According to CBN, “the crimes stem from far-left terrorists with a Marxist ideology whose sole purpose is to strike fear in Canadians for practising their faith”.

The terrorists carry out the attacks under the guise of being in solidarity with the natives. Since mid-June, almost a thousand anonymous burials have been found near boarding schools entrusted to Christian churches where the state forcibly placed, with a view to their assimilation, the children of the First Nations in Canada, from the end of the 19th century to the 1950s.

However, indigenous leaders are calling for the church arsons to stop. 

“Burning down churches is not in solidarity with us indigenous people. As I said, we do not destroy people’s places of worship,” said Jenn Allan-Riley, an assistant Pentecostal minister at Living Waters Church, during a press conference last week.

“We’re concerned about the burning and defacing of churches bringing more strife, depression, and anxiety to those already in pain and mourning,” she said.

Allan-Riley, who is a ‘60s Scoop survivor and the daughter of a residential school survivor, said the church arsons were fuelling further division between indigenous people and non-indigenous people, and that burning the churches “is not our native way.”

In addition, at least two of these arson attacks targeted communities that were not present in Canada at the time of the Indian residential schools – a Vietnamese Christian church and a Coptic Orthodox Church (Surrey, British Columbia), which shows either the ignorance of those who attack the churches or highlight the fact that they are at war with all Christians, wherever they come from.

Sources: Christianophobie.fr, CBN, CTV News