#1 Christian Website Hacked By Atheist!

Update: To read my An Open Letter to the Atheist Hacker of Christian Mega-site Crosswalk.com, click … well, there.

Instead of the largest Christian website in the world (2.5 million views a month; 200,000-plus subscribers), people who visited www.crosswalk.com this morning found a single, crudely designed static page featuring cheesy-looking burning crosses and a message from the hacker directed to “Christian sheep,” talking about how Christianity sucks and is nothing but lies believed by idiots and so on. The message was maybe 50 words long. (It was also about impossible to read, since, as the hacker/author readily admitted, English is not his first language. He’s from the great country of Finland.)

The #1 Christian website in the world, hacked by an irate Finnish atheist!

I write for Crosswalk; my job there is to be “funny,” “reverently irreverent,” and to “think outside the box.” For a writer (or one like me, anyway) it’s a dream gig. In the course of this year I’ve grown extremely fond of Crosswalk’s director. He’s a good man. (He’s also one of the funniest people I’ve ever met.) I hated to see his work get hurt this way.

I was surprised how disturbing it was to see what had happened to Crosswalk. It felt violent. It was like having your home robbed, or your car stolen. Just awful.

Right after I saw what happened to Crosswalk I did a quick posting here about it, just saying something like “Go see what happened to Crosswalk.com!” But within minutes of my posting that, the site got unhacked, and was back to normal. So right away I took down my posting about it, since then it wouldn’t have made any sense.

So the short story is: Crosswalk got hacked; the hack seemed to last about two, maybe three hours; then it got fixed. (My friend the Crosswalk director wrote me about it. “Short version of the story,” he said, “is that we got hacked, big time. Should be mostly normal now. Hope we didn’t cause you to stumble in your faith.”)

See? Funny!

Anyway, that’s what happened this morning with Crosswalk.com.