We celebrate the gift of free construction trailers here and at our housing site provided by David Sherman, owner of Allied Trailers. Two recent publications, one government and one from the private sector, give us some facts about church burnings in America to reflect on as we celebrate the birth of this new church. This gave us a subtotal of 1,090 houses of worship burned from all causes. We have no definitive numbers from May nor this month except to report a church burned in Tennessee last week, mentioned in the NCBC briefing, and three Jewish synagogues that were reported burned in the press on the West coast in the last two weeks. So even though we admit incomplete numbers, our best and most reliable sources report at least 1,219 burned churches and other houses of worship since 1995 in America.
Houses of worship continue to burn.
This is an ocean of darkness that bespeaks a domestic terrorism to equal any terrorism we face from foreign sources. Yet our response, as a people, as a government, and from our philanthropic sector has been inadequate to meet the needs. Even as we send health workers to Kosovo to help our soldiers who have been deeply disturbed by finding evidence of mass killings, we have made no such commitment to the pastors and families of our own burned churches even though many show clear signs of traumatic stress syndrome. Even as we prepare to spend billions to rebuild the war torn areas of Eastern Europe, our federal response to burned churches in terms of low-cost loans through HUD has seen only 7 churches able to avail themselves of this help. There are literally hundreds of churches that need help today that will not be helped because the people of America are unaware of these real numbers.