It's nearly as rare as a hailstorm in Hades that I write in response to an e-mail to the editor, but at least one recent missive deserves a quick stab. Reacting to Greg Nyquist's WorldNet Magazine article, "The Lions are Back," about worldwide persecution of the Christian Church, some chap named Lance Leighnor wrote to say, "While I can support some of what you write and even agree with it ... the latest bit of Christian nonsense to hit your site is really so far off to the right, it's off the radarscope."

Not too sure which radarscope that happened to be, I was happy that Lance so quickly clarified what he meant: "Do Christians feel they have to be persecuted in order to validate their faith? From what gets written on your pages, it would appear the answer is yes."

Never mind that such persecution might actually be news. No, we lackeys for the Lord just like reminding the world we get our rumps walloped on a regular basis -- makes us feel special or something. After all, when Serbs kill Albanian Muslims, that's news, but when Christians wind up becoming backstops for bullets, that's just flexing our martyr muscles. Oh, pity us.

Lance was also quick to point out that Christians have, in their benevolence I'm sure, introduced the joys of martyrdom to many others as well -- saying that sundry, sour saints of Christ have murdered as many as 500,000,000 people in the last 2,000 years. (Cheers, plaudits and great whoopee are, by the way, in order for the bean counters over the last couple millennia who diligently kept such accurate records of this long-term death and annihilation campaign. We're talking tough work here, folks. Have you ever seen an abacus that actually goes that high?) Lance went on to write that this campaign "sadly includes the Jewish Holocaust, directed by that good German Lutheran Hitler. ..."

Hitler the Lutheran?

I've heard Hitler called a lot of things -- but few with more than four letters and definitely never a Lutheran. Might as well say Anton LaVey the 13th apostle, or Josef Stalin the humanitarian.

Just to check, I pulled my copy of "Mein Kampf" out from under the kitty-litter box to give it a quick once-over. As far as I can tell, Hitler mentions Luther only once, and only in a passing reference as a "great reformer." He never cites him as an authority for his views. Further, Hitler spent many years as a member of the Church of Rome -- which of course had that little scrap with Luther a few hundred years before, called the Great Reformation. Catholics are still a bit touchy about the whole thing.

In other words, if Hitler's a Lutheran, then so is the pope.

Lucky for Lance, however, bone-headed ignorance enjoys company -- and with whom better to share a seat on the rock-head roster than President William Jefferson Clinton?

Billy Jeff earned his butt rest on the boob bench when addressing an assembly at a Feb. 4, 1999, prayer breakfast, where he publicly confessed, "I do believe that even though Adolf Hitler preached a perverted form of Christianity, God did not want him to prevail."

The latter part of this sentence is obvious to anyone with even a meager understanding of Christian theology. God governs and controls the universe -- something that (it sometimes seems) Clinton wishes he could do, but on which God holds the patent. In simple terms, if God doesn't want it to occur, the script gets canned.

No problem here. The real trouble is in the phrase, "Adolf Hitler preached a perverted form of Christianity. ..."

That's the sticking point -- a point that stuck William Donohue, president of the Catholic League, like a fireplace poker right in the eye. After the remark, Donohue asked the president to apologize for the observation, which he dubbed, "a remarkably ignorant comment about Hitler and Christianity." Donohue further commented, "Anyone who has studied Hitler knows that this is pure nonsense," adding, "Hitler was a neo-pagan terrorist whose conscience was not informed by Christianity, but by pseudo-scientific racist philosophies."

The foundation of those philosophies was a Mulligan stew of muddled ideology: bite-sized pieces of Thomas Henry Huxley, chunks of Charlie Darwin, hunks of Ernst Haeckle and less-than-tender morsels of Friedrich Nietzsche -- men not well known for their strident confession to traditional Christianity. Rather, they and Hitler dismissed Christianity either in part or in toto.

In his book, "The Atheist Syndrome," John P. Koster profiles Hitler in an attempt to explain his rejection of Christianity. Writes Koster, "Hitler appears to have believed that Jesus never rose and that Christianity was a sort of Jewish conspiracy." That goes a fair pace beyond simple "perversion" it would seem. And far from being sincere about matters of faith, Koster points out that very often Hitler used religion as a tool. For instance, in unifying his political base, he would often speak to his right-wing toadies in terms of his "Christian" war against commies and Jews, while muttering anti-Christian slogans to his atheist and leftist cronies. For Hitler, Christ was a multipurpose messiah -- good for sympathy when talking with Christians and good for nothing when talking with atheists.

Throwing the president back into the debate from a different angle, this tactic is strikingly similar to a practice he and his friends share. Clinton and Co. frequently belittle the so-called "religious right" while, at the same time, courting the affection of churchgoers when the need arises. Every time Bill gets caught on TV with an intern stuffed under the kneehole of his desk and needs a little image boost, he plays the God card, lugs his 10lb. King James to church and puts on his "Devoted and Faithful" hat. With camera-shutter salvation only a quick-click away, it seems that all Bill has to do is get his church-meeting mug on the idiot box for 3.7 seconds and he could murder Al Gore with his bare hands while watching his poll numbers soar to the highest firmament.

In the end, of course, Clinton and Leighnor's words belie some pretty awkward ignorance.

Hitler wasn't just weirdly Christian or slightly unorthodox, preaching a quirky, buggered faith. You don't call a Buddhist an unorthodox Christian. He simply isn't one. Ditto for Adolf. He wasn't Christian, any sort of Christian -- Lutheran, Catholic, evangelical or otherwise. Everything he did was a rejection of the doctrines of Christ. Hitler's totalitarian power fetish was a middle finger to God's rightful place as Sovereign Lord and the Jewish Holocaust was a grotesque and horrific violation of the Ten Commandments' injunction against murder on a gut-wrenching scale.

Think of it this way: If ole Dolf were transported to the Last Supper would he be John -- head resting on Christ's bosom? Or would he be Judas Iscariot -- plotting the demise of the only begotten Son of God?

My vote goes for option 2. After all, Christ was Jewish, and Hitler never did behave very Christianly when it came to folks like that.