During the first reports that someone had detonated a car bomb and then opened fire at a youth camp in Norway, many assumptions clicked into place.

The massacre was actually committed, police say, by a blond Norwegian whose photo would not seem out of place in an American college directory. As Breivik’s 1,500-page manifesto emerged, calling for violence to rid Europe of non-Christians and those he deemed traitors to Christian Europe, some seized on the religious aspect of his delusions.

Mark Juergensmeyer, editor of the book “Global Religions: An Introduction” and a sociology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, wrote an essay likening Breivik to Timothy McVeigh, the American who killed 168 people in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. It was the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil until 9/11.

McVeigh and Breivik were both “good-looking young Caucasians, self-enlisted soldiers in an imagined cosmic war to save Christendom … and both were Christian terrorists,” Juergensmeyer wrote.

In a column for Salon.com, Alex Pareene said Breivik is not an American-style evangelical, but he listed other connections to Christianity. “All of this says ‘Christian terrorist,’” Pareene wrote.

Such claims drew strong resistance. “Breivik is not a Christian. That’s impossible. No one believing in Jesus commits mass murder,” Bill O’Reilly said on his Fox News show.

That makes sense to Joyce Dubensky, CEO of the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding. She said it also makes sense that “millions of Muslims say Osama bin Laden is not a Muslim, that no one who believes in the prophet Muhammad commits mass murder.”

For Christians who think of their faith as preaching peace, how to explain the faith-sanctioned killing of the Crusades? For Muslims, what about the thousands of jihadists now following violent interpretations of Islam?

Or consider the Ku Klux Klan’s burning crosses. If those were the actions of a misguided minority, shouldn’t the same be said of the 19 men who hijacked airliners on 9/11?

What do you think about this????