The Freedom From Religion Foundation is denouncing President Trump’s lie that the suspect in custody for attacking the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is “anti-Christian.”
“He had a lot of hatred in his heart for quite a while,” the president said during an appearance on Fox News’ “The Sunday Briefing.” “And he just, I don’t know. He just, it was a religious thing. It was strongly anti, anti-Christian.”
Au contraire, notes the largest association of freethinkers (atheists and agnostics) in North America. Cole Allen is Christian, was active in a Christian campus organization and even cites his Christian beliefs in a manifesto that Trump also falsely mischaracterizes, saying, “When you read his manifesto, he hates Christians.” Yet Allen even thanked his church and cited the bible in the writing.
CNN states, “Allen attended the California Institute of Technology from 2013-17, according to his LinkedIn profile, where he participated in the school’s Christian Fellowship organization and its Nerf Club, in which members armed with foam toys organized campus battles. Facebook photos from 2016 also show Allen at Christian Fellowship events at the school.”
The New York Times says, “Another fellowship member recalled that while Mr. Allen was generally quiet and studious, he was not shy about defending his own interpretation of his faith.” The Times quotes fellowship member Elizabeth Terlinden: “He was definitely a strong believer in evangelical Christianity at the time that I knew him.”
Newsweek reports that Allen “had deep roots in the Christian community,” was active in the Caltech Christian fellowships and even served as a large-group coordinator of discussions on the Apostles’ Creed. “His father, Thomas Allen, is a ruling elder at Grace United Reformed Church in Torrance, a congregation in the United Reformed Churches of North America,” the magazine adds.
We also know already that in his manifesto of more than 1,000 words, Allen gave what Newsweek calls “religious reasoning.” Newsweek writes, “He cited Scripture throughout and argued that Christians have a moral obligation to resist unjust authority through force.” Newsweek cites a theologian quick to deny there are any germs of violence in Christian teaching, but quotes Drew University Ethics Professor Darrell Cole saying that Allen’s interpretation, in asserting that one doesn’t have to “turn the other cheek” in the face of injustice, contains a kernel of legitimate Christian teaching. Allen also contends in his manifesto that the counsel to “render unto Caesar” applies to obeying legitimate civil authority rather than unlawful orders. Theological debates aside, as Newsweek writer Jesus Mesa notes, “What remains clear to the theologians interviewed is that Allen was not foreign to Christianity. He drew on real Christian traditions, misapplied them, and acted in isolation from the very communities those traditions require.”
Unfortunately, some media are casually repeating Trump’s assertions as gospel truth, such as this news story out of Utah reporting as a “key takeaway” that “suspect Cole Tomas Allen … wrote anti-Christian manifesto.” It’s now all over the internet and social media that an “anti-Christian manifesto” was found, when, in fact, the suspect explicitly cited his Christian beliefs as a rationale for his attack.
“Trump isn’t just distorting the facts, he’s lying about them,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Given the White House’s national security directive from last year falsely blaming terrorism on ‘anti-Christianity’ and ‘hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion and morality,’ such a perversion of the truth seems calculated to scapegoat nonbelievers and non-Christians.”
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to defending the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters relating to nontheism. With about 42,000 members, FFRF is the largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics and humanists) in North America. For more information, visit ffrf.org.
