Is Hostility toward American Christians Increasing?

Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, seems to have become almost a household name in the wake of his murder last week. I had heard of him before then but didn’t know much about him. I have since learned especially about his strong faith in Christ and of his debating and dialoguing with students on high school, college, and university campuses. I am so grateful to learn this about him, and I very much look forward to meeting him in heaven.

Much has already been written about the motives of the “alleged” shooter, Tyler Robinson. What’s obvious from the released transcript of his conversation with his lover is that he thought Kirk was hateful and that he hated him in return. That doesn’t surprise me, but what has surprised me is so much vitriol, and even celebration, from some people on the left. There used to be an unwritten rule not to speak evil of the dead, but in our day and age, that has been thrown out the window. MSNBC analyst Matthew Dowd suggested that it was Kirk’s hateful rhetoric that led to his murder; to their credit, MSNBC fired him. CA state Sen. Scott Wiener wrote earlier this week that Kirk was a “vile bigot” and that he normalized “dehumanization.” Unfortunately, Wiener cannot be fired. There have been other employees of various companies that have also been fired because of hateful comments about Kirk. Thankfully, there have been other kinds of voices as well. One of those voices is country artist Gavin Adcock, who said, “If you live in the life of the Lord and believe in Jesus, you shouldn’t be scared to leave this world, and Charlie Kirk was a great example of that.”

Most of what I have seen in the wake of Kirk’s death is framed in political terms. However, I believe that there is something else, something much deeper, going on. For many years now, American Christians have been marginalized as unthinking, reactive bigots (among other things), but other words targeting Christians have entered the attacks as well, including “evil.” One of the people using that word is evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins; he skirts using it to describe Christians directly, but he has called Christianity “an evil religion.” Isaiah 5:20 comes to mind: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.”

If you live in the U.S. and are not in a Christian “bubble,” it’s not hard to see how the U.S. has become increasingly hostile toward Christians; that hostility can quickly morph into hate, and the ultimate expression of that is murder. In that regard, I decided to research mass shootings at churches and Christian schools in the U.S. Since 1980, there have been 11 at churches:

1980: 1

1999: 1

2000-2009: 2

2010-2019: 4

2020-present: 3

I have included shootings where multiple people were shot but “only” one person died. It should be obvious that the number of shootings at American churches has skyrocketed in comparative terms; this is even more obvious when you consider this: 9 of these mass shootings have been since 2007–and 7 of those 9 have been since 2015. This is approaching an exponential increase.

When I looked at Christian schools (K-12), I found “only” three mass shootings, but note this: one was in 2023, and two were in 2024. One clarification: the Annunciation shooting was at a school-wide Mass at the Church of the Annunciation being attended by students and faculty of the Annunciation Catholic School; I included this shooting as a church shooting.

Regardless of how mass shootings are defined (is it a minimum of three deaths or four?), there have been hundreds of them in the U.S. since 2000, perhaps even thousands. At schools (including colleges/universities) alone, there were 461 from 2000-2024. You could say that the number of mass shootings targeted at churches (11) and Christian K-12 schools (3) is very small, but again, when we look at the fact that 12 of those 14 have occurred in a single generation, and 10 of them since 2015, I believe that tells us something.

In John 15:18-19, Jesus tells His disciples, “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.” When we who are Christians share our faith, we can expect resistance because the foundation of our message is that people are sinful and they need Christ. In our contemporary society, we can expect hostility, even hate. However, as one of my sisters in Christ and fellow bloggers (who goes by seekingdivineperspective) recently wrote, “There’s still time to speak. Even if they shoot.”

May we who are Christians be courageous, winsome, and loving as we speak and demonstrate the truth about the Truth Himself: Jesus Christ.