The other day I pointed out that the liberal Unitarians who recently got shot at in Tennessee responded in a more “Christian” way than the fundamentalist Christians who got shot at last December in Colorado.

An usher in the Unitarian church put himself physically in the path of a man firing a shotgun at the congregation and got killed in the process, as other men in the congregation tackled the shooter and held him for police.

At the fundamentalist church in Colorado, on the other hand, a security guard simply gunned down the shooter who burst into their church and then thanked God for steadying her hand.

I couldn’t help noting that the fundamentalists merrily disregarded the Biblical injunction to turn the other cheek, while the self-sacrificing action of the Unitarian usher appeared to be just the kind of thing that Christians like to think of as distinctly Christian – despite the fact that the Unitarian church is hardly Christian at all but encourages its members to “develop their own personal theologies,” and indeed, the church’s liberalism was one of the reasons it got attacked. It struck me as a nice irony.

I expected that some fundamentalist readers might berate me for these observations, but I figured liberal Unitarian readers would thank me, and it would be a wash. So you can imagine my surprise when I saw the letter to the editor in Sunday’s paper from a trustee of the First Unitarian Society of Schenectady not thanking me but taking me to task.

He said he was disappointed in my remarks. He said with dismay that I “seemed to be trying to contrast” the responses in the two churches -- and at least that much of his letter was perceptive, since I certainly was trying to contrast the two responses. He said, “I’m not sure what point Mr. Strock” – that’s me – “was trying to make,” though I thought I made the point as clear as I could, and if I had made it any clearer I would have won a booby prize for obviousness. He asked if I was “trying to draw wider conclusions about Christians and Unitarians,” which I wasn’t, necessarily, though I have noted on other occasions that fundamentalists are pretty breezy about what parts of the Bible they take literally and what parts they ignore. And finally he proposed that this wider conclusion, which I did not make, was “unfair, leaning toward divisive.”

Here I had gone to bed after writing my original column thinking, well, I may anger some people, but at least I’ll be in solid with the Unitarians, and look what I got. Now I’ve learned my lesson, and I’ll never say anything generous again.