Minneapolis Shooting Highlights Increasing Hostility Toward Christian Churches and Schools

Studying a single issue over time often reveals important trends, and one trend there to observe is an increasing amount of hostility toward Christian churches and schools across the United States. Most recently, a former student at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Minnesota came to an afternoon Mass and shot 19 people, two fatally.

“The shooter was very openly disdainful of Christianity and Christian symbols,” director of Family Research Council’s Center for Religious Liberty Arielle Del Turco said on “Washington Watch.” “He had a picture of Jesus attached to a shooting target in his room, and he was posting videos about this. He had a magazine for one of his rifles that tauntingly said, ‘Where is your God?’”

Immediately after the mass shooting, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey gave a news conference where “he was speaking about how important it is not to vilify the transgender community,” noted The Post Millennial’s Libby Emmons on “Washington Watch.” “He spoke at length, not just at that news conference, but later in the day, about how important it was not to vilify the transgender community.”

Now, why would Frey frame his comments as if people who identify as transgender were the victims? Wasn’t a Catholic school the target of the attack? Didn’t the attacker make his anti-Christian animus clear? Why the rush to defend a whole class of people disconnected from the shooting? In the instinctual response to respect people who identify as transgender over the actual victims of the shooting, Frey was joined by the entire left-wing media, which “has been going above and beyond to make sure they’re using female pronouns for this man,” said Emmons.

If this rings a bell, that’s because these events fit a pattern very similar to events surrounding the March 2023 shooting at Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee There as now, the shooter was a former student unhappily chasing a transgender identity. There as now, the target was a Christian school connected with a church, which was made a target specifically because of its teaching. There as now, the shooter left behind abundant evidence of anti-Christian bias. There as now, the media rallied to defend transgender-identifying individuals instead of the actual victims.

Both incidents are part of a more general trend of increasing violence against churches. The most recent issue of FRC’s “Hostility against Churches” report, released earlier this month, has cataloged “1,384 acts of hostility toward U.S. churches, occurring between January 2018 and December 2024.” This is almost certainly an undercount “because we are only identifying incidents that have already been publicly reported,” Del Turco described.

These attacks have increased in frequency (with a slight decline from 2022). “In our report this past year, in 2024, which is the most recent year we have data on, we found 415 incidents of hostility against churches, compared to 2018 when we found 50. That is a massive increase over a small amount of years,” said Del Turco.

“It’s hard to know what’s going on in the hearts of all of these people,” she continued. “At the very least … we have to conclude that there is a severe disrespect for Christianity in our culture. The most mild incident in our report might be: someone’s walking down the street and throws a brick through a stained-glass window at a church. Even that shows a severe level of disrespect at minimum, or hostility.”

Disrespect for Christianity across the broader culture feeds, and is fed by, disrespect for Christianity from government entities. This disrespect was conspicuous during the Biden administration, which sent informants into Catholic churches, sued the largest Christian universities, and sought to bury peaceful Christian pro-lifers underneath the jail.

The most immediate example comes from Minnesota. After school shootings in 2022 and 2023, the Minnesota Catholic Conference asked Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., and other state officials to give nonpublic schools access to funds for security upgrades and emergency-response training, the National Catholic Register reported. Despite a face-to-face meeting with Walz, where the governor expressed his belief that schools should be safe, the funds that could have stopped the Annunciation shooting were never made available to nonpublic schools.

Fortunately, it seems that government has turned a corner. “The FBI is investigating this as an act of anti-Catholic bias …. That’s a really encouraging sign that the administration is paying attention to this issue. They’re recognizing there’s hostility against Christianity,” said Del Turco. “While we are turning to prayer and turning to the Lord for help, we also are encouraged when our leaders are taking this seriously.”

In fact, Scripture itself makes the connection between prayer and the government protecting Christians. In 1 Timothy 2:2, Paul urges Christians to pray “for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.” Christians should expect to face persecution in many forms, but Paul suggests that their ability to live peacefully results from their prayers for government officials.

Most fundamentally, Christians must recognize that acts of hostility toward churches in general, and shootings at Christian schools in particular, are not matters that can be settled with the right gun control legislation or some security funding. At a deeper level, we recognize these incidents as part of a spiritual war over the final state of eternal souls.

This is why “so many of these attacks on churches outlined in the report just seem to make no sense,” such as “people breaking into a small Baptist church in a rural area and just raiding and destroying the entire sanctuary,” Del Turco urged. “And when these attacks make so little sense, I think it’s a reasonable conclusion that there’s a spiritual aspect here. … And for us, all of us, it’s a call to prayer.”

Originally published by The Washington Stand.

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