I’m interested in the different responses of the two church congregations that have gotten shot up recently. First the fundamentalist megachurch in Colorado Springs last December, and second the Unitarian-Universalist Church in Tennessee just the other day.

The fundamentalist New Life Church in Colorado Springs professes belief in the Bible as “infallible and inerrant.” Does that mean that the members of the church meekly offered themselves to more gunshots last December, seeing as how Jesus, in the Bible, enjoins them to turn the other cheek? Not at all, they engaged one of their members as a security guard when they got wind of trouble, and when the shooter burst into their church, the security guard gunned him down. Gunned him down and then gave thanks to God for steadying her hand.

The Unitarian-Universalist Church, meanwhile, is about as loose theologically as you can possibly get. The one in Tennessee says on its Web site that its members are “encouraged to develop their own personal theologies” and further, “we believe in the authority of reason and conscience.” They’re liberal humanists who give no more importance to the Bible than to any other religious or philosophical book. So how did they react to being shot at? According to a witness, one of the ushers stood up and “put himself in between the shooter and the congregation” and got killed by doing so, whereupon other congregants tackled the shooter and held him for the police.

So the non-literalist usher acted in a way that Christians like to think is distinctly Christian: He sacrificed himself for others. The Bible-thumping Christians opened fire.

As a connoisseur of irony, how can I not relish this?