THERE IS NO K IN HOAX:

[L]ack of evidence so far of racist intent has not inhibited incendiary warnings and claims, many of them tweeted under the hashtag #WhoIsBurningBlackChurches. An activist with the liberal religious advocacy group Sojourners told Huffington Post: "Whenever you have African Americans in history pushing back against white supremacy, you inevitably have church burnings," adding, "In light of Confederate flags being taken down off of government buildings, this is a true threat to the dominance of whiteness in America."

But an official for the Southern Poverty Law Center cautioned in the same HuffPo piece against assuming the burnings were racial.

Some coverage has taken the time to point out that about 1600 churches in the U.S. suffer fires every year, 16 percent of them due to arson, which means on average at least five churches suffer arson every week. There are believed to be about 340,000 religious congregations in the U.S., and about 20 percent are believed to be black, although about 40 percent in the South are thought to be predominantly black.

Much of the recent coverage has cited the black church arson story of the 1990s, when there was a reputed upsurge in burnings. Few articles back then noted that church arsons averaged about 500-600 annually, according to the insurance industry, and that if 20 percent were black there would be on average about 100-120 burned black churches, which no study ever found to be the case.

Yet the black church arson story of twenty years ago became an established narrative, which President Clinton referenced to political effect, and which some on the left linked to an upsurge in white racism that supposedly crested with the 1994 Republican congressional win, facilitated by four million "angry white men."

The 1990s story was heavily promoted by the now defunct Center for Democratic Renewal in Atlanta and the National Council of Churches in New York, which raised over $14 million for its Burned Churches Fund, some of which helped forestall the council's own financial crisis.

It is understandable that many today have accepted the premise of a racially motivated upsurge in attacks on black churches, without realizing the lack of available facts. All church destruction, whether deliberate or accidental, merits condolence and assistance. One of the more admirable efforts to undergird the understandable dismay with hard facts came on July 1 when the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission circulated a fact sheet on the burnings that cited the wider national numbers placing the story in context.

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