Claiming as oneself as Christian doesn't necessarily make them Christians. Theologically ignorant people tend to think its a title one can just apply to oneself and that's that. There are certain requirments for this to fall into the proper categories. Other sects of Christianity have to find the organizations actions acceptable to be considered a Christ-like model. The kool kids klub will more often than not fall into the category of "unacceptable" along with Westboro. This applies for other religions like Islam, and as usual one will point out that the loud minority are just using the name as an excuse to feel better about their own movement.
i tend to think that the business of trying to objectively dictate what makes someone a "real x" when x is literally just an idea gets pretty murky, because it's a completely subjective label. the easiest solution is to just accept that when someone says "hey i am x because i believe y," you believe them rather than questioning the legitimacy of their beliefs by comparing them to an arbitrary standard of what they
"should" be.
if the point is to exclude or include certain people based on their actions or personality, it's much easier to just say that an abstract ideological concept is completely separate from the actions and personality of any individual person or group that claims to align with it
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