DALLAS -- Nelson Smith cares for his church and its people as much as he cares for his own home and family, he said. So when he got the call last August that it was vandalized for the second time in two months, he drove there straightaway.
Someone had graffitied Nazi swastikas on Stonebridge United Methodist Church in McKinney alongside the words "skin king," a reference to the white supremacist skinhead movement, and the threat "not my best work yet..."
Smith, Stonebridge's facility coordinator and a church member for over 24 years, worked with several other parishioners to clean the building as fast as possible before the Sunday morning service.
"It's tough sitting there with a pressure washer, trying to get rid of hateful messages so other people can't see it, and knowing this is your house. This is your home," Smith recalled. While working, he said, the group "prayed together for the person who did this, as well as just the hate in the world."
Smith's church isn't the only one in North Texas that has recently suffered violence or vandalism. On July 23, Plano's Community Unitarian Universalist Church was attacked by a firebomb that left the building's front doors and foyer damaged. A few weeks earlier, the LGBTQ-affirming church had been trolled by anti-LGBTQ YouTubers who pretended to be gay and mocked the church's beliefs. Plano police were investigating the case.
On July 15, Fort Worth police arrested a man who allegedly threatened to "shoot up" First Pilgrim Valley Baptist Church. At least two other churches in Fort Worth reported acts of vandalism over the past few years.
Nationally, leaders of several Christian denominations have been raising the alarm about rising violence and vandalism against churches. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops warned of a "disturbing trend" of vandalism against Catholic churches in 2022 and has reported 270 acts of vandalism and destruction since May 2020. Black churches around the country have been victims of arson, "suspicious" fires and tens of thousands of dollars in property damage in recent years.
A RISE IN HATE CRIMES
The FBI releases national hate crime statistics annually and its most recent data from 2021 reported 10,840 hate crimes, the highest number in more than two decades, according to the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that fights antisemitism and hate crimes. Of those 10,840 crimes, 1,590 were related to religion, the FBI said.
Jake Kurz, director of communications for the central division of the Anti-Defamation League, said the spike in crimes against religious groups in the U.S. is linked to a rise in polarization.
"If we're more polarized, then we are more extreme in our views, and we are acting out in a way that is detrimental to people who are outside of our group," he said. "People are reacting to communities that are different than their own... Places of worship are just one way that people express themselves."
Rachel Carroll Rivas, deputy director for research, reporting and analysis at the civil rights group Southern Poverty Law Center, pointed out that the U.S. has a long history of churches involved with the Civil Rights movement being targeted.
Racist violence against churches "is something people of the younger generation aren't used to, but it is not new," she said. Carroll Rivas cited the recent court case that found far-right extremist group the Proud Boys liable for $1 million for destruction of property including a Black Lives Matter sign at the predominantly Black Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C.
Unlike in the '50s and '60s, when Black churches were more often targeted by the Ku Klux Klan, Carroll Rivas says in recent years her organization is seeing white supremacist groups pivot to lone wolf violence in an attempt to avoid institutional accountability.
"Let's have a bunch of lone wolves do the work for us," she said, summarizing the strategy. Terms like "skin king," which was graffitied on the McKinney church, signal that a person is part of white supremacist communities and listening to their messaging, she said, even if a formal tie isn't established.
Carroll Rivas said her organization is also seeing a spike in violence toward churches that support the LGBTQ community, including this year's firebombing of an Ohio church that planned to host a drag queen story hour.
"These particular churches who have been open and affirming churches for LGBTQ people, particularly Unitarian Universalist churches, have really been targeted for their openness."
'LACK OF RESPECT FOR RELIGION'
The Family Research Council, a conservative evangelical group, published a report last December on what it called "acts of hostility" against churches with data from 2018-2022 and updated its findings with a supplemental report in April. The group concluded that "acts of hostility," which ranged from arson to graffiti to protests during services, had increased significantly from January 2018 to September 2022, totaling 420 incidents.
"It's more thinkable now than it used to be a few decades ago for people to lash out at churches," study author Arielle Del Turco said.
Even if not every act of vandalism is motivated by "a specifically anti-religious intent... the fact that they're targeting churches in the first place shows an underlying lack of respect for religion overall," she added.
Del Turco cited "increasing secularization" and the growth of "nones," or those who do not identify with a religion, as reasons for the increase in violence.
David Campbell, a Notre Dame professor who studies secularization and secular people, questioned Del Turco's conclusion.
"The vast majority of Americans who are secularists are not hostile to religion. In fact, we find that they score very high on measures of what we might call religious tolerance," Campbell said, citing large studies of secular people he conducted for a book he co-authored called Secular Surge: A New Fault Line in American Politics. "They are very accepting of the free exercise of religion."
Instead, conflicts among believers may be contributing to anti-church violence, Campbell said. "There has been violence directed against places of worship over the long arc of American history, and often it's people of one faith who are attacking those of another faith."
Disputes within Christianity could be part of the problem, Carroll Rivas said.
"There is a current movement by a very small, narrow faction of the Christian community to define who is Christian and who's not... Some people are talking about this as a white Christian nationalist movement."
'DON'T BACK DOWN'
Violence against a house of worship can have a profound impact on the congregation, said Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow with the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism.
"When you target a religious institution -- be it a church, a synagogue, or a mosque -- you're not simply affecting the people who may run that institution, and you're not just affecting the congregation, either. You're going to be affecting anybody of that faith who learns about this and then becomes afraid."
The Rev. John Allen, lead pastor of the McKinney church that was vandalized last year, said he isn't afraid. He joined the church in July.
"They can come after me all day," he said. "I'm not going to let anybody threaten me or intimidate me from the work that we're called to do."
He shared words of advice for churches that may be worried they could be next. "Take the steps to keep people safe," he said, emphasizing security cameras and other safety measures. "But don't back down."
"Somebody has to be the voice of love and peace in our society."
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Joy Ashford covers faith and religion in North Texas for The Dallas Morning News through a partnership with Report for America.