Evangelicals Say Shootings Are Hate Crime

The murderous rampage this week at a Texas Baptist church exemplified rising hostility toward Christians in America and abroad--and an inexplicable reluctance to recognize the shooting as a religious hate crime, national evangelical leaders said Friday.

From Jerry Falwell to Pat Robertson, James Dobson and D. James Kennedy, conservative Christian leaders uniformly decried what they called a double standard in treating Christian victims of violence.

The recent shooting at a Granada Hills Jewish community center and last year’s murders of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming and James Byrd Jr. in Texas were quickly--and rightly--labeled as hate crimes against Jews, gays and blacks, respectively, the leaders said.

But no such declaration has been made, they pointed out, in the case of Wedgwood Baptist Church, where Larry Gene Ashbrook reportedly screamed anti-Christian expletives as he killed seven churchgoers. The gunman also reportedly had mutilated a Bible at his home before the attack.

Nor, religious leaders say, were anti-Christian motives highlighted in attacks on a high school prayer circle in West Paducah, Ky., in 1997 or this year at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in which born-again Christian Cassie Bernall became a symbol of martyrdom when she was killed after reportedly affirming her faith in God.

“There is a total absence of outrage over the killings at the Baptist church and in Colorado, as far as the religious aspect is concerned,” Falwell said. “We have, whether intentional or not, built up a reservoir of hostility toward people of faith, particularly evangelical people.”

Falwell and others blamed everyone from Hollywood to the U.S. Supreme Court to the American Civil Liberties Union for fostering disrespect, even antipathy, toward Christians and for dislodging biblical values from a central place in American life. “Evangelicals are portrayed by Hollywood as buffoons, uncaring people and hypocrites,” he said.

Evangelical leaders say Christians are suffering unparalleled persecution worldwide--a number estimated at 200 million in the 1997 book “Their Blood Cries Out,” by Paul Marshall and Lela Gilbert. Now, they argue, the attacks against them are coming home to America.

“It would seem that killing Christians is on a far lower level of seriousness than anyone else being killed,” said Kennedy, pastor of the 10,000-member Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Florida. “Is that where we’ve come to as a Christian nation?”

Despite the escalating violence, however, the religious leaders uniformly declared that gun control was not the answer. Both Robertson and Dobson, who heads Focus on the Family, said they own shotguns for hunting. Richard Land, a top official with the Southern Baptist Convention, also said he possesses a shotgun for hunting and two pistols for “personal protection.”

The religious leaders did advocate some limits on the right to bear arms, including bans on assault weapons and in such venues as schools. But they took larger aim at what they called society’s loss of moral values and at the films, TV programs, video games and music that they say promote a culture of violence.

“We need to have a serious moral revival that will shift this culture of death to a culture of life,” said Robertson, president of the 700 Club.