by BY SA MCCARTHY/THE WASHINGTON STAND
Experts are warning of rising anti-Christian hostility — not just abroad, but at home in the U.S. Arielle Del Turco, director of the Center for Religious Liberty at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand, “International religious freedom groups are monitoring religious freedom conditions in the United States more and more, and it’s easy to see why. Sadly, American culture is increasingly hostile to traditional Christian beliefs.”
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She added, “To a large extent, we can all intuit that by browsing through a streaming service or scrolling on social media. But these cultural shifts are also having real-work impacts for Christians in America who simply want to go about their lives while staying true to their faith.”
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Del Turco continued, “When Christian couples are denied a foster care license because their faith is at odds with gender ideology or fifth graders are prevented from starting an interfaith prayer club at school, these are critical reminders that religious freedom isn’t something we can take for granted — it must be defended. Thankfully, the U.S. still has strong legal protections in most cases and religious freedom is the victor in court more often than not. However, cultural support for religious freedom is in peril and we must be intentional about fostering that.”
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Del Turco’s comments follow a warning issued by International Christian Concern president Jeff King. In an interview with The Christian Post, King lamented that too many in Western nations fail to see the trend of increased persecution of Christians domestically. “Basically, we are frogs in the kettle, and the bubbles keep coming up under us,” he said. “Too many people are not aware politically, and they’re so used to thinking of how things were that they can’t figure out where these bubbles are coming from, not realizing they’re being cooked.”
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Earlier this year, FRC’s Center for Religious Liberty published a report entitled, “Free to Believe? The Intensifying Intolerance Toward Christians in the West.” In it, the Center for Religious Liberty identified 168 incidents of anti-Christian hatred or discrimination from January 2020 to the end of 2023, including 33 incidents last year alone.
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The report notes that the majority of identified instances of anti-Christian hatred or discrimination, occurring in 2020 and 2021, were often related to COVID-19 lockdown violations, but that intolerance of public and even private biblical worldviews is on the rise.
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“As the mainstream culture moves further and further away from a Christian worldview, Christian beliefs that contradict progressive secular values are increasingly denounced by the culture and wrongly portrayed as being hateful or bigoted,” the report read. “Although FRC identified fewer incidents related to COVID-19 after 2020, incidents that we identified of Christians facing discrimination for their biblically informed beliefs increased.”
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“It is shocking to see Western countries — the same ones we think of as free and open societies — take authoritarian measures against Christians simply trying to live out their faith,” said FRC President Tony Perkins in a letter attached to the report. “Hostility toward Bible-believing Christians is clearly and steadily rising in the West.”
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Also this year, Del Turco and FRC published a report detailing not only an increase in attacks against churches in the U.S. but an exponential acceleration of such incidents. Tracking and cataloging attacks against churches — including vandalism, destruction of property, arson, bomb threats, and gun-related incidents — since the beginning of 2018, FRC reported that 2023 saw 436 attacks against churches, which Del Turco noted was “more than double the number identified in 2022 and more than eight times the number identified in 2018.” Del Turco commented, “These findings suggest that hostility against U.S. churches is not only on the rise but also accelerating.”
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Another notable instance of anti-Christian hostility comes in the form of the FBI avoiding accountability for targeting American Catholics. Last year, the FBI’s field office in Richmond compiled and circulated a memo detailing plans to spy on Catholics who attend the Tridentine Mass, the form of the Mass most common prior to 1969. Such Catholics were labeled “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists,” based on the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Hate Map,” which places “radical traditionalist Catholics” on a list alongside the Ku Klux Klan.
Although a congressional report determined that senior FBI officials and lawyers approved of the memo’s creation and circulation, the Department of Justice recently ruled that the agency had committed no wrong in creating and circulating the memo. Even though American Catholics were smeared as racists and potential domestic terrorists, the DOJ wrote that “our review of emails, instant messages, and text messages … during the relevant time period did not identify any evidence of discriminatory or inappropriate comments … about Church 1, or individuals who practiced a particular religious faith or held specific political beliefs.”
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Nor is the increase in hostility towards Christians limited to the U.S. In its annual report covering 2022, the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in Europe (OIDAC Europe) noted a 44% increase in social hostility towards and violent attacks against Christians as well as acts of vandalism and desecration against churches.
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According to the report, 748 anti-Christian hate crimes were committed in Europe in 2022, including murders and arson attacks against churches, especially in France and Germany. OIDAC Europe linked the majority of the attacks to groups with far-left, Satanic, Islamic, feminist, or LGBT affiliations.
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Catholic Cardinal Gerhard Müller of Germany, former director of the Vatican’s doctrine office, commented last year on the secular West’s hostility towards Christianity, especially Christian morality. “I believe that today, Jesus would not be condemned only because He is the Messiah, but He would in Canada or in the United States or in European countries go to prison because He spoke out the truth about marriage between a man and a woman,” the cardinal stated.