A prevalent theme in the public forum on the recent wave of black church arson in the United States is that the events are part of an overarching conspiracy on the part of hate groups to start a race war. In attempting to discount this theme, critics have concluded that events of black church arson are not racially motivated, and instead are random acts of insurance fraud and delinquency. We argue that competition theory sheds light on these recent events by moving us away from both sides of this debate. We argue that, in the absence of good data on connections between various hate groups, it is useful to consider this wave of ethnic violence as a result of ethnic competition for economic and political resources. Using yearly event counts and time-series cross sectional data, we test hypotheses derived from competition theory. We conclude that competition for both economic and political resources increases the yearly counts of black church arson.