Given the preponderance of Islamic inspired terrorism in recent years, there has been, in some quarters, a perhaps well-intended effort to introduce perspective and balance to the picture. This has led to claims that the bulk of terrorist acts are committed by Christians. But truth and reality don't require balance. They are what they are. So what is the truth rather than the simple assertion?
There are reasons to call into question the good faith bona fides of those making these claims. The polite reading of their motivation is that they are concerned that Americans will form blind prejudices based on exceptional cases and that they might turn on Muslim Americans. George Bush did a reasonably good job of drawing the distinction between community and perpetrators and conveying the message that all Americans are Americans and should not be hived off as groups.
This concern about the susceptibility of Americans to bigotry, however well intended, is markedly prejudicial and bigoted in itself and goes against all the measurable evidence. Americans are a distinctly tolerant and receptive culture and clashes almost always happen over personal actions and behaviors rather than prejudices. In a country of 320 million, there are always going to be aberrations but they are few and far between. A few years ago, I looked at the FBI hate crimes statistics for 2000-2010 and the numbers were very low. Anti-muslim hate crimes were tiny and dwarfed by the on-going and persistent infection of anti-semitic hate crimes.
The claim that most terrorist acts in the US are committed by Christians is absurd on its face but insight and perspective come from discovering what you thought you knew might not be the case. It is worthwhile investigating the claim at least at a cursory level. David French has a whack at addressing this in
No, America Doesn’t Have a Christian Terrorism Problem. French makes some good points but I don't think it is an airtight case. He has a handful of stories, narratives, anecdotes, instances that are consistent, but ultimately you want something numerically robust. How do we define a terrorist act (distinct from a crime)? This isn't a pedantic issue. Notoriously, the Obama administration classified the Fort Hood attack by Major Nidal Hasan as an incident of workplace violence rather than terrorism and yet the popular vernacular understanding is much clearer. It was a terroristic attack for religiously motivated purposes. What makes the Chattanooga shootout a terrorist event as opposed to a gang shooting? Given the definition we choose to use, how many terrorist acts have there been in the past decade? Of those, how many have been committed for avowedly "Christian" reasons? I cannot come up with any. Islamic inspired attacks? Sure. Fort Hood, Boston, Chattanooga, etc. Lots of attacks, lots of deaths.
As is often the case, the claim rests on some definitional issues, which French touches on.
We’ve seen this movie before. Following the dreadful Oklahoma City bombing, many on the left tried to pin Timothy McVeigh on Rush Limbaugh, and despite the fact that McVeigh called himself an agnostic, some leftists still refer to him a “Christian terrorist.”
Separate from the claim about Christian terrorism, there is another trope going around, something along the lines that we are not at risk from foreign terrorists but from homegrown terrorism. Again, a claim that could be true but when you dig into it you find definitional issues. This is illustrated by a recent report released by George Washington University,
ISIS in America. They are looking at the 71 people arrested in the US since March 2014 for ISIS-related activities. The claim in the executive summary is that:
The profiles of individuals involved in ISIS-related activities in the U.S. differ widely in race, age, social class, education, and family background. Their motivations are equally diverse and defy easy analysis.
They seem to be conveying the idea that anyone could be an ISIS terrorist, that there are no predictive patterns among the 71. But that doesn't appear to be true. They don't provide a summary of the metrics to support their statement so I eyeballed the detailed individual narratives they provide on the 71. That's where definitions become important. For example, does a white Bosnian Muslim immigrant to the US who has become a naturalized citizen count as homegrown terror or international terror?
Based on the quick review, 60% of the 71 are first or second generation Muslim immigrants. 40% are American converts, most of whom are African-American. I see three native born white converts. One Hispanic convert. No East Asian or South Asian. No Native Americans.
Despite the claim that they differ widely by race, age, etc. there is actually a quite defined profile. All the 71 are Muslim. Most are recent immigrants from the Middle East or Muslim countries and virtually all the rest are African-American. Virtually all are between 20-35 years old.
The issue to me is not what the actual profile might be. The issue is the reluctance to speak factually. One of our greatest assets as a nation is a trust and confidence in one another as well as trust and confidence in our system of government. Trust among citizens is high on a global scale and I suspect higher than it has long been. There has been a sustained Gramscian effort to cultivate racial and other identities and encourage people to think of themselves as groups rather than individuals. Blessedly, outside a few academic disciplines, Hollywood, the media and a few other postmodern Frankfurt School redoubts, this appeal to racial and group identity has largely failed to take root. We are Americans and we trust one another.
Our second pillar, trust in our form of government has taken a lot of hits in the past two or three decades, deservedly so. The regrettable thing is that it is not the form of government at fault but the mixed bag of characters we have had populating it. The worst political class ever, as some put it. None-the-less, the distrust in government is there.
Claiming that most terrorist attacks in the US are Christian, and that most of the terrorist attacks are homegrown can both be argued on tendentious grounds with twisted definitions and deliberate obfuscations. It can be argued, but it is not correct. As long as politicians and their fellow travellers are peddling these myths, it tells the citizenry that the political class think A) our citizens are idiots, and B) our citizens are easily swayed bigots lacking all form of self-control.
No wonder there is so little trust in government. It does not bode well.
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