CHARLESTON — Recent attacks against houses of worship in Michigan and England have rattled faith leaders in South Carolina who fear politically-motivated violence shows no signs of abating and endangers their religious communities.
Just hours after two people were killed by a man plowing his car into a crowd of Jewish worshipers and going on a stabbing spree outside a synagogue in Manchester, England, on Oct. 2, a suspicious suitcase was found at Charleston’s Orthodox Brith Sholom Beth Israel synagogue on Rutledge Avenue, prompting a police response. The suitcase was found to be empty and harmless, but the incident heightened concerns among local religious leaders.
Five days before the attack in England, a man crashed his car through the doors of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Grand Blanc, Mich., on Sept. 28, and then set the truck and church ablaze with gasoline while opening fire on congregants with a rifle, killing four people.
A month earlier, two children in Minneapolis were killed by a gunman who fired dozens of rounds through stained glass windows at Annunciation Catholic Church.
These are only the latest in a wave of mass killings at places of worship. Charleston infamously suffered its own tragedy on June 17, 2015, when nine worshipers were shot dead during a Bible Study at Emanuel AME Church on Calhoun Street. A decade ago, the Charleston massacre prompted a visit to Charleston from President Barack Obama, who eulogized The Rev. Clementa Pinckney during a funeral service at the College of Charleston, where he also led the singing of “Amazing Grace.”
Yet the church attack in Charleston was soon eclipsed by other mass shootings, including even deadlier attacks at houses of worship, such as the 2017 slaughter of 26 people at a Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, and the 2018 slayings of 11 worshipers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.
It can be hard to keep all the killings straight.
After the attack against the synagogue in England on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, a handful of faith leaders in Charleston decried the violence plaguing religious institutions and suggested ways to stop the killing. Fewer people would commit violent acts, they said, if political leaders more forcefully denounced all types of violence and did not regularly demonize their opponents as enemies.
“It starts from the top,” said Rabbi Yosef Bart of Brith Sholom Beth Israel. “Leaders need to say, ‘This is violence, this is wrong.’ ”
Bart said his synagogue’s security team worked effectively with Charleston police to investigate the suspicious suitcase and protect people from a potential threat.
While the empty suitcase was devoid of any antisemitic message, the rabbi noted that Jewish people are under regular threat, especially after a terrorist attack by the Palestinian paramilitary group Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, in which more than 1,200 people were killed and more than 200 abducted. That brazen attack spurred Israel to launch an ongoing war in the Palestinian territory of Gaza that many human rights organizations, including two in Israel, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, call a genocide.
“There’s a lot of poison, venom in the air against Israel and Jews,” said Bart. “People whose antisemitism was more underground, now it’s more overt.”
Bart lamented that many political leaders do not always denounce political violence. Some leaders, he said, “are not ready to call evil, evil, not ready to call terror, terror.”
At the Central Mosque of Charleston, former trustee Ghazala Javed said that political propaganda and lies have spurred much of the modern-day violence, at least much more so than any true hatred of a faith.
“There’s a fight for power,” said Javed, a retired cardiologist. “It’s not really religious-based, but politically motivated.”
Some politicians get ahead, she said, by attacking minorities and cultivating a sense of superiority among their followers. These tactics, she said, can prompt disturbed or ignorant people “to take the law into their own hands” and cause bloodshed. It doesn’t help that some people profit from and prolong war in the Middle East, which fuels further conflict, she added.
“All we can learn from it is to fight the ignorance (with) more interfaith experiences and learning from each other,” said Javed. It’s critical, she said “to propagate peace and love amongst all the religions and try to counter the lies and hate.”
During Sunday services at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, The Rev. Adam Shoemaker and his congregants were “passing the peace” and greeting each other when “some people whispered in my ear that some news was breaking” regarding the church attack in Michigan. Shoemaker told the congregation of the attack and later described news of the shooting as “a sobering reminder of the violent world we live in full of too many guns.”
Like Bart and Javed, Shoemaker said that it’s particularly perverse for people to be attacked as they worship, in “places where people should grow closer to God and their neighbor.”
He, too, blames modern messaging for spurring some individuals into committing the unthinkable, as well as the prevalence of firearms in the United States, where guns outnumber people.
“I do feel like we are in a particularly polarizing, intense time that social media exacerbates,” said Shoemaker, “(and) it does feel to me like more and more people have guns.”
Shoemaker has served in the ministry for 20 years. He said church members are more anxious than ever about the state of the world. Many talk to him about their worries, he said, and some families have made preparations to move abroad in response to their fears and dismay over current events.
Despite the recent and ongoing attacks against faith communities, none of these religious leaders imagined much changing in their respective houses of worship.
Bart said his synagogue already operates a robust security operation, as demonstrated by the quick response to the suitcase scare, and that his worshipers won’t be cowed.
“It is not stopping people from coming to service, practicing their faith and being proud Jews,” he said.
Javed said she does not see much changing at the mosque in terms of security, either. The best way to fight back against violence is to confront hate and be a good neighbor, she said.
“Repel evil with good,” said Javed, quoting the Quran. “We can all work together to neutralize the hate and whatever fuels this hate.”
At St. Stephen’s, Shoemaker does not envision hiring armed guards or locking church doors during services. The church previously installed panic buttons, he said, but the pastor is reluctant to fortify the church for fear of discouraging worshipers from attending.
“It is a tricky thing to wrestle with,” said Shoemaker. “I don’t think we can let the fear overwhelm us to the point we don’t live our lives.”
For Holli Emore in Columbia, one way to bridge differences is to make people realize what they might have in common. As the chairwoman of Interfaith partners of South Carolina, she regularly engages with people of different religions and helps them “learn how to be different together.”
Such interactions, she said, are critically important in today’s society, where many people eschew group activities in favor of solitary pursuits. The lack of communication, she said, often means people fail to recognize how much they are alike, including sharing near-universal desires for safety, health, happiness and success.