A Cherished Right at Risk: Incivility Towards Black People of Faith

This article was inspired by and co-written with LaRita Reid, Founder and President of Real Civility, LLC.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

                                                                        First Amendment of the United States Constitution

Americans enjoy one of the greatest rights a nation can guarantee its citizens – the freedom of and from religion. This article was written on Wednesday, 03 April 2024, and I wonder how safe individuals are in practicing their faith.

Over Easter Sunday and Easter Monday, the NYC Metro area experienced Easter Mass being disrupted at the magnificent St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan. Protestors took over the cathedral’s altar, shouting and holding up banners during the Mass. Fortunately, they were immediately removed. On Monday, in Teaneck, New Jersey, a quiet and idyllic suburb just outside NYC, a Jewish synagogue was contending with vitriolic protestors and counter-protestors, requiring considerable police presence.  

While these instances are growing and must be addressed, Americans must also understand that Black churches have been contending with much worse disruptions for three consecutive centuries.

The Black Faith Experience

Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church

Source: Wikipedia

Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church (Mother Emmanuel) was founded in 1817 and is located in Charleston, South Carolina. According to Wikipedia, “At that time, Blacks could only hold services during the daytime and were not allowed to learn how to read. In June 1822, Denmark Vesey, one of the church's founders, was implicated in an alleged slave revolt plot. Vesey and five organizers were rapidly convicted in a show trial and executed on 02 July after a secret trial.” Sadly, this would not be the last tragedy this storied church would face.

On Wednesday, 17 June 2015, Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old White supremacist, attended a Bible study class at Emmanuel AME Church with ten other participants. He participated in the discussion, and while others prayed at the end of the class, Dylann pulled out a Glock 41 and shot and killed nine of the attendees. Another was shot but survived. One of those killed was South Carolina State Senator (and senior pastor at Emmanuel AME) Clementa Pinckney. Roof was given a life sentence without parole and may eventually be executed.

Unfortunately, these attacks are far from anomalies.

Arson and Bombings

The article “List of Attacks Against African-American Churches” is a sober read. Nonblacks cannot begin to fathom the vitriol leveled against Black houses of worship. Here are just a few citations from the 1960s:

• 1962 January 16 New Bethel Baptist Church, St Luke's African Methodist Episcopal Church, and Triumph Church Kingdom of God and Christ, all three in Birmingham, AL, were fire-bombed.

• 1962 September 25, St. Matthew's Baptist Church of Macon, Georgia, was burned. "It is the fifth church to burn in a month."[3][4]

• 1964 July 30, Mount Moriah Baptist Church near Meridian, Mississippi, was leveled by fire. This attack is connected to countless others that were meant to intimidate Black residents who were active in the Civil Rights Movement.[5]
  

Throughout the 1960s, as The Civil Rights Act was passed and America slowly started to integrate, intentional fires and bombings – yes, bombings – occurred at Black churches. Between 1962 and 1964, six churches were fire-bombed, and another twenty-one were set on fire. Put differently, a black church was bombed or burned about once a month between 1962 and 1964. These numbers represent only those cited in the article and documented by authorities. The real number is more likely much higher.

16th Street Baptist Church Bombing victims, 15 September 1963, Birmingham, AL

Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair

Photo Credit: Zinn Education Project

While Black church arson continued throughout the late 1960s and into the 1970s and 1980s, the 1990s saw a decline in overall church arson, but the Black community was once again disproportionately impacted. “According to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), the number of church arsons decreased from 1,420 in 1980 to 520 in 1994. However, a 1996 House Judiciary Committee report found that a disproportionate number of church arsons were at Black churches in the South.” According to Wikipedia, “More than 30 Black churches were burned in an 18-month period in 1995 and 1996.” That is a church burning every 2.4 weeks.

"The attack on African American churches is more than just an act of terrorism against a place of worship...It is an attack on the very soul of the African American community. It is the source of their sense of humanity, their sense of self-worth, their fight for dignity and equality, their leader and trainer in the struggle for freedom and justice." 

Ozell Sutton, Chair of the Justice Department's Community Relations Service Church Burning Response Team (1996)According to PBS, In the late 1990s, at least 80 Black churches had been burned, firebombed, or vandalized. In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Church Arson Prevention Act and formed the National Church Arson Task Force (NCATF) to investigate the crimes. The NCATF reported a steady decline in church arson, investigating 297 incidents in 1996, 208 in 1997, and 114 in 1998.

The 21st century has continued to see Black church burnings. In 2019, in St. Landry Parish, a parish with approximately 81,000 residents and located about 100 miles northwest of New Orleans, three Black Baptist churches were set on fire by Holden Mattews, a White supremacist. He received a 25-year federal prison sentence.

It is surreal to believe that in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the Black community’s houses of worship were still at risk of being intentionally destroyed. I watch a lot of news, and what I find frustrating after co-writing this article is the lack of media coverage of such events. What does that say about our society in terms of what we value? What is concerning is that this is not only about the Black community but about the places where they worship. One gets a sense that while the former may be valued, the latter is not, and that is where society gets into trouble.   

Why Attack Black Churches?

After reviewing many articles and data sets, one cannot ignore the geographical concentration of the church attacks—they are almost exclusively in the South, an area known for high levels of church attendance, according to the Pew Research Center. One would logically conclude that if church attendance is high, that there is a corresponding respect for religion in general – irrespective of the faith and certainly of one’s skin color.  In short, the “commonality” across all communities should be the desire to seek out God, be a better person, and serve Him. Perhaps this is the case for most Southerners.

However, the ones that chose to burn Black churches have a problem. What is it about the church itself, vs., say, a business or residence, that makes them the source of people’s anger?

In Henry Louis Gates’s book, “The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song” (Penguin Press), he provides a historical, contextual, and eloquent explanation for why churches are targeted. In Gates’s words:

“The Black Church was the cultural cauldron that Black people created to combat a system designed to crush their spirit. Collectively and with enormous effort, they refused to allow that to happen. And the culture they created was sublime, awesome, majestic, lofty, glorious, and at all points subversive of the larger culture of enslavement that sought to destroy their humanity.”

“The miracle of African American survival can be traced directly to the miraculous ways that our ancestors reinvented the religion that their “masters” thought would keep them subservient. Rather, that religion enabled them and their descendants to learn, to grow, to develop, to interpret and reinvent the world in which they were trapped; it enabled them to bide their time — ultimately, time for them to fight for their freedom, and for us to continue the fight for ours.”

“It also gave them the moral authority to turn the mirror of religion back on their masters and to indict the nation for its original sin of allowing their enslavement to build up that “city upon a hill.”

The church was (and is) the institution that continues to empower the community to define and pursue its course. And that is the greatest threat to those who are against Black equality. 

Image Source: Britannica

Civil and Peaceful Solutions

In order to properly address the safety challenges faced by Black churches, all religions must first realize that they have a collective responsibility to look out for and help one another. Attacks on places of worship do not happen in silos, i.e., someone who has no moral filter to stop them from destroying a Black Baptist church will do the same to a synagogue or mosque.

Here are a few ideas for how we can get started.

Demand Improved Media Coverage

The vandalism and destruction of houses of worship, regardless of the faith, needs to be covered more in the media, which spends a good deal of time covering the conflicts in Europe and the Middle East while paying scant attention to the literal and figurative burning occurring in our own country. This requires, however, that the media see churches, synagogues, and mosques as valuable contributors to society.

Citizens can go into local and national news social media accounts and ask why they are not covering an incident regarding a house of worship. The more pressure that is put on news networks, the greater the coverage and awareness building of what is happening.

Join Forces with Other Faith Communities

There is strength in numbers. All faiths want to continue to enjoy that special right in the U.S. Constitution that allows for peaceful assembly and the ability to practice our faiths as befits our religion. However, instead of working in silos to address an individual house of worship issue, get together with other faith groups to explore where you can work together. A few areas where we should start are:

1.      Create Joint Efforts on Public Safety. This can include lobbying the police for increased patrolling near religious institutions and collectively purchasing security cameras, private patrols, and more to reduce costs.

2.      Lobby Local and State Governments to Protect Religious Freedoms. For example, protection from regulation of a religious school’s curriculum, e.g., special interest groups demanding that their ideology be taught in schools where that thinking runs counter to scripture.

3.      Share Strategies to Expand Congregation Membership. Church, Synagogue, and Mosque membership have been declining rapidly since 2008. Men, in particular, attend services much less frequently than women. This is not only a faith problem; it is also a security risk.

Counter Societal Incivility

Prejudice and violence are, to an extent, the outcome of a society that embraces moral relativism. Violence is prevalent in our movies, video games, and TV shows. Social media and its sophisticated algorithms allow individuals to quickly and efficiently align with people who share their values. That can be a positive outcome if the shared interests are cars, music, hobbies, faith, school, etc. It can also be detrimental if the alignment is around hatred towards others.

Excessive focus on materialism and the relentless focus on the self in social media means we are focused less on other’s needs and suffering and more on things that do not matter.

Religions must develop a collective dialogue that challenges these prevailing social norms and presents a better way forward.

The time to act is now. The broader faith community is increasingly targeted, and the Black community should not have to endure another century of arson and fire-bombed buildings.

God provides us with a collective focus—on serving and fulfilling His Commandments. The more we work together to protect our faiths and fellow people of faith, the more time we can spend doing God’s work. Isn’t that the only reason we are here?

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Michael Benedict published his first book, The Civil Society Playbook: A Commonsense Plan for a Return to Civility, in 2024. His career spans 25+ years in senior-level marketing positions at Fortune 1000 companies, tech startups, and marketing consultancies. His book covers areas of incivility that are not frequently discussed in the media. It offers solutions - actions - that anyone, regardless of age, can implement to improve civility in all aspects of society. He can be reached at michaelbbenedict@gmail.com. The book is available on Amazon, Apple Books, and Audible.