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Bitter Winter

A magazine on religious liberty and human rights

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Home / International / News Global

Christian Churches Vandalized Again Across United States

01/21/2022PierLuigi Zoccatelli |

The incidents are just too numerous to explain all of them away with mental health issues of the perpetrators

by PierLuigi Zoccatelli

TV News show christian churches vandalized

Attacks against Christian churches continue in different states of the U.S., and are now becoming somewhat endemic, as a look at some recent incidents demonstrate.

On December 28, 2021, somebody fired shots from outside into the interior of Everlasting Life Holiness Church in Prichard, Alabama, killing a 65-year-old woman who was inside the church.

In Hillsborough, New Jersey, the police reported on January 2 that the Catholic church of Mary Mother of God had been attacked three times in the past month of December.

On January 4, 2022, a man who had entered a church in downtown Buffalo, New York, and started shouting at the pastor and threatening to kill those in attendance was arraigned on one count of making a terrorist threat.

Also on January 4, a man was arrested, accusing of having set fire to a nativity scene located in front of Hopeland Church, an evangelical church in Vandalia, Ohio. It remains unclear whether the same person was also responsible for another attack to the church’s parsonage, where property was destroyed on January 2. The man was indicted on January 14.

And again on January 4, unidentified perpetrators vandalized the historical Flowertown Baptist Church in Summerville, South Carolina, that they had entered by breaking several windows with a fire extinguisher.

On January 9, St. Phillips Moravian Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, was evacuated after a bomb threat. The same happened the same day at Burns United Methodist Church in Des Moines, Iowa. Police is investigating the incident as a hate crime.

The woman accused of the attack against Denver’s Catholic cathedral. Source: Office of Denver’s District Attorney.
The woman accused of the attack against Denver’s Catholic cathedral. Source: Office of Denver’s District Attorney.

On January 13, a woman who had vandalized the Catholic Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Denver, Colorado, was arrested on hate crime charges. She had sprayed graffiti with anti-Christian messages on the external walls of the cathedral and on statues outside it.

Aso on January 13, a man appeared before a court in Smithville, Tennessee, after he spray-painted a local church, and left a threatening message, stating “[It would] be a real shame to lose your church because of terrorists.”

On January 16, police arrested a man who had entered St. Timothy Catholic Church in San Antonio, Texas, armed with a gun and tried to interrupt the Mass, together with another man who was waiting for him in a van outside the church.

As Bitter Winter commented in previous cases of “epidemics” of attacks against Christian churches in Europe and North America, it is well possible that some of the incidents can be ascribed to the mental health problems of the perpetrators. However, they are too numerous to be explained only through mental health issues, and a larger climate of hostility to Christianity prevailing in segments of North American culture justifies the police officers and the courts that treat these as hate crimes.

Tagged With: Catholics, Christian Churches

Professor PierLuigi Zoccatelli
PierLuigi Zoccatelli

PierLuigi Zoccatelli (born July 30, 1965 in Verona) teaches Sociology of Religions at Pontifical Salesian University, Torino, and Sociology of Esotericism at the University of Turin. He is deputy director of CESNUR, the Center for Studies on New Religions, and the associate editor of The Journal of CESNUR. Among other affiliations, he is a member of the scientific committee of the Interdepartmental Center for Research in Religious Sciences “Erik Peterson” (CSR) of the University of Turin, and of Contemporary Religions And Faiths in Transition (CRAFT), a research center of the Department of Cultures, Politics and Societies of the University of Turin. He is also a member of the section “Sociology of Religion” of the Italian Sociology Association (AIS), and of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE). He is the author of several books and articles in the field of New Religious Movements and Western Esotericism, and co-director of the widely reviewed Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy. His writings has appeared in 12 countries and in 8 languages.

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