News & MediaJune 8, 2016<June 8, 2016

A year after the Charleston church shooting, what has changed? (Religious News Service)

by Marjory Wentworth

South Carolina Poet Laureate Marjory Wentworth, left, and former Charleston Post and Courier reporter Herb Frazier, who grew up in Emanuel AME Church. They co-authored “We Are Charleston” with College of Charleston historian Bernie Powers. The book, taking the massacre at Mother Emanuel as its starting point, recounts the history of the city and the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and the reaction of Charleston to the violence at Emanuel AME. RNS photo by Lauren Markoe

By Lauren Markoe
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CHARLESTON, S.C. (RNS) A few weeks after a young white gunman killed nine people at a Bible study in a black church here, another young white man walked into a Bible study at another black South Carolina church.

This young man did not seem to understand why his unexpected presence at Campbell Chapel, 100 miles away in the coastal town of Bluffton, unnerved the regulars that Wednesday evening, the traditional time for Bible study in African Methodist Episcopal churches.

It was as if he hadn’t heard about Dylann Roof, his white supremacist manifesto and his intention to start a race war. It was as if he had not felt the shock waves of the crime that unsettled the nation. The young man’s awkward body language, disapproving sighs and eye-rolling only made the congregants more nervous as they tried to focus on Scripture.

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