The Christians Who Make Little Martyrs Out of Uvalde Victims

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David Roberts
@drvolts
"The right’s loyalty to God-the-gun is not a coincidence but rather the manifestation of a deep commitment to violence in all forms, from political coercion by minority rule to the brutal implications of a country soon to be without Roe."

nymag.com
The Christians Who Make Little Martyrs Out of Uvalde Victims
A nihilistic religion worships the gun.
11:34 AM · Jun 5, 2022

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/06/the-christians-who-make-little-martyrs-out-of-uvalde-victims.html

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When I was 11 years old, I thought I was going to be a martyr. The mass shooting at Columbine High School was so shocking it penetrated the walls of my school, which was, until sixth grade, also my home. Yet I longed to leave, to make friends and go to class. I went to public school a few months after Columbine, and I was ready to die if I had to. The idea did not occur to me organically. The church library had acquired a new tale, an update of sorts to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, which occupied a different shelf in the same tiny space. Called She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall, it claimed that one of the gunmen killed Bernall because she refused to deny Christ.

Written by Bernall’s mother, Misty, the book portrayed the teen as a troubled girl who found God just in time to die for him. Cassie had dabbled in the occult with a bad crowd. In letters she wrote to a friend, Cassie had wished violence and death on her parents. The Bernalls pulled her out of her Colorado public school in favor of a Christian institution and forced her to attend a church youth group. After she accepted Christ and her behavior improved, they sent her to Columbine. On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris approached Cassie where she hid under a table in the school library and, according to her mother, asked her if she believed in God. When she said yes, he shot her. In fact, witnesses said that Harris had never asked Cassie anything at all. Instead, his accomplice Dylan Klebold asked a different girl, Valeen Schnurr, if she believed in God. He’d already shot her once, but she said yes anyway, and Klebold walked away. Bernall died, but Schnurr lived.

I was transfixed by the Bernall book and the power of its grief, and so were many others. The book was a national best seller, even though its central claim didn’t survive scrutiny. Perhaps Bernall’s conversion was genuine — she isn’t here to dispute her parents — but real or not, her faith alone could not satisfy the Evangelicals who embraced the book. They needed blood to support their worldview. “Should the believers accept the literal truth, they’d be left with a hopeless equation: Schnurr said yes and she lived, but saints and martyrs don’t live,” Hanna Rosin wrote in the Washington Post, weeks after the book’s release. “Saint Cassie probably said nothing and died.” Investigations and reports meant little to the Christian right, which swept Cassie up to heaven. The Christian singer-songwriter Michael W. Smith recorded a song in her honor. Churches like mine purchased the book so that gullible young people like me would read it. We were entering a time of great persecution. The Left Behind series had begun publishing just a few years before Columbine and minds were fixed on tribulations to come. Her murder confirmed what we already believed: The nation had turned its back on God, and blood was the punishment.

The gun is our Moloch, the writer Garry Wills said after Sandy Hook. As Moloch, the Old Testament god serviced by child sacrifice, the gun “is an object of reverence,” he wrote. “Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails … So let us celebrate the falling bodies and the rising statues as a demonstration of our fealty, our bondage, to the great god Gun.” I no longer believe in God or the devil, but I believe in the gun because in America there is no other choice. To me, the gun is more real than the Trinity, and it is the true author of our tribulations. For all Cassie’s parents got wrong about her story, something remains of her martyrdom, but not to God, to the gun. She shares this with the children of Uvalde, Parkland, Newtown, and other places we will someday know because the right refuses to restrict the gun.

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