Updated on June 28, 12:34 p.m ET 
“What’s the church doing on fire?”Jeanette Dudley, the associate pastor of God’s
Power Church of Christ in Macon, Georgia, got
a call a little after 5 a.m. on Wednesday, she told
a local TV news station. Her tiny church of about
a dozen members had been burned, probably
beyond repair. The Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms,
and Tobacco got called in, which has been the
standard procedure for church fires since the
late 1960s. Investigators say they’ve ruled out
possible causes like an electrical malfunction; most
likely, this was arson. The very same night, many
miles away in North Carolina, another church
burned: Briar Creek Road Baptist Church, which
was set on fire some time around 1 a.m. Investigators
have ruled it an act of arson, the AP reports;
according to The Charlotte Observer, they haven’t
yet determined whether it might be a hate crime.

Two other predominantly black churches have been
the target of possible arson this week:  Glover Grove
Missionary Baptist Church in Warrenville, South
Carolina, which caught fire on Friday, and College Hill
Seventh Day Adventist, which burned on Monday in
Knoxville, Tennessee. Investigators in Knoxville
told a local news station they believed it was an act
of vandalism, although they aren’t investigating the
incident as a hate crime. (There have also been at
least three other cases of fires at churches this week.
At Fruitland Presbyterian Church in Gibson County,
Tennessee, and the Greater Miracle Temple Apostolic
Holiness Church in Tallahassee, Florida. Officials
suspect the blazes were caused by lightning and
electrical wires, respectively, but investigations are
still ongoing. A church that is not predominantly
black—College Heights Baptist Church in Elyria,
Ohio—was burned on Saturday morning. The fire
appears to have been started in the sanctuary, and
WKYC reports that the cause is still under investigation.
The town’s fire and police departments did not
immediately return calls for confirmation on Sunday.*) 

These fires join the murder of nine people at
Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal
Church as major acts of violence perpetrated
against predominantly black churches in the last
fortnight. Churches are burning again in the United
States, and the symbolism of that is powerful. Even
though many instances of arson have happened at
white churches, the crime is often association with
racial violence: a highly visible attack on a core
institution of the black community, often done at
night, and often motivated by hate. 

As my colleague David Graham noted last week, the history of American church burnings dates to before the Civil War, but there was a major uptick in incidents of arson at black churches in the middle and late 20th century. One of the most famous was the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four girls. Three decades later, cases of church arson rose sharply. In response, in 1995, President Bill Clinton also set up a church-arson investigative task force, and in 1996, Congress passed a law increasing the sentences for arsonists who target religious organizations, particularly for reasons of race or ethnicity. Between 1995 and 1999, Clinton’s task force reported that it opened 827 investigations into burnings and bombings at houses of worship; it was later disbanded. 

In recent years, it’s been harder to get a clear sense
of the number of church fires across the country.
The National Fire Protection Association reports
that between 2007 and 2011, there were an average
of 280 intentionally set fires at houses of worship in
America each year, although a small percentage of
those took place at other religious organizations, like
funeral homes. One of the organization’s staffers,
Marty Ahrens, said that tracking church arson has
become much more complicated since reporting
standards changed in the late ‘90s. Sometimes, fires
that are reported to the National Fire Incident
Reporting System are considered “suspicious,” but
they can’t be reported as arson until they’re
definitively ruled “intentional.” Even then, it’s difficult
to determine what motivated an act of arson. “To know
that something is motivated by hate, you either have
to know who did it or they have to leave you a message
in some way that makes it very obvious,” she said.
“There are an awful lot of [intentionally set fires] that
are not hate crimes—they’re run-of-the-mill kids doing
stupid things.” 

The investigations in North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Ohio, and Tennessee are still ongoing, and they may end up in that broad category of fires of suspicious, but ultimately unknowable, origin that Ahrens described. But no matter why they happened, these fires are a troubling reminder of the vulnerability of our sacred institutions in the days following one of the most violent attacks on a church in recent memory. It’s true that a stupid kid might stumble backward into one of the most symbolically terrifying crimes possible in the United States, but that doesn’t make the terror of churches burning any less powerful.

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EMMA GREEN is the managing editor of TheAtlantic.com, where
she also writes about religion and culture.