WorthyNews:Church Attacks In US Escalating, Report Warns

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By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News

WASHINGTON/BUDAPEST (Worthy News) – Attacks against American churches have skyrocketed over the last decade due to growing anti-Christian sentiments in the United States, says a leading research and advocacy group in a new report.

The Washington D.C.-based Family Research Council (FRC) explained that attacks against churches increased 800 percent in less than six years — and more than doubled in 2023.

“These findings suggest that hostility against U.S. churches is not only on the rise but also accelerating,” FRC added about the report obtained by Worthy News on Monday.

The report “Hostility Against Churches Is on the Rise in the United States. Analyzing Incidents from 2018-2023” cited attempted bombings, shootings, and satanic vandalism” amid growing anti-Christian sentiments.

It linked “numerous attacks based on anti-Christian bias due to support for abortion or extreme transgender ideology.”

In one of the deadliest attacks last March 27, Audrey Hale opened fire at the Nashville Covenant School, operated by the Covenant Presbyterian Church, killing six people, including three young students, FRC recalled.

Hale, who frequently identified as a male named “Aiden,” told a friend she had left a manifesto and “plenty of evidence behind,” attesting to her motive. Yet, aside from a few pages pried out of police hands by conservative commentator Steven Crowder, Hale’s manifesto remains hidden, FRC complained.

TRANSGENDER VIOLENCE

The assault is but one example of 2023’s transgender-related anti-church violence, investigators said. “Last January 3, a man named Cameron Storer, who identifies as female, set fire to Portland Korean Church, a historic, 117-year-old vacant building. Storer claimed that voices in his head threatened to “mutilate” him unless he set the church ablaze.”

Tony Perkins, FRC’s president, said the “Biden administration’s whole-of-government opposition to Biblical morality is ‘fomenting this environment of hostility toward churches.’”

Attacks against churches between January 2018 and November 2023 were “709 acts of vandalism, 135 completed or attempted arsons, 32 bomb threats, 22 gun-related incidents [and] 61 other incidents, including assault, threats, and interruption of worship services,” FRC established.

These acts of “religious intimidation” send the message “that churches are not wanted in the community or respected in general,” Arielle Del Turco, who authored the report, told FRC’s publication The Washington Stand.

“Regardless of the motivations of these crimes, everyone should treat churches and all houses of worship with respect and affirm the importance of religious freedom for all Americans,” the author added.

The report revealed that violence against churches “continued to explode” in 2023. During the first 11 months of last year, the FRC researchers verified “at least 436 acts of hostility against U.S. churches — more than double the number of attacks in all of 2022.”

The attacks included “315 acts of vandalism, 75 completed or attempted arsons, 20 bomb threats, 10 gun-related incidents, 12 instances of satanic graffiti [and] 59 churches faced repeated acts of hostility,” the FRC said.

CHURCH HOSTILITY

These statistics likely understate the extent of the problem, as “[m]any acts of hostility against churches are likely not reported to authorities and/or are not featured in the news or other online sources from which we collected data,” said the report. “[T]he number of acts of hostility is undoubtedly much higher.”

President Biden has denied wrongdoing and told a National Prayer Breakfast audience in 2022, mainly comprising of members of the U.S. Congress, that his Christian faith reminded him of the importance of service. “In a moment of a great division, our democracy is at grave risk. I pray that we follow what Jesus taught us: to serve rather than be served,” he stressed.

Many church assaults also stemmed from the “Christian church’s 2,000-year-old teaching that life begins at fertilization/conception,” the FRC said, which described abortion as “murder.”

Church assaults peaked in June, the first anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the Roe v. Wade ruling that had legalized abortion nationwide.

An arsonist set the Incarnation Roman Catholic Church in Orlando ablaze on the pro-life ruling’s first anniversary, although investigators could not determine if the date figured into the blaze, the FRC noted.

But “pro-abortion attacks on Christian churches” continued unabated all year long. On January 18, just before the [anti-abortion] March for Life, “someone vandalized the monument to the unborn at St. Rosalia Roman Catholic Church in Pittsburgh,” the FRC explained.

Eight days later, an attacker “desecrated a pro-life banner” inside a Florida Catholic parish with the phrase “Women’s body, women’s choice,” the report recalled.

PRO-LIFE SIGN

Months later, on September 9, someone splattered red paint on an anti-abortion “pro-life sign” at the Second Baptist Church in Palermo, Maine, leaving behind two messages: “Abortion is our human right” and “Queer love 4 Eva”, according to investigators.

Vandals reportedly also destroyed “a pro-life display of 1,000 wooden crosses” that organizers said were “representing unborn lives snuffed out by abortion” at a display in Mary Queen of Heaven Catholic Church in Elmhurst, Illinois.

Several of Ohio’s 24 reported church attacks were linked to opposition to the state’s Issue 1 campaign. The controversial constitutional amendment created a “right” for people of all ages to access abortion at essentially any point in pregnancy, FRC said.

The report did not include attacks this year, including earlier this month when a pro-Palestine person clad in a trench coat and accompanied by a child opened fire in a crowded Texas megachurch before she was gunned down and killed by security, officials said.

The shooting, in which a child and a man were also injured, happened at pastor Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston, which has one of the nation’s largest congregations.

With church attacks rising, the FRC suggested in its report that President Biden should do more to defend Christian values.
“Joe Biden’s ‘indifference abroad to the fundamental freedom of religion is rivaled only by the increasing antagonism toward the moral absolutes taught by Bible-believing churches here in the U.S,’” the report complained.

Biden has, however, countered that he is a person of faith. Speaking at the National
Prayer Breakfast in 2022, he told the audience, mainly comprising members of Congress, that his Christian faith reminded him of the importance of service. “In a moment of a great division, our democracy is at grave risk. I pray that we follow what Jesus taught us: to serve rather than be served,” he said.

The post Church Attacks In US Escalating, Report Warns appeared first on Worthy Christian News.

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As the song says “Don’t it always seem to go That you don’t know what you’ve got Till it’s gone.”