I don't think it's that it's "criticism of the church" that people get touchy about. It's just that people tend to focus on the syntax in isolation and not acknowledge the tradeoffs that are involved with different syntaxes.

A lot of lispers are used to people complaining about the parens and syntax but not acknowledging the consistency, the macros, the language-design-as-a-library, the structural editing, and the easy repl integration story that you get in return. And those are the features that lispers are really excited about, and it's frustrating when people don't acknowledge that you give up all of those benefits when you choose algol-like syntax.

Now, I'm not saying that you're one of those people who doesn't understand that, but if you've met lispers who "get touchy" about it that's probably why.