Instead of confronting the inherent supremacism of Islam and naming Christian persecution, Barack Obama resorted to the euphemism of cowardice—even in the case of massacre.

Lars Møller | April 9, 2026

From Wikimedia Commons: Dutch Reformed Church (Wolvendaal), Colombo (J. L. K. van Dort, 1888)

On Easter Sunday 2019, Islamist terrorists affiliated with the National Thowheeth Jama’ath and inspired by ISIS detonated suicide bombs in three churches and three hotels across Sri Lanka, slaughtering more than 260 innocent souls—many of them Catholics and Protestants gathered in worship to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The carnage was not random; it was a deliberate assault on Christian faith in a nation where believers had already faced rising threats. Yet when former President Barack Obama addressed the world from his Twitter account, he chose these words: “The attacks on tourists and Easter worshippers in Sri Lanka are an attack on humanity.” Hillary Clinton echoed the phrasing almost verbatim, praying for victims of attacks on “Easter worshippers and travelers.”

Obviously, this was no innocent slip of the pen. “Easter worshippers” is a grotesque circumlocution, a linguistic evasion that strips the victims of their Christian identity. Christians do not worship Easter; they worship the risen Lord Jesus Christ. The term reduces a two-thousand-year-old faith community—targeted precisely because of its confession—to a seasonal activity. Conservatives and Christian voices rightly excoriated the language as a calculated refusal to name the obvious: this was religious persecution of Christians by Islamists. The same Obama who, mere weeks earlier, had grieved the Christchurch mosque attacks in New Zealand by explicitly standing with “the Muslim community” now could not bring himself to utter the word “Christians.” The double standard was glaring, the moral cowardice unmistakable. In an age when Christians are the most persecuted religious group on earth, such verbal gymnastics betray not neutrality but ideological bias.

The reluctance to explicitly denounce Christian persecution may appear paradoxical in a time that celebrates victimhood but falls perfectly in line with an anti-Western trend that may soon celebrate its 100th anniversary: ​​socialist (and atheist) revolutionaries join forces with Muslims for tactical reasons. Despite their respective utopias, they share the desire for the collapse of Western civilization.

Obama’s presidency was marked by eloquent rhetoric on religious freedom in the abstract. He spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast about threats to believers worldwide and signed legislation advancing international religious liberty. Yet when it came to the concrete, systematic slaughter of Christians in Muslim-majority lands, his administration displayed a consistent reluctance to name the perpetrators or the victims with clarity. This pattern reached its symbolic nadir in the Sri Lanka statement, but its roots lay deeper—most notoriously in the 2009 Cairo speech titled “A New Beginning.” There, Obama traveled to Egypt to “seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world,” based on “mutual interest and mutual respect.” He quoted the Qur’an, praised Islamic contributions to civilization, and bent over backward to reset relations after the Bush era’s wars.

What he did not do was issue a comparably bold, unambiguous defense of the ancient Christian communities being driven from the very region where the faith was born. In Iraq and Syria, Christian populations had already plummeted under Islamist pressure; in Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and Sudan, believers faced daily terror. Obama’s outreach to Muslim leaders appeared to come at the expense of the dhimmi—the subjugated non-Muslims whose blood and churches were expendable in the name of geopolitical “reset.” An intelligent and eloquent president, Obama nonetheless aroused legitimate suspicion: was he truly on the side of the West in the escalating civilizational conflict with radical Islam? Or had his moral compass been recalibrated by a multicultural relativism that viewed explicit solidarity with Christians as politically incorrect?

The statistics paint a damning portrait. According to the Open Doors World Watch List, more than 388 million Christians face high or extreme levels of persecution globally. In 2026 reporting alone, 4,849 Christians were killed for their faith, with Nigeria accounting for the vast majority—3,490 martyrs murdered by Fulani militants, Boko Haram, and ISWAP in a campaign of genocidal violence. Top persecutors include Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, Eritrea, Syria, Pakistan, Libya—nations where Islamist ideology, state-sanctioned blasphemy laws, or official indifference enable the carnage. These are not abstract tragedies; they are the systematic eradication of Christianity across the cradle of the faith. Churches are bombed, converts beheaded, schoolgirls kidnapped and forced into marriage, priests executed.

Yet too many Muslim political and religious leaders—presidents, kings, imams, and clerics—offer little more than perfunctory condemnations or, worse, remain silent while their educational systems, media, and mosques foment contempt for “infidels.” This is complicity by omission, a moral abdication that demands rebuke. If there had been any higher justice on earth, the world’s Muslim leaders should be held to account: reform the texts that incite hatred, protect minority citizens as a sacred duty of governance, and reject the jihadist theology that treats Christian blood as cheap. Failure to do so is not cultural difference; it is barbarism tolerated in the name of faith. 

Obama’s domestic legacy compounds the indictment. The man who positioned himself as a healer of racial divides instead sowed deep fissures in the American nation. His rhetoric of grievance, his elevation of identity politics, and his indulgence of narratives that distorted American history laid the intellectual groundwork for the ideological frenzy that erupted after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The riots that followed—marked by violence, looting, and cultural iconoclasm—were fueled by the very prejudices and historically illiterate distortions that Obama helped normalize. A president who could not name Christian victims abroad with clarity proved equally adept at inflaming domestic divisions at home. His moral stances, so often draped in eloquence, invite suspicion precisely because they consistently tilted away from robust defense of Western Christian heritage towards accommodation of those who view it with hostility.

To defend Christians today has nothing to do with tribalism; it is a defense of universal human dignity and of the civilization that birthed the very concepts of individual rights that Obama claimed to champion. Christianity has given the world hospitals, universities, the abolition of slavery, the sanctity of the weak, and the idea that every soul bears the imago Dei. To watch its adherents butchered while Western leaders resort to euphemisms is a betrayal of our own inheritance. The Sri Lanka attacks were not an isolated horror; they were one bloody chapter in a global pattern where Islamism—enabled by silence or appeasement—targets the faith that refuses to submit. Passionate solidarity with these brothers and sisters is not optional for those who value truth, justice, and the West’s moral foundations. 

The time for equivocation is over. Barack Obama’s “Easter worshippers” locution was more than a stylistic choice; it was symptomatic of anti-Westernism and a deeper reluctance to confront uncomfortable realities about religious persecution in the Muslim world. Muslim leaders who preside over or tolerate the eradication of Christian communities should face unrelenting international pressure to reform or be exposed as enablers of atrocity. And the West—if led by leaders with a clearer moral vision—should stand unapologetically with the persecuted Church. Anything less is not diplomacy; it is surrender.

Christians are not seasonal worshippers or abstract “people of faith.” They are the body of Christ under siege, and their defense is a test of our civilization’s soul. History will judge those who looked away.

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