, because it is so old, but tradition is not wholly bad. It should not obscure the real thing though, the reason for it, and maybe sometimes it does.

I don't know. I don't understand. I would think you would love meeting and being with people who love the Lord and can understand what he has done for them. I think the sort of people I am talking about--the Christians who hate Christians--really do love to be with others who believe like they do, but when they think of the church in general, they think of the kind of people who do not really know that they need grace, and so are prideful and like to judge.

My question about that is, how can the latter even be defined as Christian? Isn't a Christian someone who knows that they are unacceptable to God except by his own mercy and sacrifice? So then why do these "Christian haters" think that Christians are so awful? Why don't they know that who they are really hating are people who think they're Christians, but don't understand anything about it at all?

It's just that churches today are so full of such a mixture--and that's fine, I hope some of the mixture gets saved--but so many of these churches are without strong biblical teaching, and so many pastors are afraid to speak the truth that's in the Bible, that "Christian" has become a whole mass of people who everyone can define however they want: nice people, harmless people, judgmental people, abortion-doctor-shooting people, family-ruining people, gay-hating people.

The Bible does not use any of that to define a follower of Christ. Christians, of all people, should recognize other Christians by the biblical definition, and not be distracted and confused by all of today's random cultural definitions. I just did not know Christians could be that confused about one another, and it makes me sad. I always knew that non-believers think who knows what about us, but if some Christians cannot even recognize the difference between real Christians and culturally labeled "Christians," what do we do?