I heard about the shooting on the radio on Friday morning. A man had been gunned down in his Melbourne home during the night.

In today’s paper we get the full story. The victim was a man by the name of Jafar Heshmaty. He had left his native Iran, worked illegally in Greece, bought a Greek passport and then flown to Melbourne in 1989.

In Melbourne he was put in detention while his claim for refugee status was fought in the courts. He received support from the Baptist Church which organised protests and a Christian community sponsorship for him.

But after three years the High Court ruled against him because of doubts about his real identity. So he sought and received asylum in America instead.

Still, he ended up in Australia when a Melbourne Baptist woman who had campaigned on his behalf married him. He worked as a security guard but realised that his new life in the West wasn’t going to be so glamorous after all.

So, to the surprise of his Baptist wife, he turned to crime. He used standover tactics to extort money from nightclubs and he kidnapped a Russian man for a week to extort funds.

“In the end, his mentality was that of a terrorist,” complained his Australian wife, “It was a terrifying time and I was stone cold in fear ... He had no fear of the law or police, nothing ...”

“And here was me and the Baptist community,” she laments “who had given him so much. We had given him a country, an identity and a life… “

For me, this story is yet more evidence of how terribly naive and gullible some left-wing Christians can be (the “Bappos” in Australia are at the far left of the political spectrum). When I was at high school I admired the Jesuit brothers and the mostly Irish priests I knew for being worldly-wise and practical-minded. They were mostly not the kind of men you would try to take advantage of.

I don’t think the same can be said for some of the left-leaning churches. They seem to be awash with a gushing, cloying, soppy moralism which is all heart and no head. It’s a kind of mentality which is barely tolerable in a woman, but nothing less than contemptible in a man.

Will the Baptists learn their lesson? Will they refrain from launching political protests on behalf of illegal immigrants who even the usually sympathetic courts decide are untrustworthy and unreliable?

Probably not. This is not the kind of soul searching they are too adept at.

Whilst on this topic, here’s a fine post by Lawrence Auster defending religious conservatism against an otherworldly Christianity.