Editor’s Note: This blog was originally released in 2012. We thought it was appropriate to share it again following the string of recent tragedies, including the Las Vegas slaughter and yesterday’s tragedy at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs.
A teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, reflecting on the carnage and tragedy of one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history, posed a question to the world:
“Who would do this to our poor little babies?”
The initial answer was a 20-year-old man named Adam Lanza.
The larger answer seems harder for us to grasp but is, nonetheless, more to the point.
The answer: evil.
When the 10-year anniversary of the Columbine killings took place, we were able to look back with new insights into the event on the morning of April 20, 1999, that forever changed our national consciousness.
We learned that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were not goths. They weren’t loners. They weren’t in the “Trenchcoat Mafia.” They were not disaffected video gamers. They hadn’t been bullied. The supposed “enemies” on their list had already graduated a year earlier. They weren’t on anti-depressant medication. They didn’t target jocks, blacks or Christians.
They just wanted to kill.
Two seemingly normal, well-scrubbed high school boys went to their school in a prosperous suburban subdivision with the goal to kill thousands. Their bombs didn’t work, so they proceeded to kill 13 classmates and wound another 24.
By 2002, the U.S. Secret Service and U.S. Education Department had completed a study on school shooters and found that no single profile fit them all. What was clear was that few simply “snapped” at the time of the attack. They had usually planned it with meticulous detail.
Conclusion?
“They are rage shootings,” says David Osher, a sociologist and vice president at the American Institutes for Research.
And the rage has continued.
Does the name Byran Uyesugi ring a bell? Robert Hawkins? Mark Barton? Terry Ratzmann? Robert Stewart? In an article titled, “Why Are Americans Killing Each Other?” Ted Anthony writes that “each entered the national consciousness when he picked up a gun and ended multiple lives.”
Forty-seven were killed through mass shootings in the month before the Columbine anniversary alone.
As Anthony notes, we now live in a society “where the term ‘mass shooting’ has lost its status as an unthinkable aberration and become mere fodder for a fresh news cycle.”
But then he asks the pivotal question, “Why are we killing each other?”
The only answer that he could muster was the loss of the American dream. Eight years of terrorism angst, six years of war in Iraq, months of recession. He lamented that 663,000 lost their jobs in March 2009, and he worries how many might be angry about it—and might have a gun.
With all respect, that is no answer.
In his book Explaining Hitler, Ron Rosenbaum surveys theory after theory regarding the Nazi leader’s atrocities. In the end, all of his explanations fail to confront the “laughing” Hitler—the bloodthirsty dictator who was fully conscious of his malignancy. He didn’t have to kill the Jews; he wasn’t compelled by abstract forces. In truth, he chose to, he wanted to.
Here was simply an evil man.
And that is the answer.
Evil.
But this is precisely the word we seem unable to own.
It brings to mind Jean Bethke Elshtain’s experience on the first Sunday following the attacks of 9/11. She went to a Methodist church in Nashville. The minister, who she describes as having a kind of frozen smile on his face, said, “I know it has been a terrible week.” Then, after a pause he continued, “But that’s no reason for us to give up our personal dreams.”
She thought, “Good grief! Shouldn’t you say something about what happened and how Christians are to think about it?” But then she realized that if one has lost the term evil from his or her theological vocabulary, then it is not easy to talk about such a thing.
But a robust and deeply theological discourse on “evil” was precisely what the world needed to hear at that moment and would have been uniquely served in hearing. Millions flooded to churches across the nation to hear a word from God, or at least about God, to make sense of the tragedy. Sadly, many were left as empty and lost as before they entered—which is one reason why the millions who came left just as quickly.
And why we, as a culture, have no framework for the tragedy of events such as Newtown.
So let me repeat what I tweeted on the day of the attacks.
I am heartbroken for the parents, furious at the evil and more resolved than ever to give my life to Christ’s mission.
Which, by the way, is the war against
... evil.
James Emery White
Sources
James Emery White, Christ Among the Dragons (InterVarsity Press).
Peter Applebome and Michael Wilson, “Who Would Do This to Our Poor Little Babies,” The New York Times, December 14, 2012, read online.
Greg Toppo, “10 Years Later, the Real Story Behind Columbine,” USA Today, April 14, 2009, read online; Greg Toppo and Marilyn Elias, “Lessons from Columbine,” USA Today, April 14, 2009, read online.
Ted Anthony, “Why Are Americans Killing Each Other?,” Associated Press, posted Sunday, April 5, 2009.
Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil.
Jean Bethke Elshtain in the afterword to Evangelicals in the Public Square, edited by J. Budziszewski.
About the Author
James Emery White is the founding and senior pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, NC, and the ranked adjunctive professor of theology and culture at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, where he also served as their fourth president. His latest book, Meet Generation Z: Understanding and Reaching the New Post-Christian World, is available on Amazon. To enjoy a free subscription to the Church & Culture blog, visit ChurchAndCulture.org, where you can view past blogs in our archive and read the latest church and culture news from around the world. Follow Dr. White on twitter @JamesEmeryWhite.