In the spring and summer of 1996, African-American churches were headlining the news as they fell victim to a new wave of arsons and bombings. Television news reports carried dramatic images of churches engulfed in flames. Morning papers carried stories of devastated church members standing around the smoldering remains of their beloved sacred spaces. Beneath their shock was an underlying awareness that this was not a new phenomenon. At critical moments of Black empowerment in the United States — Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement in particular — racist backlash had targeted its rage on the heart and soul of the African-American community: its houses of worship. Now it seemed there was another spike in such incidents. Federal agencies had documented 52 incidents of attempted arson or bombings against houses of worship in 1995. The following year the number of cases they investigated jumped to 297. Of these incidents, a disproportionate number (over 40 percent) were perpetrated against African-American churches.

The story of this chapter in American cultural history is complex and has been vastly understudied. It is a story that weaves together the political and cultural background of events that were framing public discourse around race at the time (the murder trial of O.J. Simpson, the Million Man March, etc.), the dynamics around Bill Clinton's reelection campaign, the role of media in constructing and deconstructing social problems, the interventions of religious institutions and foundations, and the active compassion and latent guilt that mobilized thousands of volunteers in the rebuilding effort. The data are immense, the stories, myriad. This is a subject that begs for further interdisciplinary analysis in unraveling the complex intersection of race, class, power, and religion.

Christopher Strain makes a significant contribution in this slim book toward documenting the dynamics of the spate of Black church burnings. The 157 pages are chock full of media references to church fires and the reaction to them. He chronicles the issue from what is largely understood as its entre into the national spotlight (Green Bay Packers football star Reggie White's public statement during the 1996 Super Bowl after the arson of his home church) to the spike in hate crimes against Muslims post-September 11, 2001 to an echo church arson wave in 2006. While this ambitious volume can sometimes read like a cut-and-pasted annotated bibliography, Strain nevertheless does an enormous service to our understanding of the issue by pulling together a vast number and variety of media references. Also included are photographs, many taken by the author, which ground the data in the social realities of local terrorism.

One of the most compelling components of the national debate that took place around the church burnings was the question of whether a conspiracy was at work. African-American leaders and ministers of torched churches, as well as social commentators and a few journalists, had floated the possibility of a racist conspiracy coordinating and fanning the flames. The prevalence and nature of the crimes (often with racist graffiti found on charred walls) seemed to indicate that something more insidious was afoot than drunken teenagers up to mischief or disturbed individuals randomly attacking Black churches. Yet as soon as the word “conspiracy” entered the public discourse, there was a strong reaction from conservative voices, as Strain documents. Even as the rhetoric of conspiracy moved from connoting organized strategies to a “cultural conspiracy” which gives permission to unrelated individuals to target African-American churches, conservative voices would hear none of it. Citing anecdotal evidence of Black arsonists or the proverbial drunk teenagers being arrested in some of the crimes, the anti-conspiracy commentators declared the conspiracy theory a “hoax.” Eventually these commentators were successful in reframing what began as national news into local stories, and within a year, the torching of Black churches disappeared from the media spotlight.

Those interested in the construction of racial meanings and the nature of national conversations about race in our society should study this case. Burning Faith does not really attempt to ground an analysis in a theoretical framework. Strain begins and ends the book with a general social capital interpretation of the phenomenon as expressive of the “absence of community in the United States in the late twentieth century” (xiii). What he does well, however, is to amass and organize a vast collection of media references that were describing and interpreting a dramatic historic moment. In constructing the narrative through the voices of the time, readers with the perspective of time and space are drawn to questions that deserve further research. How did national organizations (like the predominantly white National Council of Churches and the Congress of National Black Churches) come to leverage political and economic power in constructing and addressing the issue? (And how did those two groups operate differently?) What were the dynamics surrounding the Religious Right's sympathetic involvement, directly in opposition to conservative commentators? What really mobilized the faith-based community to respond as strongly as it did in terms of financial contribution and volunteer service — and what happened to that impulse? How did the African-American congregations that were victimized interpret the fires, the national spotlight, the sudden solidarity, and finally the loss of national interest?

The rash of church arsons in the 1990s represents the gnarliness of the issue of race in the United States. Hopefully, it will be revisited by political scientists, sociologists of race and religion, journalists, and religious leaders to give us a deeper understanding of how different sectors can collude and collide to spark rage, contain it, and finally quench it. But all will need to reference the media documentation represented in this work.