This one’s a different sort of call. You  might have seen the story of the Liberty University student, Mark David Uhl, who was arrested the day of Jerry Falwell’s funeral with several homemade bombs - “sort of like napalm,” said a sheriff, in five soda-sized cans. Authorities aren’t quite sure what Uhl planned to do with them, but the suspicion is he might have used them against a group of uninvited guests at the funeral - the Rev. Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church crowd.

And since the event occurred, some on the left side of the blogosphere have leapt on it with both feet, pointing out that here was a person who apparently planned to carry out what we could legitimately call a “terrorist” attack. And that the motivation for that attack seems to have been his religious faith.

Does that then make him a “Christian terrorist?”

Christians, no doubt, will recoil at the mere use of the term. We want to pretend that Christians couldn’t be terrorists, that only radical Islamists are motivated by their faith to violence. But that isn’t true, and in fact this country has seen several acts of what we might call faith-based terror. Eric Rudolph would certainly be a Christian terrorist, as would anyone else who has plotted or actually carried out an attack on abortion clinics.

But Uhl’s situation is different, in that his apparent target was also Christian. Indeed, you might say it was the Christian extremism of Phelps’ group itself that angered Uhl. A friend of his told USA Today that Uhl considered the Westboro Baptist protestors a ”sorry, disgraceful bunch of people,” but that he never would have harmed them. Bombs do, however, have a way of harming people.

So we might call Uhl a terrorist, or a potential terrorist - and it seems we should, if we’re going to be consistent about these things, if “terrorist” is going to be used to describe actions or potential actions rather than just someone’s nationality or religion. But a “Christian terrorist?” I just don’t know that this qualifies. Because I agree with Max Blumenthal, that “The Christian right has warped religious doctrine to advance a Utopian political worldview that promises to purify the land of liberal decadence.” But Phelps doesn’t exactly represent “liberal decadence” - quite the opposite, actually. Which might make Uhl’s intentions that of a left-wing Christian terrorist.

Or maybe just a disturbed young man who happened to be Christian.