(Note: Before you start, I need to tell you that this post is about 1400 words. It’s like four days of posts. But I can’t break it up. So you can skip it if you want to. And come back tomorrow. I’ll see an editor.)

I grew up not going to movies. There was a possibility that, even if the movie was good, like a Billy Graham movie, people wouldn’t look at the marquee, they’d just see that we were walking out of a movie theatre. And would wonder about our faith.

The first two movies I saw when I could choose to go on my own, the first two movies in a theatre that were not for a school trip (“Man of La Mancha”), were “The Muppet Movie” and “The Amityville Horror.”

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Those movies capture images people inside and outside of “Christian Fundamentalism” and “Christian Evangelicalism” have of those two subcultures of Christianity.

On one hand, evangelicals are teddy bears and frogs, sometimes cute, sometimes funny, often engaging, and always believing in a dream. On the other hand, fundamentalists are like a house possessed by some malevolent force. Just when you are comfortable, something makes you scream.

There are similarities many draw between the two movies and between the two cultures. Each are seen to play on emotion. Each are scripted. Each has the appearance of reality but are essentially unreal.

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On the top shelf of my office at home, sandwiched between Have His Carcass by Dorothy Sayers and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard, are several paperback books. Each is a quarter inch thick. They are titled “The Fundamentals”. There are several volumes. Each is a collection of essays, writing that fights immigrants. In this case, however, it was ideas that were crossing borders, undermining teaching about the Bible, about the virgin birth of Jesus. These were scholarly essays, thoughtfully argued.

I haven’t read them through. I have, however, read Sayers and Stoppard many times. I’m more about story than scholarly.

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“The Fundamentals” belonged to my great-uncle Andrew. He was a pastor. He went to seminary. He was a scholar. And for reasons my mother doesn’t remember or wasn’t ever told, he quit pastoring, went to farming, and died young. From what little I know, I have a feeling that he was torn between the two theologies.  The immigrant theology, higher criticism, was liberal. He grew up closer to what was becoming fundamentalists. Each thought they were right, thought they were the true church. There was no middle ground. There was, I’m guessing, no room for Andrew. Scholarly and believing the roots.

Evangelicalism came after Andrew. It is, in my mind, like fundamentalism without the anger, like liberalism with limits. It is somewhere in the middle, though both sides, if sides we may call them for the moment, would find the middle ground a swamp of compromised dreck rather than a holy hill rising above the lowlands. For fundamentalists, evangelicals compromise with the world too much. For liberals, evangelicals are vague but not enough. You might as well be fundamentalists and be cranky.

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By the time we get to my movie-less childhood, my family was in the evangelical camp, though barely. My dad had eased out of the fundamentalist church where he’d been ordained. The scholarly essays of “The Fundamentals” had turned into lists of things we didn’t do. We didn’t dance or drink or smoke or go to movies or play with regular playing cards. We didn’t listen to rock music. The doctrinal beliefs about the Bible and the virgin birth and hell and God actually existing were still there, but what affected life more was the behavioral constraints. In fact, you could look like a good Christian person without believing much of anything, as long as you showed up in church and didn’t do the list.

The behaviors were, I’m guessing, designed to strengthen the community of faith, to draw distinctions, to create a culture. And, the approach of denial has merit. If you don’t drink at all, alcoholism is never a problem. If you don’t dance, you limit where you can hang out. (Of course, because you hold the Bible as authoritative, you have to decide what to do with Jesus turning water into wine at a wedding where, most likely, there was dancing. But that’s another post.)

So I grew up not doing certain things, doing other things somewhat surreptitiously, and struggling with whether a relationship with God came from what I did or from how I related to him.

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And then I read portions of a 1,500 page manifesto yesterday from someone who is described as a Christian Fundamentalist. From someone who, perhaps, grew up like me, not going to movies. I read it wondering whether he had gone to see “The Muppet Movie” too. And I discover the Amityville Horror. There is something evil walking there, through the manifesto.

This Andrew, late in the document is going through some Q and A:

Q: Do I have to believe in God or Jesus in order to become a Justiciar Knight?

A: As this is a cultural war, our definition of being a Christian does not necessarily constitute that you are required to have a personal relationship with God or Jesus. Being a Christian can mean many things; that you believe in and want to protect Europe’s Christian cultural heritage. The European cultural heritage, our norms (moral codes and social structures included), our traditions and our modern political systems are based on Christianity – Protestantism, Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity and the legacy of the European enlightenment (reason is the primary source and legitimacy for authority).

It is not required that you have a personal relationship with God or Jesus in order to fight for our Christian cultural heritage and the European way. In many ways, our modern societies and European secularism is a result of European Christendom and the enlightenment.

It is therefore essential to understand the difference between a “Christian fundamentalist theocracy” (everything we do not want) and a secular European society based on our Christian cultural heritage (what we do want). So no, you don’t need to have a personal relationship with God or Jesus to fight for our Christian cultural heritage. It is enough that you are a Christian-agnostic or a Christian atheist (an atheist who wants to preserve at least the basics of the European Christian cultural legacy (Christian holidays, Christmas and Easter)).

The PCCTS, Knights Templar is therefore not a religious organisation but rather a Christian “culturalist” military order.

I read that, from page 1361, and breathed a sigh of relief. He isn’t a Christian fundamentalist theologically, not in the way my uncle Andrew would have understood that. He’s not one of the tribe that is closely related to my tribe. And I think that the police and the media have played on the stereotypes of what it means to be part of the Christian right, the Christian fundamentalists. And I start to get a little defensive.

I feel awful about the murders. I spent many summers in camp. I understand the trust and order. The young people moving toward the officer to listen, to learn, to be directed makes sense.

But the murders don’t.

And then I stop.

Because Andrew the murderer is talking about Christianity as a set of practices, as a collection of cultural guidelines and expectations that can maintain order, regardless of whether God is involved.

And I wonder how often I do exactly the same thing. How often I teach behaviors without ever pointing to a relationship with Jesus. The thing that he regards as irrelevant, I hold essential. At least I think I do.

Uncle Andrew looked at the tension and turned away. He couldn’t resolve the tension between belief and scholarship in a way that would allow him to stand publicly and teach one or the other. I understand that tension.

Andrew the bomber disregards the belief part and kills people.  And too often I understand the desire to inflict culture regardless of belief. And I understand that when we get obnoxious in the name-calling and character assassination that accompanies that approach, we forget that Jesus regarded that kind of hatred as murder. Not punishable in political courts, but for those who claim to follow Jesus, certainly meriting scrutiny.

What I want, deep down, is to be another Andrew. An early follower of Jesus. Who didn’t argue. Who didn’t debate. Who simply brought people to Jesus. And let behavior follow.