I'm glad that Darth Bagel mentioned this, because I think it depends on which church you're actually looking at. The Coptic Orthodox Christian culture, which is what I am most familiar with, is very different than whatever kind of generic or even denomination-specific European Christian culture you can point to in the West, or America specifically. Generally speaking, we do not go around telling others about the fate of their immortal souls or castigating them for being immoral according to Christian standards or whatever, and I have to imagine that this is probably because the Coptic people have lived as second-class citizens in their own country for centuries now, and that country (Egypt) is largely non-Christian, so the Copts aren't used to situations where they can expect to be part of a majority, or to be free to speak about what they see as right or wrong. (And here in America it just continues, anyway; often times I find myself having to explain to people at my parish what a Lutheran is, or what makes Roman Catholicism different from Orthodoxy, or whatever...these are just not things that are on the radar of most Coptic people, since 95%+ are members of the same church. So they come to America, are happy because they are in a Christian country where they won't get kidnapped and people won't destroy their churches or monasteries, and then they become confused because "Christian" means a lot of different things here that they don't understand, and technically they're a much smaller minority here than they were in Egypt, and the dominant culture is so,
so different.)
Among Coptic Orthodox people it is more important to fast and pray than to involve ourselves in useless bickering (I'm different, since I'm an American; hahaha). We save that stuff for after the liturgy, at least! Also, Coptic people are usually involved in this or that aspect of the traditional healing professions, which might seem a little unusual compared to other churches (if only because it is so prevalent; when one of our deacons got his Ph.D. in computer science, even our priest commented that this is unusual that a Copt would be a computer scientist and not in medicine). Our current Pope, HH Pope Tawadros II, was a pharmacist and managed a state-owned pharmaceutical factory before he joined the monastery, and even in my own tiny parish (of 6 families) there is one doctor. We highly respect knowledge, and take seriously the cooperation of God and man in the healing of the body.
An Egyptian friend of mine in the Eastern Orthodox Church once commented that when he last lived in Egypt, in the 1980s, a common saying among Egyptian Muslims was that a neighborhood without Christians was not a good neighborhood. This was said because apparently it was understood that if you needed something, you could go to your Christian neighbor and they would give it to you without asking for anything in return, whereas a Muslim would expect a favor or make unreasonable demands regarding repayment, even from another Muslim. Egypt has changed a lot since then, though, so I'm not sure if that's still a common saying, but I think the principle behind it shows that giving and selflessness are a big part of Egyptian Christian culture.
And, hopefully like all Christians everywhere, we thank God for everything. As a church of mostly poor people, there's perhaps a lot to be sad about, but you don't often hear about it. The Coptic Orthodox Church really has a culture of martyrdom (HH Pope Tawadros II responded recently to a Western reporter's question about the current troubles in Egypt by saying that he is not worried, because the church
must present martyrs in every age), and probably produces more martyrs today than any other particular church. It helps focus us and strengthen us, so we praise God in all his saints, old and new. Here, for example, is the message of HG Bishop Moussa Fr. Tadros Yaqoub at the funeral for the martyrs of the 2011 bombing of the Church of the Saints in Alexandria:
This, I hope, qualifies as reflective of Christian culture even more so than particular prohibitions or attitudes about hot-button social issues.
