How Sri Lanka’s Christian Community Became a Target During Holy Week

Sri Lankan Navy soldiers stand guard in front of the St. Anthony’s Shrine a day after the series of blasts, in Colombo, Sri Lanka on Monday.
ERANGA JAYAWARDENA / AP

The deadly bombings in Sri Lanka over the weekend follow a pattern of religious terror that has become grimly familiar around the world. The attackers targeted churches on Easter Sunday, when Christians would be gathered in large numbers and vulnerable during worship. They also chose crowded and exposed public spaces, including hotels likely to be hosting foreign tourists.

And they may have been associated with an Islamist militant cause: On Tuesday, the Islamic State claimed responsibility, although this has not been independently verified. Sri Lankan officials have alleged that at least one local Islamist group was involved in the attacks, and suggested that the attacks may have been carried out in retaliation for the white-nationalist shooting spree at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March; they did not say what led them to make that claim. The bombings killed at least 321 people, according to Sri Lankan police, and injured hundreds more.

This pattern of violence is depressingly familiar worldwide, but it has been distinctly unfamiliar in Sri Lanka—until now. The small island nation was consumed by a vicious civil war from 1983 to 2009, which was largely motivated by ethnic, rather than specifically religious, tensions. Since then, however, leaders of the dominant Sinhalese Buddhist population have frequently targeted religious minorities, including Christians and especially Muslims. In fact, Christians and Muslims in Sri Lanka have developed a degree of solidarity as persecuted minorities, Chad Bauman, a religion professor at Butler University who studies Christian movements in the region, told me.

The exact motivations of the attackers are still not known. But they may have targeted churches in part because these spaces are powerful symbols of the West. Fairly or unfairly, Sri Lankan Christians have long been associated with colonial power; today, connections to global missionary networks and massive institutions like the Roman Catholic Church compound that association. While Muslims and Christians in Sri Lanka do not have a history of mutual hostility, the general atmosphere of religious repression may have contributed to the attackers’ desire for violence. The bombings may be the latest permutation of violence in a country that is burdened with a bloody history but that has been largely peaceful in recent years. Sri Lanka has joined an expanding list of countries where churches have been twisted into a dramatic stage for ideological violence.

Sri Lankan politics have long been defined by ethnic and religious tensions that are inextricable from its colonial past. Christianity most likely arrived on the island, which sits off the southeastern tip of India, with the Portuguese in the early 16th century. A century and a half later, the Dutch took control, followed by the British, who governed the country until 1948.

For the people who remained on the island, then known as Ceylon, after its independence was declared, this was a moment of trying to figure out what Sri Lankan identity was, Shobhana Xavier, an assistant professor at Queen’s University in Ontario who studies global Islam, told me.

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SOURCE: The Atlantic, Emma Green