The Surprises About Anti-Religious Crime in America

February 14, 2018

By Paul V.M. Flesher

The FBI collects statistics about hate crimes in the United States. These are crimes that were motivated by hatred against the victims -- whether a hatred of their race, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation. A look at the information from 2016, the most recent year available, reveals a number of surprises, especially about hate crime directed at religions and religious people.

The first surprise is that there are so few crimes motivated by hatred of a particular religion. For 2016, only 1,273 such crimes were reported to the FBI by police departments around the nation. For a country of 323 million people, that is quite low.

Let’s put that number in perspective. Crime is reported as a rate per 100,000 people. In 2016, the national violent crime rate was 386 crimes per 100,000 people, while the national property crime rate was 2,450 per 100,000 people. Anti-religious crime of all types was only 0.39 per 100,000 people.

            Now, it is known that hate crime figures are underreported. But, even if they were underreported by 1,000 percent, the crime rate would be only about 4 per 100,000 people. When compared to the property crime rate of 2,450 per 100,000 individuals, it is clear that there is no epidemic of anti-religious crime; however, such individual incidents may be featured in the media.

The second surprise is that anti-religious crime does not make a large percentage of hate crimes. Anti-religious hate crimes represent only 21 percent of all hate crimes in the USA. Most hate crimes are inspired by racial or ethnic hatred.

The third surprise is that, despite regular media reports about the vandalism of synagogues, mosques and even churches (especially black churches), religious institutions are not the most frequent target of anti-religious crimes. People are the most common target. Individuals and their family homes were assaulted in 51 percent of the 1,273 anti-religious crimes reported. Businesses were the second-highest target at 11 percent, while religious institutions comprised just 9 percent of the crimes.

The fourth surprise is that, despite the claims we hear in the media about Christians suffering anti-Christian bias, Christians are not frequently the targets of anti-religion hate crimes. Of the 1,584 victims of anti-religious attacks, Jews and Jewish institutions constitute more than half of the victims, 54 percent. And, despite all the anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric, in 2016, Muslims were the victims of only 24 percent of anti-religious crimes. Christians and their churches were victims of anti-religious hate crimes in only 11 percent of the incidents.

The focus on Jews and Jewish institutions as targets indicates the continued presence of Christian-based anti-Semitism within our country. The fewer anti-Muslim crimes suggest that the anti-Muslim fervor has not caught on as thoroughly at this point. The few anti-Christian crimes are most likely Christian-on-Christian crimes: Think white Christians against black Christians and their churches, or attacks on Mormon or Jehovah Witness missionaries going door to door.

The fifth surprise is that anti-religious crimes usually aim to intimidate rather than injure. Most crimes against individuals do not even rise to the level of violent crimes; 87 percent of them are simple assault or (verbal) intimidation. With regard to crimes against property, most (86 percent) are vandalism, property damage and occasional destruction -- again, intimidation rather than theft.The one exception to this characterization is that 13 percent of anti-Muslim crime is aggravated assault, far more than against victims of any other religion.

The take-away point is that anti-religious crime is quite uncommon in the United States, despite sensationalist media reports. Individuals and their homes are the most common victims of these crimes, and the vast majority of the victims are Jewish or Muslims. Christians make up a small minority of the victims of anti-religious attacks.

Note: Thanks to Cameron Walker, of the Laramie Boomerang, whose recent column on hate crimes inspired this analysis.

Raising the Dead

In our modern culture of horror movies, Halloween brings on thoughts of the dead rising from the earth and walking among the living. In recent years, that once-a-year notion had become a large entertainment genre built around zombies, from books to TV to film.

But to Christianity over the centuries, the phrase “the dead rising” would have meant raising the dead into heaven. Have you ever thought about what gives the dead the power to rise into heaven rather than into the world of the living?

Medieval Christian theologians believed that the dead were weighed down by their sins and so stopped at a midway point, Purgatory, where they were purified for entry into heaven. Post-Puritan Protestant thinkers emphasized lightening one’s burden while here on earth, through confession, forgiveness, and leading a sanctified life.

Theological descriptions were fine for the clergy and the educated, but ordinary, often unlearned, Christians took a different route to ensuring that the dead made it to heaven. They buried their dead in locations where there was a special link between heaven and earth.

Earthly locations with special links to heaven were considered to be sacred places. Sacred means “touched by God.” In the Holy Land, in Palestine, sacred places were fairly common.  Any place Jesus performed a miracle, for instance, was considered a sacred place. These locations where divine power had been displayed were believed to have a special link to heaven, the divine realm. 

Over the centuries, these sacred spots often became heavily used cemeteries. Churches and monasteries were built on them, and cemeteries formed around them. Several sites became destinations for pious Christians who never set foot in the Holy Land during their life. But they had their remains transported there for permanent burial

The British Isles differed from the Holy Land.  Since Christianity reached these islands centuries after Jesus’ life and death, they had no sites where Jesus, or even some of his early followers, had lived, traveled or done miracles.

So at what sacred locations could the early British Christians bury their dead?  One solution was to take over the sacred places of earlier religions—the sites where the Druids and others had practiced their rites.

In Anglesey, two sites have recently been found where the Christians buried their dead next to a Bronze Age burial mound nearly two millennia older. Near Stonehenge, the ancient stone circles of Avebury and Knowlton were appropriated by the Christians as cemeteries.  And at Lough Erne in Northern Ireland, an ancient two-faced stone statue became the center of a Christian burial ground.

What is going on here? The early British Christians, like those in Israel, wanted to bury their dead at a sacred site. The only sacred sites they knew came from the pagans. But now that the Christians knew the true nature of the divine being, that he was God, they seemed to have decided that these sites were part of God’s holiness. By burying the dead there, they were brought closer to the Christian heaven.

But who knows, in the dark of Halloween night, whether the early Christians remained certain that their God was completely in control. Perhaps some pagan spirits and power remained, and who knows what the dead might do . . . .

October 2016