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More On The Church Fires
February 9, 2006    File under: Alabama

From Reuters:

Some of the churches had majority white congregations and some had majority black congregations.

...

"You can't understand why somebody would do something like that apart from being just evil."

From UPI:

Federal agents say two white men in an SUV are being sought in connection with the burning of nine rural Alabama Baptist churches in the past six days.

The men were seen in a dark-colored sport utility vehicle near five church fires last Friday, the Montgomery Advertiser reported. Three of those churches were destroyed.

...

Banks said it doesn't look like there's a racial motivation, as the four churches that burned Tuesday have predominantly black congregations, but only one of the five on Friday was predominantly black.

From Duke University:

"We don’t know the motives of the terrorists who have burned several rural Baptist churches in Alabama, but we do understand the devastating effects of a church-burning on a small town," said Richard Lischer, Cleland Professor of Preaching at Duke’s Divinity School. "The local church is both guide and anchor for the community’s morality and religion. It helps hold life together."

Four churches, all within an hour’s drive of one another in rural western Alabama, were burned by suspicious fires Tuesday. Five churches were burned last Friday in the central part of the state.

"In Nazi Germany, it was the burning of synagogues. In the American South of the 1950s and ’60s, it was the burning of little black churches. In other parts of the world, it is the mosques that are going up in flames," said Lischer, a former pastor of a rural congregation and author of "Open Secrets: A Memoir of Faith and Discovery" (2002), which chronicles his pastoral experience.

"Every such attack is an attempt to shake and destroy a community’s foundation of faith," Lischer said. "Which is why Martin Luther King and his associates often held services in the smoldering ruins of fire-bombed churches. Their message was, ‘You can’t kill God.’"


Posted by Jake Adam York at February 9, 2006 7:33 AM