I can’t really blame you; the pain is yet growing,
With so many horrible losses
But somehow it seems that your privilege is showing—
You seem to have mis-placed your crosses.

One of the reasonably local papers around Cuttletown had a political cartoon today that irked me a bit. Here’s a link–I won’t show it here because, well, I’m cheap. Basically, the cartoon morphs the cross from the flag of Norway into the crosses at the graves of the victims.

It’s a clever concept, but it reinforces the position of privilege held by Christians (despite claims of persecution) in the US. The crosses represent the victims (reminiscent of Justice Scalia’s view that crosses are “the most common symbol of the resting place of the dead”), which is all well and good, except that

According to Inglehart et al. (2004), 31 percent of Norwegians do not believe in God. According to Bondeson (2003), 54 percent of Norwegians said that they did not believe in a “personal God.” According to Greeley (2003), 41 percent of Norwegians do not believe in God, although only 10 percent self-identify as “atheist.” According to Gustafsson and Pettersson (2000), 72 percent of Norwegians do not believe in a “personal God.” According to Froese (2001), 45 percent of Norwegians are either atheist or agnostic.

(source: Phil Zuckerman’s chapter, “Atheism: Contemporary Numbers and Patterns”, in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism.)

Ah, but we do know with certainty that there was at least one Christian involved. The shooter. Yes, it appears his extremist political views, not his religion, was his motivation. I’m sure American cartoonists would make the same distinction for Muslim terrorists as well.