A YouTube algorithm did me a favor last week. It kept resurfacing a report from the National Churches Trust, published last April, with a headline I could not quite shake: over 9,000 crimes reported at UK churches in just three years.
The numbers are blunt. Between 2022 and 2024, the Countryside Alliance documented 9,148 incidents at UK churches through Freedom of Information requests: 3,758 thefts and burglaries, 3,237 cases of criminal damage, vandalism and arson, and 1,974 cases of violence. The real total is almost certainly higher, since only 33 of 45 police forces fully responded.
Not a religious persecution story.
A friend pointed out, sensibly, that most of this is theft. Lead from the roof, mostly. The rest is the usual catalogue of small-town vandalism, with a stray Satanist or two thrown in. Not a religious persecution story. Just criminality with a particular geography. He is right about the data. And yet I find myself unable to leave the matter there.
France, a few years earlier, had a similar wave. The French Ministry of the Interior recorded 1,063 anti-Christian acts in 2018, roughly two attacks on churches per day, and the trend has not really subsided since.
An extraordinary climb in reported anti-Christian hate crimes across Europe.
The Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe (OIDAC) tracked an extraordinary climb in reported anti-Christian hate crimes across Europe between 2021 and 2023, from 519 to 748 to 2,444.
The French government’s own investigation, when it finally came, concluded that the perpetrators included Islamist, far-right, far-left, and Satanist profiles, alongside what officials politely called “the unbalanced and minors who are probably over-represented.”
There is no single agenda. There is no monolithic enemy.
That is a striking finding, and a useful one. There is no single agenda. There is no monolithic enemy. What there is, instead, is a pattern of opportunistic attacks against buildings that are open, lightly defended, often empty, and frequently old.
France’s headline numbers are real, but the substance behind them looks more like the UK pattern than a coordinated anti-Christian campaign: a lot of vandalism, a lot of theft, a hard core of genuine hate crime, all aggregated into a single statistic.
This is where I want to slow down, because the responses on both sides miss the more interesting question.
No, it isn’t really a persecution story
One response is to fold all of this into a narrative of Christian persecution in the West. The numbers are real, the suffering is real, the pattern is real, therefore the persecution is real. The label gets applied, the donor appeal gets written, and the analytical work stops.
This will not do. Stealing lead from a church roof to sell as scrap metal is not religious persecution. It is theft of an opportunity target. A teenager spray-painting a satanic pentagram on a vestry door is not running a coordinated anti-Christian campaign; he is, in most cases, a teenager.
None of these things, taken individually, fits the persecution category, and pretending otherwise is the kind of overreach that ends up doing the persecution argument more harm than good.
Petty crime, drunken vandalism, troubled teenagers, the unbalanced.
The same caution applies to the French numbers. There is real anti-Christian hate crime in France, and the Observatory’s documentation of attacks on consecrated objects, statues of Mary, and tabernacles deserves to be taken seriously. But once you set aside the genuine hate-crime cases, what remains in the French data is recognizably what we see in the UK: petty crime, drunken vandalism, troubled teenagers, the unbalanced.
Multi-causal here means mostly miscellaneous, not a sustained anti-Christian campaign with many faces. The persecution label, applied to wholesale scrap-metal theft and bored teenagers with spray cans, eventually empties of meaning. The label matters too much to spend it carelessly.
But it reveals increasing disrespect for religious institutions
So if it isn’t persecution, what is it? It is something more diffuse, and in some ways more revealing.
I have spent a long time uncomfortable with the dichotomous approach we have inherited in this field: an incident is religious freedom violation, or an incident is not; a conflict is religious, or a conflict is not religious.
I understand why the binary exists. When you are running a data collection project like the Violent Incidents Database, you eventually have to decide whether each case enters the dataset or stays out. The methodology demands a yes or a no. But every researcher I trust in this field privately admits the same thing: a great deal gets lost in the translation from messy reality to clean category.
Perpetrators usually do not target believers at all. They target buildings.
The perpetrators usually do not target believers at all. They target buildings. The buildings happen to be churches because churches are convenient: unguarded, open during daylight, full of metal that resells, decorated with statues that smash satisfyingly.
Catholic churches in particular have the vocation to always be open to visitors, which is part of their pastoral character and not a security oversight. That very openness, the welcome that any passerby is meant to find at the door, becomes a liability in a society that no longer recognizes what the openness is for.
There is no anti-Christian conspiracy.
There is no anti-Christian conspiracy. And yet the pattern itself tells us something. It tells us that churches now occupy a particular social position in Western Europe, a position that makes them easy and acceptable to attack.
Not the same kind of acceptable as in Pakistan or Nigeria, where the attack itself is the point. A milder, more ambient kind of acceptable: the kind that registers as low-value crime against low-value targets.
A synagogue defaced with a swastika makes the national news. A mosque defaced makes the national news. A church with its lead stripped, a Virgin Mary smashed, a tabernacle overturned, occupies a paragraph in the regional paper, if that.
The hierarchy of public outrage is real, and it is telling. It is not a hierarchy of suffering, since each of these acts inflicts comparable damage on comparable communities. It is a hierarchy of which religious institutions still command a moral perimeter in the public imagination, and which do not.
This is where the declining moral standing of Christianity in Western European life starts to matter.
This is where the declining moral standing of Christianity in Western European life starts to matter, not as a theological problem but as a sociological one. Vandalism against churches is becoming, if not acceptable, then less unacceptable.
Mindless desecration of a building that fewer and fewer people regard as belonging to anyone in particular generates less friction than the same act would have generated a generation ago. The criminals are correct in their cost-benefit analysis. They face a lower social and legal cost for damaging a church than for damaging almost any other category of cultural site.
That is not religious persecution. It is something more diffuse, and in some ways more revealing. It is the slow erosion of the special standing that Western societies once afforded their churches, an erosion measurable not in arrests or convictions but in what people now feel free to do without much fearing what their neighbors will think.
A society that has simply forgotten how to behave in a sacred setting.
The same shift shows up inside services as well as outside them. Visitors wander into famous churches mid-Mass, talk through the liturgy, leave when they feel like it, behave as they would in any other tourist attraction. The disrespect is not malicious. It is the more telling kind: a society that has simply forgotten how to behave in a sacred setting because it no longer recognizes the setting as sacred.
This is, I think, what the religious freedom framework should be doing in cases like these. Not adjudicating every incident as in or out of the persecution category, but asking what the surrounding ecology of incidents tells us about the standing of religious communities, the protection they receive from the state, the seriousness with which their grievances are treated, the cultural cost of attacking them.
A society in which Christianity has lost much of its public protection.
A society where churches are widely vandalized with low public outrage and minimal prosecution is not a society persecuting Christians. It is a society in which Christianity has lost much of its public protection, and that fact deserves to be named without melodrama.
The 9,000 UK crimes are not a persecution story. But they are a story. They tell us something about the country, about its churches, and about the slow, unglamorous process by which sacred space loses its sacred character in the eyes of the broader public. That is worth our attention even when, perhaps especially when, no one is being martyred.
The honest position, I think, is to hold both things at once. Persecution is best understood as a continuum, with low-intensity and high-intensity manifestations and a great deal of texture in between, and that is the framing I have argued for elsewhere.
But not everything that happens to religious communities sits somewhere on that continuum. Some of what we are seeing in Europe is not persecution at low intensity. It is something else: a slow shift in the social standing of religious institutions, a gradual reduction of the cultural cost of damaging them, a quiet recoding of what counts as sacred space in the public imagination.
“Persecution” is not the right word for what is happening.
That phenomenon is real, and the religious freedom framework should be wide enough to take it in and name it accurately, even when so-called “persecution” is not the right word for what is happening. Drawing those distinctions carefully is most of the methodological work in this field.
Originally published as a Five4Faith Substack article. Republished with permission.
Dennis P. Petri, PhD is the International Director of the International Institute for Religious Freedom and Founder and scholar-at-large of the Observatory of Religious Freedom in Latin America. He is a Professor in International Relations at the Latin American University of Science and Technology. He is the author of The Specific Vulnerability of Religious Minorities, a book on undetected religious freedom challenges in Latin America.
The International Institute for Religious Freedom (IIRF) was founded in 2005 with the mission to promote religious freedom for all faiths from an academic perspective. The IIRF aspires to be an authoritative voice on religious freedom. They provide reliable and unbiased data on religious freedom—beyond anecdotal evidence—to strengthen academic research on the topic and to inform public policy at all levels. The IIRF's research results are disseminated through the International Journal for Religious Freedom and other publications. A particular emphasis of the IIRF is to encourage the study of religious freedom in tertiary institutions through its inclusion in educational curricula and by supporting postgraduate students with research projects.
