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Alabama Church Fires Try to Attack Foundations of Faith

"The local church is both guide and anchor for the community's morality and religion," says Richard Lischer

While federal, state and local officials search for the arsonists who have damaged or destroyed nine Alabama churches in the past week, a Duke University Divinity School professor says the impact of such actions is clear.

"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.'"