The mass shootings in New Zealand last week and the one in Pittsburgh last October both targeted houses of worship during the main worship time of the week.
Last week’s mosque shootings were during jumu’ah, the communal prayer on Fridays at midday. Last year’s synagogue shooting fell on a Saturday.
There’s an obvious and banal explanation for the timing: It was when the killers knew they could find the largest concentration of Muslims and Jews in one place.
But there’s a more diabolical motive as well. A terrorist hopes to not only take lives, but to disrupt the lives of as many survivors—near and far—as possible.
A terrorist attack during weekly worship at a holy place is particularly foul. The fear it instills in its wake is particularly harmful. At a time when believers are trying to elevate their attention and intentions above the world, they are left to wonder and fear, to startle at a door opening, or even a child crying.
The day after the Pittsburgh shooting, this happened to me. During Mass, I saw someone sprint past the stained-glass windows of our parish. This wasn’t normal, and my mind immediately raced to the worst case scenario. I was in the front pew. Could I get my children out the front door if a shooter entered through the back? If I did, would I flee with them, or would I try to come back for the elderly lady in the other front pew?
If you live near a synagogue, you know this type of terrorism left its mark on America’s Jewish community years ago. Every Saturday, we see the police cars stationed outside the synagogues we pass in our Silver Spring neighborhood and in Potomac. It’s an ugly reminder to us of the threat of violent anti-Semitism. To the worshippers there, it is hardly a sign of peace.
In some ways, the mosque and synagogue terrorism here has the same effect as the marketplace suicide bombings that were frequent last decade: It is an attack on the things that bring people together.
A town where people are afraid to gather at the marketplace doesn’t merely lose out on the commercial level. It becomes a town where people see their neighbors less, and thus know their neighbors less. This reduces social trust, and dramatically erodes the quality of life.
Similarly, an attack on a church interferes not only with the spiritual life of believers, but also with their social health as well. The house of worship is the single most important institution of civil society, at least in America. The Tree of Life synagogue was the beating heart of the Squirrel Hill neighborhood in Pittsburgh. It was the heart of Jewish Pittsburgh.
The two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, were similarly social hubs. Many mosques serve as as a community hub, bringing people together and thus providing a safety net, a social network, and a sense of purpose. “We really focus on this being a community center,” Nadia Ashraf-Moghal of the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo told me in 2017 “not just a musjid,” (the Arabic word for a house of worship).
If you are a Muslim in the Toledo, Ohio area, you can just show up at the Islamic Center at their weekly community Sunday, and make the connections you need, for a job, an apartment, some friends, and so on.
“The mosque is not just a house of worship,” Mary Catherine Ford, married into a Muslim family, wrote in the Chicago Tribune after the New Zealand attacks. “It is the star around which the Muslim community orbits, the light in which Muslims grow and thrive.”
Places that lack robust communities suffer. People alienated from congregations suffer. It’s much harder to practice one’s faith without a community of fellow believers, but it’s also much harder to maintain the other practices of a good and fulfilling life, such as work and family.
The attacks in New Zealand weren’t merely attacks on those two mosques. They also weren’t merely attacks on Muslims. They were felt by believers of all faiths around the world.
So this particular fight is between a diabolical terrorist and people seeking God. The good news is that we know who wins in the end.
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*Correction: This piece originally referred to Ford incorrectly as a Muslim convert.
