the rational behind the practice of burning a cross as a threat
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A big fire on your front yard can be pretty scary. Could easily have been burning crossbeams, if you catch my meaning.
It originally was a Scottish practice. A burning cross was a declaration that war is coming, a call to rally the clans who could see it. Think of it like the beacons of Gondor in LotR. The Klan appropriated it as a sign of “violence is coming *to you*”.
It became a thing the Klan did because of D.W. Griffith’s film “The Birth of a Nation”. This film (and the book it was based on) portrayed the Klan in an overwhelmingly positive light and to make them seem cooler they invented a bunch of things that the actual Klan, which was more or less wiped out in the 1870s, never actually did. These included the iconic white robes and the practice of cross burning, which author Thomas Dixon borrowed from an old Scottish practice.
The movie (and book) were so popular that it lead to a resurgence of interest in the Klan and the so-called second KKK was founded on Thanksgiving of 1915 with the burning of a cross on top of Stone Mountain in Georgia. The Klan’s position as America’s most well known racist terrorist organization meant that the things they were known for became fairly scary to the people they were targeting, hence cross burning is seen as a being a particularly threatening act.
You really can’t apply rational thought to religious extremists (of any religion). However, my thinking (I am unaffiliated with any religion) is that it is partly symbolic of “if we can do this, we can get to you other ways” as well as fire being taught to christians as the means that god uses to “cleanse sin” from the world, so the cross in conjunction with the fire becomes a threat and means of intimidation.
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