Glenn postulates:

Sooner or later, you know, fundamentalist Christians are going to pick up on this lesson, engage in similar behavior, and make similar demands. Because, apparently, it works fine.

UPDATE: Bryan Preston says that I’m wrong, and that Christians won’t do such things. I tend to think that conduct that’s rewarded gets engaged in more. We’ll find out which one of us is right, soon enough.

My own experience, however, is that Christians can lose it, too. Death threats aren’t the same as murder, of course. But I was appalled at the behavior I experienced, which included nasty threats, wishes that my wife would suffer Terri Schiavo’s fate, and nasty phone calls to my home as my wife recovered from heart surgery. That behavior, from religious pro-lifers, seemed kind of un-Christian to me. So pardon me if my faith that things can never get worse is weaker than Bryan’s.

Glenn goes on to say that Allahpundit mentions that history isn’t on Bryan’s side of the argument - and he’s exactly right on that score. It would, however, be a huge mistake to equate the people today either calling themselves or being labeled as “fundamentalist Christians” with the Klansmen of that ugly, ugly series of events from US history. Still if you’d asked them, those Klansmen, to a man, would no doubt profess their profound faith, and quite a few would probably misquote various Bible passages to rationalize their acts of terror. Sure, you’ve seen such behavior - it’s just that in Arabic (or Pashto, or Urdu) it is a bit harder to understand than English with a thick Southern drawl.

In a way, I guess, both Glenn and Bryan are somewhat, but not totally, correct. Bryan is correct, in that actual Christians, as we have come to know them today, would probably not participate in the use of their religion for acts of terror. Glenn is correct, also, in that since the Klansmen identified themselves centrally as Christians, and used their interpretation as a justification for their crimes, it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility. Not at all.

But actually, as the Klansmen before, and the Islamists today, it would simply be a convenient rationalization for heinous barbarity, by thuggish brutes.