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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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innocent Christians being persecuted

A crazy trans person shooting up a Church is not being persecuted. From what I can tell, the Christian right and the LGBT* may be politically opposed to each other, but almost all of their members would be horrified when they learned that someone had shot up their opponent group.

Likewise, the fact that lots of mass shootings happen in schools is not proof that there is a coherent ideology which prizes the killing of US students.

Contrast this with Jews. There is a coherent group which will cheer whenever someone shoots up a synagogue. While I am sure that they likewise get their base rate of crazies without any antisemitic ideology (plus the odd youth who was formerly a member and blames the institution for whatever is wrong with their life), I would guess that nine out of ten murderous attacks against synagogues have an antisemitic background. That does not mean that these attackers are sane, but simply that on a per-victim-capita basis, a random unhinged person will encounter a lot more claims that the Jews are what is wrong with the world than that it is the Methodists.

A crazy trans person shooting up a Church is not being persecuted.

Even more relevant, this was their former school! It is the default of mass shooters to target their current and former workplaces/schools (often over highly personal grievance) so assuming it was a targeted attack on religion instead of just default mass shooter behavior could use some stronger evidence.

Contrast this with Jews. There is a coherent group which will cheer whenever someone shoots up a synagogue.

It's not clear to me that there is such a coherent group. At the very least, I have not seen them act before. There are certainly occasional anti-semites, but they don't seem to be unified in any way. Which I don't think is too dissimilar from Christians, to be honest - there are individual bigots who will cheer when someone hurts a church, but not a unified group. So it seems to me that both groups are equally persecuted - I would say neither group is truly persecuted right now, but if one argues that individuals being hostile towards Jews counts then I would say it should count for Christians as well.