Burning Faith: Church Arson in the American South

7. Hope

One of the most distinguishing characteristics of the 1990s was its violence. As particularly ugly examples of this violence, the church burnings of the mid- to late 1990s and the way the nation responded symbolized a search for community at the beginning of a new millennium. Americans were surprised to discover in both religious and secular efforts to aid the victims of church arson that community in the United States was stronger than they had believed—and stronger than the fires themselves would indicate. All the Rage Both 1998 and 1999 were signature years for hate crime in the United States. James Byrd Jr., an African-American man, was dragged behind a truck to his death in Jasper, Texas. Matthew Shepard, a gay college student, was beaten and left to die on a fence in Wyoming. Dr. Barnett Slepian, a pro-choice obstetrician, was gunned down by a sniper in his kitchen in New York. Congregation B’nai Israel and Knesset Israel Torah Center in Sacramento and Congregation Beth Shalom in Carmichael, California, were set ablaze, causing an estimated $3 million in damage; the following month, the same person who firebombed the three Sacramento-area synagogues shot a gay couple to death in their home outside Redding, California. These incidents capped a season of hate, mirroring the violent rage of a 7 hope 126 / Burning Faith nation in turmoil. The fabric of American society seemed to be tearing apart. Gang wars. Drive-by shootings. Road rage. Random, senseless violence. The shapeless rage churning beneath the surface of American life found its most disturbing and senseless expression in a series of school shootings that occurred in the late 1990s. They began in Pearl, Mississippi, on October 1, 1997, when a sixteen-year-old stabbed his mother to death and then fatally shot two girls and seven other high school students. Similar “wildings” by angry teenagers at West Paducah, Kentucky; Jonesboro, Arkansas; and Springfield, Oregon, in the 1997–98 school year left a trail of nine dead students, three adults killed, and many wounded. The killings culminated at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in April 1999, when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold used a small arsenal of firearms to gun down twelve classmates and a teacher in the worst incident of school violence in American history. More school shootings have occurred since then. The bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995 symbolized the anger of the far-right patriot and militia movements, but violence ultimately knew no political allegiance. It was not the sole purview of the ultraconservative ; in fact, hatred of what America had become was as strong on the far left as it was on the far right. For example, between 1978 and 1995 an unknown assailant that the press labeled “the Unabomber” sent sixteen letter bombs to corporate executives and university professors; the packages killed three people and injured twenty-three others. In 1995, the Washington Post published the Unabomber’s “manifesto,” a 35,000-word, Luddite polemic against corporate America. Extolling individual freedom, the Unabomber claimed that the apparent blessings of computers, cell phones, and electricity actually destroyed the “power to control the circumstances of one’s life.” Nearly a year later, in April 1996, police identified the Unabomber as Theodore J. Kaczynski and arrested him at a remote cabin in Montana; Kaczynski, who had earned a doctorate in mathematics at Harvard University and held a tenure-track teaching position at the University of California at Berkeley, had withdrawn from modern life to live outside of what he saw as the madness of American civilization.1 Vying for headline space with these hate-inspired incidents, the church burnings of the mid- to late-1990s were part of a larger landscape of American rage. Reverend Monty Knight, pastor of First Christian Church, a Disciples of Christ church in South Carolina, believed the fires grew out of a deeper dysfunction eating away at the soul of America. “It’s symptomatic of a certain hope / 127 violence in our culture that’s pretty obvious,” he said in June 1996. “There are so many expressions of violence and evil in the world that you hardly know where to start.” Indeed, the church arsons were a symbol of the inchoate rage of the 1990s that Richard Cohen, writing for the Washington Post, identified in June 1996. Cohen, chastised by a black colleague for failing to discuss the...