Was the Nashville school massacre of March 27 an anti-Christian hate crime?
We don’t really know—partly because the Nashville police have so far not released a manifesto and other documents that might provide clues to the motivation of the suspect, 28-year-old Audrey Hale, killed by police after breaking into The Covenant School, a small Christian academy serving elementary grades in Nashville, and firing 152 rounds that killed six people, three of them children aged 9.
It seems that Hale was once a student at Covenant. Police and others have said that she identified as transgender and wanted to be called by the man’s name “Aiden,” as well as have others refer to her by masculine pronouns. Police investigating the mass-murder have said that Hale harbored “resentment,” possibly against the school. Its sponsoring church, Covenant Presbyterian, is affiliated with the theologically traditionalist Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) and declares on its website that it adheres to the “abiding validity of the moral law (Ten Commandments).” The PCA opposes same-sex marriage and is scheduled to vote in June whether to approve a petition to urge states and the federal government to “renounce the sin” of permitting transgender surgical and hormonal procedures for minors.
But here’s something we do know about the Nashville shooting: It has triggered an instant wave of anti-Christian sentiment on the part of media figures, entertainers, and other cultural influencers. Or rather, a wave of sentiment against traditionalist Christians who decline to go along with the militant LGBTQ ideology that’s now the credo of the establishment, from President Joe Biden on down.
The powers that be seem to have forgotten the actual victims of Hale’s shooting spree: the small children and the brave school staffers who put their bodies between their charges and the bullets. They have shifted their solicitousness to the “transgender community,” whose members they now regard as the real Nashville victims.
First there was the “deadnaming” kerfuffle, when media outlets, unaware that Hale had wanted to be called “Aiden” and “he/him,” initially referred to her by the name her parents had given her at birth. Trans activists took to Twitter to accuse the news outlets of “misgendering.” The New York Times and other media then fell over themselves trying to avoid referring to Hale as having any gender at all. She was simply “the shooter” in New York Times stories.
But after Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene speculated that Hale’s rage might have sprung from taking testosterone supplements—suggesting that “gender-affirming” hormones might not be such a good idea—progressives quickly dropped deadnaming as an issue and moved on to mocking traditional Christians themselves.
When Tennessee’s Republican Gov. Bill Lee called on people to “please join us in praying” for The Covenant School and congregation, he got a contemptuous response from gun-control activist Shannon Watts of Moms Demand Action.
“If thoughts and prayers alone worked to stop gun violence, there wouldn’t have been a shooting at a Christian elementary school,” Watts wrote in a tweet.
Progressive talk-show host David Pakman indulged in further scoffing: “Is it possible they weren’t praying enough, or correctly, despite being a Christian school?”
Sportswriter Mike Wise wrote in a tweet, “This is as deep and real as it gets,” after another Twitter user, Kat Amarco, blamed “religious indoctrination” for the shooting. “[T]his human still identified as that child attending that school and carried that pain into adulthood,” Amarco wrote.
The Trans Resistance Network, which bills itself as a resource center for the “gender diverse,” went a step further, deeming the shooting a logical if unfortunate response to the “anti-trans hate” supposedly preached at The Covenant School and supposedly fueling a wave of legislation in conservative states designed to bar such phenomena as drag shows for children and transgender hormones and surgery for minors. Some 23 states have passed or are considering such bills, including Tennessee, which enacted laws banning both in early March.
“Aiden or Aubrey [sic] Hale ... felt he had no other effective way to be seen than to lash out by taking the life of others,” the group’s statement declared. “Hate has consequences.”
Within days of the massacre, taxpayer-funded National Public Radio was reacting with alarm—not over slain Christian children who might have been targeted for their faith, but over an entirely imaginary threat of violent Christian reprisals against trans people.
“Advocates fear an escalation of hate toward trans community after Nashville shooting,” read a headline on a transcript of an NPR news segment on which LGBTQ advocates declared that “[t]ransgender people are targeted for violence.”
Singer Madonna announced that she, along with a drag queen, will give a benefit performance in Nashville in December, with proceeds going to transgender organizations.
“The oppression of the LGBTQ+ is not only unacceptable and inhumane; it’s creating an unsafe environment; making America a dangerous place for our most vulnerable citizens,” Madonna wrote on Instagram.
“Most vulnerable citizens?” How about those gunned-down 9-year-olds who will never see age 10?
Christianity has always had its “cultured despisers,” as the 19th-century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher famously wrote. But it has taken until now for cultural influencers’ bile against traditional Christian moral beliefs and those who hold them to become so firmly acceptable that it seems OK to speculate that the young victims of a gruesome mass shooting had it coming.
