‘Easter Worshippers’ |
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........