Of all the news of the past few weeks, none so moved me as the conviction of Dylann Roof in the murder last year of nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston.
I wasn’t moved so much because he was convicted. The evidence was overwhelming and included Roof’s confession. No, it was the retelling of the horrific crime, the powerful reminder about the degree to which racism can infect us and an overwhelming feeling of solidarity with my fellow Christians who were the victims of Roof’s terror. Just looking at their faces in the photo above breaks my heart.
As you may recall, Roof, who was 21 years old, entered the church during an evening Bible study. For nearly an hour, he sat among a dozen people before opening fire during the participants’ final prayer. Testimony during his trial revealed that Roof was filled with racial hatred and spent months planning to murder black people.
According to a National Public Radio account, witness Felicia Sanders described hiding under a table and “cowering with her 11-year-old granddaughter who was with her.” She described “feeling the blood of her mortally wounded son and aunt who were on either side of her.”
“Leave You to Tell the Story”
Another witness, Polly Sheppard, told the jury Roof stood over her with his gun and asked her if she had been shot. When she said no, Roof told her: “I’m not going to. I’m going to leave you here to tell the story.”
Less than 24 hours after the massacre, Roof gave a two-hour taped interview to FBI agents, part of which was played for the jury. In it, he said of Sheppard, “I didn’t shoot her because she was, like, looking at me.”
Clemency by whim.
Among Roof’s reasons for the massacre, he said he felt he “had to” because “no one else was brave enough.” He explained that he believed white people “already are the second-class citizens.”
Is Roof mentally ill? Maybe. But you can’t assume that somebody who does something horrific is ill. What is certain – and in my opinion this is a main ingredient in racism – is that he had a severely distorted view of reality.
First, he acknowledged during the trial that the people who he shot were not “bad people.” The presumption, then, is that they deserved to die because they belonged to a different race. Distorted view of reality.
Second, whites are “second-class citizens?” Again, distorted view of reality. Any informed person with ordinary powers of reasoning knows that just the opposite is true. Data in so many categories gives the lie to this idea but here are a few in case you need some evidence.
African American children are three times more likely to live in poverty than Caucasian children, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Unemployment rates for African Americans are typically double those of Caucasian Americans, and African American men working full time earn 72 percent of the average earnings of comparable Caucasian men and 85 percent of the earnings of Caucasian women.
Focus on Our Commonality
But in a blog written principally for skeptics who are searching for God, I want to focus on what we have in common with the murdered people in that church.
They, too, were searching for God and they paid for it with their lives. Like us, they may have had doubts but they took the leap of faith and by participating in that study group, they showed they were serious about the search. They are our brothers and sisters.
Besides mourning their loss, all people searching for God need to recognize racism in ourselves, our institutions – including our churches – and our government and do whatever we can to resist it.
And no matter what some of our fellow Americans believe, we can’t allow ourselves or others to confuse basic Christian love and solidarity with “political correctness.”
In the search for God, there are no liberals or conservatives, people who are or aren’t politically correct. Love rules.
