Denouncing the "Jesus saves" vandals as non-Christian is especially problematic, even confusing, in the light of actual Christian history.

All over North and South America, Christian churches, missionaries, and government officials have done much more then that to disrespect and destroy indigenous culture.

Whoever carved that message into the rock is a mere piker compared to (quite successful) mainstream Christian efforts to wipe out indigenous religion.

In Canada and the United States , indigenous children by the hundreds of thousands were forced into religious residential schools, right up through the 1990s and in some cases even beyond, where religious staff beat them, withheld food, and otherwise mistreated them for speaking their native languages and observing their their indigenous religious traditions.

If the children would not convert to Christianity, Christian staff treated them savagely and brutally.

In Canada, residential school sites are surrounded by mass graves, filled with the anonymous bodies of indigenous children who died from preventable disease, malnutrition, and neglect. They died at the hands of Christians who were " saving their souls" and "civilizing" them.

We only know about the mass graves because indigenous people are leveraging modern technology to suss them out, sometimes having to go to court to force Christian institutions to let them work.

Indigenous people in Canada have also organized sustained efforts of protest and pressure to force Pope Francis to apologize for the residential schools, something that he refused to do for many years.

He traveled to Canada recently to apologize, but First Nations are still saying that he's refusing to accept true accountability for the heinous deeds committed by the church. His apology stopped short of accepting full responsibility, and legally his half-hearted apology will probably mean that efforts to sue the Church for reparations will be more difficult.

I'm focusing on Canada, only because First Nations there have made so much progress exposing Christian efforts to destroy them.

Here in the United States, we have the same history, but much of it has not yet been told. One of the reasons is that Christian churches, including the Catholic Church, fight as hard as they can to stop the stories from being told.

One residential school in the United States that I'm aware of still has photos of Catholic priests and brothers on the walls — photos indigenous people say are of men who beat and raped them when they were children, while forcing them to convert to Christianity and stop speaking their languages.

So your commenter can get all high and mighty about who's a Christian who's not a Christian.

But what I'm talking about is mainstream Christian. Missionaries are still celebrated in Christianity , even though missionaries are usually disgusting pieces of shit who work as hard as they can to destroy other people's cultures.

Your commenter wants to set himself apart, wants to see himself as a good person. I'm sure he feels better about himself by denouncing a little vandalism.

But what he needs to do is confront the disgusting, evil heart of Christianity – Christianity's centuries of cultural vandalism.

A few Christians today are working to confront and overcome that history, and good for them. But most Christians are still perfectly fine with the cultural destruction their religion centered, enforced, and largely succeeded in.

Most Christians today are perfectly happy to fund missionaries, who commit far worse destruction than carving messages into stone.

Something tells me your commenter is one of those people.