I posted a rave review of the new Sam Raimi film, Send Help, the other day and triggered a debate I didn’t expect: is it OK for Christians to watch horror films? Send Help – a “gore-laced plane-crash survival face-off”, according to the Guardian review (which was less kind than mine) – is more comedy-horror than horror, or maybe horror/thriller. But there’s definitely horror there – you get the point.

The most extreme response was the man who said that not only are horror movies verboten, Christians shouldn’t even watch soap operas. So, for him, Emmerdale is as bad as The Exorcist – which itself seems a bizarre film to rule out, given its hero is a priest. Who rediscovers his faith after an encounter with evil. Which he wins. I call that a positive religious message.

Of course, I can see why some of the language and the projectile vomiting might be too much for the more sensitive viewer, and I wouldn’t show it to the church youth group. But then I wouldn’t show them Saving Private Ryan either – and I have used a clip from The Exorcist to introduce a serious discussion (with adults) on faith and doubt.

I hadn’t encountered this kind of radical neo-puritanism for many years, but it was still very much a thing in the 1990s. At that time, I went to a Pentecostal church in west London and, within a few months of arriving there, was persuaded to throw away my record collection, which was full of the unholy trinity of AC/DC, Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. I later regretted this but would probably have re-bought them all on CD anyway so, no real harm done.

I also avoided certain films then – in particular, Oliver Stone’s The Doors and anything that had occult overtones – but I never boycotted the cinema altogether and nor did anyone else in my church. However, one of my fellow street preachers in Leicester Square was horrified when, having completed my shift, I announced that I was off to watch Terminator 2. “Christians shouldn’t go to the cinema,” he said with withering disapproval. “What would you do if Jesus came back while you were in there rather than out here preaching the Gospel?”

I didn’t bother pointing out that the subtitle of the film was “Judgment Day”, and anyway, the tragic irony is that it has since emerged much worse things were happening within the Jesus Army, the organisation to which he belonged. So not only would he have done better to look at the plank in his own eye before commenting on the speck in mine, he might have also considered Jesus’s other comment about people who strain out gnats only to swallow a camel.

And that, for me, is the problem with neo-puritanism: it focuses on the wrong things. As Richard Holloway, the former primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, put it: “God is much more concerned about what’s happening in our boardrooms than in our bedrooms.”

Consider the General Synod this week in my own church, the Church of England. Nearly 13 years after same-sex marriage was legalised in the UK, the big issue for this synod is whether we can even say prayers for gay and lesbian couples in standalone services – to which the answer from some quarters is still a resounding “no”. They are righteously indignant about all the wrong things.

The English civil wars may have ended in 1651 but there is still a cold war being waged between contemporary Puritans and liberal cavaliers such as me. At its root are two radically different theological visions. For my friend who won’t even watch EastEnders, the world is an irredeemably sinful place from which we need to be rescued – like Noah and his ark. And just as God (supposedly) wiped out the vast majority of life on Earth in the flood, it doesn’t really matter if we destroy the planet now because it’s only the next world that matters anyway. People at my old church literally said that without shame.

Fortunately, the other paradigm is more dominant today. This prioritises the first chapter of Genesis – in which God looks at creation and declares it to be “very good” – over the later, disastrously wetter, flood narrative. Jesus famously welcomed so-called sinners rather than shunning them as a Puritan would do. With that beard and long hair, he even looked like a cavalier.

I’d love to see all Christians adopting the view taken by Ernest Hemingway, whom Morgan Freeman quotes at the end of that other great horror/thriller Se7en: “The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.” Yes, everything is beautiful: horror films, rock music, Emmerdale – in its way, all of it.

• Ravi Holy is the vicar of Wye in Kent and a standup comedian