BKERDASA, Egypt—Nearly three months after nearby residents looted and burned the Archangel Michael Church, Rida Gaballah, 49, one of the six people who tried to stave off thousands of attackers, stood among the ruins.

Utterly dismayed by the missing pews, the charred paintings of Jesus and the cross ripped off from the front door, he simply kept repeating: “This scene is horrible. This scene is horrible.”

The Egyptian government vowed to rebuild the church, one of 74 destroyed in the first three months after the military ousted Mohammed Morsi from the presidency July 3. But work has yet to begin here, leaving the church as a monument to the violence brought by Morsi’s Islamist supporters _ and to the government’s failure to protect historic Egyptian institutions.

But Gaballah, like other Christians, is reluctant to criticize. “Of course they are doing enough,” Gaballah said when asked about the government’s efforts, even as the scene around him proved otherwise, just 16 miles from the capital.

The unprecedented wave of attacks on churches sparked outrage in the weeks immediately after Morsi’s ouster. But now, for both Christians and Muslim Egyptians alike, that anger has been replaced by a cacophonous silence, even though attacks continue. The 74 best-documented cases of attacks on churches came between June 30 and Sept. 30; there have been others since, though how many is uncertain.

Christians, who make up an estimated 10 percent of Egypt’s 92 million population, have never had an easy time existing in Egypt, caught precariously for 80 years between a generally secular Egyptian state and Islamists who see Christians as heretics who threaten their vision of an Islamic Egypt.

The government historically has done little to protect Christians from the occasional outbreak of Islamist violence. No one has ever been convicted in Egypt for destroying churches, going back to 1972, when the first one was burned. There has been, at best, a single arrest in the most recent orgy of church burnings.

Yet Christians are loath to criticize the militarily imposed government, fearing, analysts say, inflaming hostility with a new regime that at least has not engaged in the anti-Christian rhetoric that characterized the yearlong rule of Morsi, an Islamist who rose to prominence through the secretive Muslim Brotherhood.

Clerics preaching that Christians were the reason for Morsi’s demise triggered much of the anti-Christian violence that followed Morsi’s ouster, though when Morsi was in power, violence against Christians was rare.

Still, many Christians are drawing from Morsi’s rule, and what it portended for religious tolerance, the lesson that an authoritarian government imposed by the military is better than the alternative.

Christians “are looking at their ability to live. They see it as better to live under a strong regime than a democracy that elects Islamists,” said Ishak Ibrahim, a Christian who is the freedom of religion and belief officer for the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, an advocacy group here. “The choice before people is freedom or the right to live. The people chose life.”

It is the kind of analysis repeated over and over among Egyptians, a fear that pushing back against an increasingly authoritarian government could somehow lead to something they believe is worse: A return of the Islamists.

“There was a national solidarity unifying Christians and Muslims against the horrible damage inflicted by the Muslim Brotherhood and Morsi,” said Youssef Sidhom, the editor-in-chief of Watani, Egypt’s biggest Christian newspaper, which his father founded.

Now, he said, using the shorthand for the Coptic Christians who dominate the religion here, “Copts are terrified to speak.”

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