In South Carolina, it feels like you can’t throw a rock without hitting a place of worship.
Historically, this plethora of options had a purpose in the South. Churches centralized social life and infrastructure in rural frontiers where little had existed before—making social and economic hubs for dispersed communities.
It’s become such a mundane visual on my daily drives that I’ve stopped noticing all of the “First Churches” of this and that. I’ve recently taken to noticing the wild roadside plants instead. Counting mimosa trees and beauty berry bushes. Noting “ditch lilies” and plantain, kudzu creeping from the shoulders up onto the hillsides—taking over power lines and swallowing tidy landscaping.
Despite the South’s similar sprawl of churches in close proximity to each other, their distance to the community’s most vulnerable populations can feel like a vast acreage. Their initial purposes diffused by new institutional boundaries, creating clean partitions.
My hunt for plants is suddenly interrupted by something flapping in my periphery. Red, white and blue banners hanging from nearby church pillars that say “GOD BLESS AMERICA!” Disquieted, I ask myself which America God blesses, and at whose expense?
These loud proclamations chafe, juxtaposed with selective silence. The Southern Church has become a place where political topics are selectively censored and curated. Pastors agonizing over sermons at Starbucks, fighting to neutralize their message so they don’t receive a barrage of angry emails Monday morning.
But silence from the pulpit on political issues isn’t a neutral stance, nor is it a theological conviction. It’s a tribal boundary—and distance is what fortifies its walls. What began as a hub for the community became a series of homogenous sanctuaries. It was a slow and unconscious funneling of people into insulated groups, where everyone thinks and looks like you. When that insulation sets in, it becomes easy to see human beings as abstract and brush off policies that harm them. This lack of proximity diminishes our capacity for compassion—never having shared a weekday meal with them or watched their children in nursery. Selective silence becomes a comfortable choice, and one that has serious consequences for our neighbors.
Roughly 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians legally living in the United States just lost their Temporary Protected Status, putting them at risk of deportation to the countries they fled from due to natural disaster and war. Last year, the same government removed this protection from Venezuelan neighbors as well. Currently, out of the thousands of refugees that were admitted to the United States since October 2025, all but three were white South Africans. These actions indicate a disturbing pattern, one that deserves public condemnation—especially from those who affirm the dignity of all image bearers. Despite this news being of concern to Christians, little noise is being made behind Southern altars.
Sometimes it’s in the silence of our congregations, not the noise, that we can see the signs of who we truly follow. This causes an uncomfortable dissonance, and for those born again into the family of God, that unease is a marker of a messy rebirth into a bigger family without borders. Somewhere in the distance, a weedwacker hums.
Southern Baptist pastor, civil rights activist and rabble-rouser, Will D. Campbell wrote prophetically of the church and race relations 64 years ago, speaking of “‘tertium genus’, or ‘third race’ — a people neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, embracing master and slave alike, king and liege.”[1] While managing to enrage every white evangelical in his time, he continued to push the matter of reconciliation and the complete equality of Christians. While these claims seemed radical in their application, they are not a new practice. And Campbell practiced it well—defending black students from violent segregationists and ministering to Klan members in prison. He boasted of a scandalous grace and return to an ancient way of living, steeped in prophetic tradition. It’s a culture that stems from Jesus of Nazareth and breaks all earthly prejudices and hierarchies. If this is the Gospel we still claim, then overt nationalism is too myopic for the church. And empathy for neighbors certainly isn’t toxic.
This raises the question: as Christians, are we at our core truly willing to follow a crucified, refugee Jesus? A God who subverts the powers of nations and triumphs in His own way? The empire thinks that power looks like cultural dominance and exclusion. It decides who belongs and who doesn’t, and has its own definition of success. But we must make a decision about our allegiances. If racism has its roots in the sin of idolatry, like Campbell argued, then I’d argue that acute nationalism has its roots in it too, and the fruit of that allegiance is evident in our detention centers.
As a body, will we ever be able to deny the temptation of dominion over the kingdoms of the earth, like Jesus did? Maybe we’ve ignored how much the Kingdom of God really resembles the mischief of weeds, in favor of our neat gardens—the way they quietly and persistently blanket institutional courtyards, shifting their landscape.
I think of the common and overlooked foliage on the road shoulders. Imagine the feeling of being overlooked myself, and decide if it’s worth making my bed down there after all. I decide that I’m ready to start working from the ground up—becoming part of a stubborn network of vines that root themselves in the marginal dirt and grow their way upwards.
The work isn’t always grand. Maybe it’s advocating for policy reform, pleading with congressional representatives, or protesting injustice on the streets. More often, it’s something less dramatic, but equally powerful and subversive—like breaking bread with someone new, listening to people’s stories, or just being unafraid to speak up for a neighbor’s cause.
You might have only a mustard seed, but you can also have my kudzu cutting.
[1] ‘Race and the Renewal of the Church’ Will D. Campbell 1962 https://a.co/d/06O1UFTF
Morgan Asuke is a writer and poet living in Travelers Rest, SC who co-leads a group of disgruntled and over-churched millennials who labor for liberation and justice in the community. Her hobbies include bird watching (casually), gardening (aggressively), and starting new hobbies (frantically).
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