The FBI's 2024 Hate Crime Statistics, released in August 2025, recorded 11,679 hate incidents nationally — the second-highest annual total since the FBI began collecting this data in 1991. Religion-based hate crimes alone accounted for 2,783 incidents, up from 2,699 the year before. Of those, 1,938 were anti-Jewish — the highest one-year figure in the program's history and roughly 69% of all religion-based hate crimes in the country. Anti-Muslim incidents totaled 228; anti-Sikh, 142.
Those are the federal numbers. The community-tracked numbers are larger, and they tell a more complete story. The ADL's 2024 Audit of Antisemitic Incidents logged 9,354 incidents — the highest annual total since the ADL began tracking in 1979. CAIR's civil rights office received 8,658 complaints in 2024, the most in the organization's 30-plus-year history. The Family Research Council's 2025 report identified 415 hostile incidents at 383 American churches in 2024, with armed incidents more than doubling year-over-year, from 12 to 28.
For most clergy and lay leaders we work with in Arizona, the question isn't whether the threat picture has shifted. They've felt it. The question is what to actually do about it — without turning a sanctuary into a fortress, without alienating the very community the congregation exists to serve, and without spending money on the wrong layer of the problem. This post walks through the data, the federal guidance, and the operational model we use with houses of worship in the Valley.
The national numbers, sorted by faith community
It helps to look at each community's data separately, because the threat patterns differ.
Jewish institutions
The FBI counted 1,938 anti-Jewish hate crime incidents in 2024, including 178 assaults (up from 174 in 2023). The ADL's broader audit — which includes incidents that aren't classified as federal crimes — recorded 9,354 total antisemitic incidents in 2024 and 6,274 in 2025, the third-highest year on record. Incidents at Jewish institutions specifically (synagogues, JCCs, Jewish schools) dropped from 1,702 in 2024 to 1,129 in 2025, but physical assaults reached an all-time high. Bomb threats followed a steep arc — 996 in 2023, 627 in 2024, and 59 in 2025 — but the threats that remain are increasingly individualized rather than mass-mailed.
Muslim institutions
The FBI's anti-Muslim hate crime total was 228 in 2024, a slight decrease from 236 in 2023. But CAIR's 8,658 complaints across all categories represented a 30-year high, and Minnesota alone documented 44 incidents targeting mosques across 2022–2024, including arsons that caused more than $3 million in damages. The CAIR data captures harassment, discrimination, and intimidation that doesn't always rise to a federal hate-crime threshold, but does materially affect how a community plans for Friday Jumu'ah or Ramadan.
Christian congregations
The Family Research Council's 2025 "Hostility Against Churches" report counted 415 hostile incidents at 383 U.S. churches in 2024, broken down as 284 vandalism, 55 arson, 14 bomb threats, 28 armed-aggression incidents, and 47 other crimes. Other trackers, using broader definitions that include parking-lot and property-line incidents, counted as many as 841 attacks against churches in 2024 — with roughly 80% classified as property crimes. The doubling of armed incidents (12 to 28) is the figure that most operators flag as the leading indicator worth watching.
The deadly force baseline
The Faith Based Security Network's deadly-force study, which tracks lethal attacks at houses of worship, reports that firearms are the weapon used in roughly 58% of deadly attacks. The remaining 40-plus percent are knife, blunt-instrument, vehicle, or arson attacks. That detail matters because the security profession often defaults to "active shooter" planning when, in fact, almost half of deadly attacks on houses of worship don't fit that template. Between 2000 and 2025, there were 246 shooting events at U.S. houses of worship, with 402 total victims. After zero fatal church shootings in 2023, there was one in 2024 and three in the first half of 2025.
FBI: 11,679 hate crime incidents (2nd-highest on record). 2,783 religion-based. 1,938 anti-Jewish (record high). 228 anti-Muslim. ADL: 9,354 antisemitic incidents (record). CAIR: 8,658 complaints (record). Family Research Council: 415 hostile incidents at 383 churches; armed incidents up 133% YoY (12 to 28). Faith-Based Security Network: 58% of deadly attacks on houses of worship involve firearms — meaning more than 40% don't.
What's been happening in Arizona
The national pattern shows up in Arizona too, and recent prosecutions tell the story.
In December 2024, an Arizona man was convicted on federal charges arising out of a plot targeting Christian churches in the state; he was sentenced to six years in prison in April 2025. In 2025, a federal grand jury in Phoenix indicted a Casa Grande resident on a one-count charge of Obstruction of the Free Exercise of Religious Beliefs by Fire after an Arizona synagogue arson. A Phoenix-area man was charged with making a terrorist threat and computer tampering for antisemitic threats directed at a Phoenix synagogue. And in early 2026, a Phoenix man was arrested after a paint-and-pellet attack on worshippers at a north Phoenix Islamic center, with the case opened as a hate-crime investigation.
Those are the cases that produced charges. They are not the full picture. Every congregation we work with in Maricopa County has, in the last 24 months, dealt with at least one incident that didn't make the news — a suspicious vehicle on a Saturday morning, an aggressive trespasser during a holiday service, a threatening voicemail, a parking-lot fight, drug paraphernalia in a back parking lot used as a shortcut. None of these are 1,938-level FBI events. All of them are the day-to-day risk surface that volunteer safety teams actually deal with.
What the federal guidance actually says
CISA's "Mitigating Attacks on Houses of Worship Security Guide," published as part of DHS's broader faith-community initiative, is the cleanest federal document on this question. It's built around five principles a serious safety team can implement without converting a sanctuary into a hardened facility:
- Establish a multi-layered security plan with clearly identified roles and responsibilities.
- Develop and exercise written emergency action plans, business continuity plans, and incident response plans.
- Conduct a vulnerability assessment to prioritize where investment actually moves the needle.
- Build a culture of awareness — congregation members and visitors are the first sensors, and a credible-reporting channel is what turns a sensor into intelligence.
- Apply physical security measures across an outer perimeter, middle perimeter, and inner perimeter, while respecting the function of each.
That last point — outer/middle/inner perimeters — is the framework worth memorizing. The outer perimeter is property line, parking lot, exterior lighting, landscaping (CISA specifically calls out keeping hedges trimmed so they don't provide concealment). The middle perimeter is the building envelope: doors, locks, vestibules, glazing, camera coverage. The inner perimeter is the sanctuary itself, the nursery, the offices, classroom hallways — where you have the highest density of people and the most narrow tolerance for false alarms.
The Nonprofit Security Grant Program (NSGP)
The single largest federal funding source for house-of-worship security is FEMA's Nonprofit Security Grant Program. FY 2024 appropriated $454.5 million; FY 2025 dropped to $274.5 million, split between Urban Area ($137.25M) and State ($137.25M) tracks. Roughly 33% of FY 2024 applications were funded — out of more than 12,000 applications, around 4,000 received awards. Houses of worship receive a 3× scoring preference (versus 2× for secular medical or educational nonprofits and 1× for everything else), which is the only categorical preference in the program.
Eligible uses, based on what congregations actually got funded for in FY 2024: video assessment and security systems, impact-resistant doors and gates, physical access control systems, jersey walls and other vehicle barriers, fixed-area lighting, and training. If your congregation has never applied, the application is genuinely worth the lift — especially since the NSGP package can fund the same hardening that an insurance carrier may begin to require anyway.
Why houses of worship are structurally hard to secure
Every operator who's worked in this space knows the tension. The mission of a faith institution is, almost by definition, to welcome strangers. A locked door at 10:00 a.m. on a Sunday is not, in most denominations, theologically tolerable. The schedules are predictable (services at the same time every week, with published times). The footprint is large relative to staff. Online livestreams hand attackers free pre-attack reconnaissance — the sanctuary layout, the entrance routes, where leadership sits, who's in the building. Most congregations operate on volunteer labor for everything outside of clergy and a small administrative staff.
These aren't excuses. They're constraints. A faith-institution security plan that doesn't account for them is going to be ignored — or worse, formally adopted and then quietly disregarded by the volunteers it depends on. The plans that work in the long run are the ones that fit the mission rather than fight it.
The five-layer model that actually works
What we deploy with congregations across the Valley looks structurally similar across Christian, Jewish, and Muslim institutions, even though the threat patterns differ. The model has five layers, and they're additive — no single layer is sufficient.
Layer 1: A trained safety team
Three to twelve members of the congregation, screened and trained, who are visibly present during services and high-traffic events. Their job is observation, de-escalation, and communication — not enforcement. Most are unarmed; some, depending on the congregation's posture and Arizona's licensing rules, may be armed. The training matters more than the uniform: medical (Stop the Bleed at minimum), behavioral threat recognition, radio communication, and a rehearsed lockdown / evacuation plan.
Layer 2: Physical hardening
The CISA outer/middle/inner perimeter framework. Specifics that consistently show up in NSGP-funded packages: vehicle barriers between the parking lot and the building face, a single point of entry during services with the others locked but exit-capable, interior glazing film on sanctuary windows, classroom and nursery door hardware that locks from the inside, exterior LED lighting, and a camera system with both a deterrent function and a forensic function.
Layer 3: Behavioral threat awareness
A reporting channel for congregation members ("see something, say something" only works when there's a place to actually say it), a relationship with local law enforcement, and a small internal review process for credible reports. Most house-of-worship attackers — like most school attackers — leak intent before they act. The 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue attacker, the 2017 Sutherland Springs church attacker, the 2019 Poway synagogue attacker, and several intervened-on Arizona plotters all had pre-incident behavior that was visible to someone. The question is whether that signal had anywhere to go.
Layer 4: Armed defender — where appropriate
This is the layer that gets the most attention and is, in most settings, neither the highest priority nor a substitute for the other four. For many congregations, an armed defender is a trained, licensed congregation member; for others, a contracted armed officer during services and major events makes more sense, particularly during High Holidays, Christmas, Easter, and Ramadan. The armed-vs-unarmed decision in this setting is similar to the one we walked through for school security in last week's post on armed security in K-12 schools: it's about program design, training, scope, and command structure — not just the presence of a holster. If you do hire contracted armed personnel, the AZ DPS licensing standards we lay out here are non-negotiable.
Layer 5: Mutual aid and information sharing
Faith-Based Information Sharing and Analysis Organization (FB-ISAO) membership, the Secure Community Network for Jewish institutions, the local CAIR chapter for Muslim institutions, the diocesan or denominational safety officer for Christian institutions, and a working relationship with the local police district commander. Threat intelligence at this layer is a force multiplier — most credible warnings come from outside any single congregation's awareness.
What this means for you
If you sit on a board of elders, a synagogue security committee, a mosque shura council, or you're a senior pastor evaluating a parishioner's offer to "stand watch" on Sunday morning — the immediate work is the same. Conduct or commission a serious vulnerability assessment against the CISA framework. Apply for NSGP funding in the next cycle. Build or formalize the safety team. Establish the reporting channel. Get the relationships with local law enforcement and the appropriate information-sharing organization on file before you need them.
The mistake we see most often is the opposite ordering: a congregation experiences a scare, panics into hiring an armed guard for the next month, doesn't budget for the year after, and ends up with no sustained program. Or a congregation invests in cameras and forgets that a camera doesn't intervene — it documents. Or the safety team exists on paper but has never run an actual drill.
None of this is alarmist. The 1,938 anti-Jewish hate crimes in 2024 occurred at a baseline where 99.9% of synagogue services nationwide ended without an incident. The 415 hostile church incidents occurred against a denominator of hundreds of thousands of services. The point of building a layered program is not to live in fear; it's to make it dramatically less likely that the day someone shows up with bad intent is also the day your congregation discovers it has no plan.
If you're a faith leader in Arizona — Maricopa, Pima, Pinal, Yavapai, Coconino, anywhere in the state — and you'd like a confidential conversation about where your congregation actually stands, our team has done this work across denominations. We don't sell fear; we don't sell single-officer "solutions" and call them programs. Request a consult or browse the resource library for the vulnerability-assessment templates we use with houses of worship.
The 2024 data is the second-worst hate crime year on record, with anti-Jewish incidents at an all-time high, anti-Muslim complaints at a 30-year peak, and armed church incidents more than doubling year-over-year. Federal guidance (CISA) and federal funding (NSGP, with a 3× scoring preference for houses of worship) exist for a reason. The congregations that handle this well in Arizona build a five-layer program — safety team, physical hardening, behavioral threat awareness, armed defender where appropriate, and mutual-aid relationships — and they do it before they need it.
