Torching Civility : ‘Us Church’: More Than a Building

When Rising Star Missionary Baptist Church in Greensboro, Ala., burned down earlier this month, as so many churches of African American Protestants have been burning across the South, one elderly black woman made a particularly apt comment. Reporters on the scene described her speech as the stammered “vernacular of elderly black folks in rural west Alabama” but Beatrice Carlisle spoke for so many others when she said: “Oh, Lord, us church is burning down.”

“Us church” burns down in part because the surrounding “us nation” is also moral tinder, its fiber threatened. When a church burns because it was struck by lightning--insurance companies call that an act of God--a minister or lay elder will be quoted in the media the next day with such words as: “It was only a roof over our heads, and we can replace that.” And they do. Or, “It was only a symbol.” In one sense, that is true. But stay around long enough to see what is being mourned and you learn there is no such thing as “only a symbol.” It is “us church.”

Christians who are precise about language sometimes complain that the word “church,” which translates a Greek word for a gathering of people, has come to apply to a building of wood and stone. Confusing, isn’t it? But this is a confusion that Carlisle and thousands of other victims will gladly live with. Building and people are almost as one.

It is similar when “us synagogue” is violated by ideological haters and nihilists who paint swastikas on the doors, “us people” who are Jews are being attacked. Like “church,” the word synagogue stands for both a building and a congregating of people--and the violators again are killers.

Every informed sociologist or reporter on the current scene reminds us that, for two centuries, each little rural church and each great urban edifice of African Americans has been “a roof over the heads” of “us people”--the only public institution where blacks had control, the only place they could freely congregate. There they were baptized, married and from there they were buried. They partied and cried there, knew suffering and victory there. They still do--though almost 40 black churches have been burned in the past 18 months.

Whoever has worn the handle of a tool through years of use until it fits the hand perfectly and uniquely, knows that tool as a part of one’s being.

The church building is a tool and symbol alike of “us church” people. The recent acts of arson, when connected with racism, will depress the congregants because these victims have to fear that some nameless, faceless monsters--someone who wants them dead--might strike again. The acts also will set the same victims afire with resolve to replace the burned buildings so they have a roof overhead as they become an even stronger congregation.

While these often remote and small buildings where rural African Americans worship keep burning, the nation around them also keeps score and asks questions. For every burning, there is a question and a theory.

Who is torching the buildings? is the first question--as yet unanswerable and, in part perhaps, never to be answered. The notion that an interstate racist conspiracy, perhaps connected with groups like the Ku Klux Klan, is responsible, is most ominous but least probable. There are good reasons to wish that the arson was the work of conspirators. Then they could be tracked down, smoked out, identified, prosecuted--stopped.

More threatening to civil life and more probable as an explanation is the contention that the church-burnings, because they target mainly African Americans, are products of generalized racial hatreds, here finding specific focus. It is unfortunately hard to find ways to connect the apparently random dots that might link those who act on such impulses and stop the perpetrators.

One hears, without evidence, that some of the burnings could be self-generated--for malign purposes of congregations that take advantage of the moment in order to collect insurance. That will rarely be credible because too many buildings are uninsured. They are the sanctuaries of the rural poor.

That leaves the copy-cat crowd: nihilists who make a movement out of what might have been an isolated act or two. And there are also, no doubt, what one Bureau of Alcohol, Tobaco and Firearms official called “mutts”--people without ideology-- and mere “nuts.” The slang dictionaries in both cases define these as “stupid persons.” A society of 260 million people will inevitably include thousands of both, dozens of whom will also take advantage of the moment and the mood to torch churches.

While the who question has not been answered in any way that would stand up in a court of law, the why question that asks the reasons for the destruction cannot be satisfyingly answered. But it can be addressed. To address it, we must begin with an understanding of the role of material objects, even the most humble, in the hearts and lives of both individuals and communities.

We are back to “us church” and “us people.” Because people, not mere buildings, are the victims and rebuilders, this is a moment when all who have vested interests in explanations have to be cautious lest they pour their own fuel on the situation. In an election year, both parties on local and national levels will be tempted to exploit the burnings, each coming up with interpretations that will serve their own cause.

The largely white Christian Coalition has already weighed in by declaring repentance and a resolve to raise money to pool with the funds and energies of others of good will who support or are themselves rebuilders. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference has balanced that declaration with accusations that the coalition repentance comes late; that the group’s resolve amounts to little, and that right-wing political programs overall consistently hurt “us people.”

Better that both parties and both kinds of forces link up with rebuilders of the churches and address all the contributing problems that create the conditions in which the people who want to kill “us church,” meaning “us people,” will find no credence. The copy cats and mutts and nuts will then have fewer reasons to perform their destructive acts, if a constructive spirit begins to mark “us nation,” where many of the structures of respect, racial concord and civility have been torched and are often already aflame.*