Does "Christians all too often come across as arrogant, judgmental, and ..." mean...?

No. It means that to other people Christians come across that way.

InfraBlue wrote:

No. It means that to other people Christians come across that way.

Failed to understand you.
Do you mean Christians think that the people they (Christians) encounter (come across) are arrogant?

Here we encounter the idiomatic and somewhat slangy phrase "come across as". To "come across" as something is to create the impression in others of having a certain quality or set of qualities, e.g. a person might come across as proud, vain, kind, stupid, cruel, lazy, intelligent, etc.

(1) "My mother comes across as bossy" means "My mother creates the impression in other people that she is bossy".

(2) So "Christians all too often come across as arrogant, judgmental, and self-righteous" means "Christians all too often create the impression in others that they are arrogant, judgmental, and self-righteous"

"All" is an intensifier of "too often".

But (2) not. It seems to me that they can both refer to "others" or "Christians." How to judge the grammar unmistakably remains a task for me in English.

Quote:

But (2) not. It seems to me that they can both refer to "others" or "Christians." How to judge the grammar unmistakably remains a task for me in English.

I do not know how to explain this in terms of grammar, but if "they" referred to others, the sentence would not make sense. Maybe the grammatical explanation would be that you cannot have a subject (others) and a pronoun that refers to the subject (they) being the subject of the same clause.

BTW, I have difficulty in understanding the reference of the pronoun they in (2) above.

(1) is very clear and unambiguous to me, because the pronoun she is absolutely referring to my mother there. But (2) not. It seems to me that they can both refer to "others" or "Christians." How to judge the grammar unmistakably remains a task for me in English.

Let me see if this will help.

Try to forget the grammar and look at the semantics, Ori. The "others" are an unnamed, nebulous group. If a speaker wanted to make "others" the focus there would have been language more specific to 'others'.

Christians follow Christ and the teachings of Christ. The comparison is them to Christ.

"Christians all too often create the impression in others that (they) are arrogant, judgmental, and self-righteous"

That is clearly not what the original line meant, but if that is what you are going for, try this:

"Christians often create the impression that they judge others as arrogant, judgmental, and self-righteous while they are humble, kindhearted and good-intentioned."

Both of the 'they's in engineer's example refer to Christians.


Christians judge others as arrogant ...

Christians are humble ....

How about adding a word...

"Christians often create the impression that they judge others as arrogant, judgmental, and self-righteous while they themselves are humble, kindhearted and good-intentioned."

That has absolutely nothing to do with the meaning of the original sentence.

contrex wrote:

That has absolutely nothing to do with the meaning of the original sentence.

True, but Ori asked us for a different sentence with a different meaning several posts ago.