Civil Commotion

The make-believe tale of Cassie Bernall’s “martyrdom” at Columbine has exerted a powerful grip on the imagination of Christian teenagers.

After Columbine, martyrdom became a powerful fantasy for Christian teenagers

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But if you were a Christian teenager in 1999, the word “Columbine” doesn’t just make you remember feeling suddenly unsafe in places you thought were okay. It’s synonymous with both a whole cottage industry that sprang up around the shooting, a raft of commercial products that retold its stories — sometimes with dubious connection to the facts — and an ethos of martyrdom that seems in retrospect to have summed up what it was to be a youth-group kid at the turn of the last century.

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And as the public mourning began to fade and the FBI conducted its investigation, it started to become clear that the story about Bernall, in particular, was probably falsely reported. It was likely another girl entirely, Val Schnurr, who told Klebold — not Harris — that she believed in God before he shot her in the school library. (Schnurr survived.) Bernall was also in the library, though further from Klebold, and Harris did find her. But later eyewitnesses stated that Harris found her cowering under a table, said “Peekaboo,” and then shot her, without Bernall uttering a word.

The eyewitness accounts seemed to point to the fact that Bernall was tragically murdered but that the martyrdom story was built on false evidence.

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“You will never change the story of Cassie,” says Dave McPherson, the pastor at the Bernalls’ church. To illustrate how far it has gone, he tells a story of traveling to a remote church in Sudan a few months after the shooting. The congregation’s first request was that he tell the story of Saint Cassie.

“The church,” he says, by which he means Catholic and Protestant, worldwide, “is going to stick to the martyr story. It’s the story they heard first, and circulated for six months uncontested. You can say it didn’t happen that way, but the church won’t accept it. To the church, Cassie will always say yes, period.”

This would be a good time to pick-up a copy of Candida Moss’ The Myth of Persecution, an outstanding book that shows that most of the so-called martyrdoms under Rome were embellished and arose not from persecution but prosecution. That is, Roman Christians who obeyed the law were left alone, and those who wouldn’t obey the law were prosecuted.

Don’t miss the story about the crowd of Christians who showed-up at some Governor’s home one morning and demanded martyrdom, and were told to go home.

What do you know? A new survey upholds exactly what I’ve said for years: The “cultural Christians” are leaving church altogether, and the loonies are increasingly concentrated in backward-looking redoubts.

Of those who said they had attended a house of worship in September, 14 percent reported that they had left that particular church by mid-November. That’s a proportion in line with several of our previous estimates from surveys in the 2000s. In the 2016 election, “leavers” were distributed across the religious population, and included 10 percent of evangelicals, 18 percent of mainline Protestants, and 11 percent of Catholics. This represents an enormous amount of churn in the religious economy.

The influence of the churches will continue to decline because their storyline is untrue, their ethics are cult-like and affirmatively harmful — and they no longer have the political and social power to compel at least the pretense of belief and regard. That is why they are an engine of so much turmoil; they want that power back.

I pointed a few days ago to a piece by Molly Worthen that links conservative Christianity to the national disgraces of “post-truth” and Donald Trump’s presidency. Now comes a former New York Times religion editor to say the yahoos number far fewer than the piece suggests.

Nice try. America’s largest denomination is the Southern Baptists, and they are emphatic about inerrancy, recognizing that once you go the way of allegory and metaphor in interpreting the Bible you undermine a lot of orthodoxy. Just 2-mlles from my home is a near mega-church where it is taught that the earth is less than 10,000-years old; that good, decent, godly people are always prepared to betray their family and friends on command, like Abraham; that the goal of the godly life is self-annihilation — the total elimination of self-interest and self-direction because the self is evil. All of this should repel anybody of ordinary intelligence and decency, and yet all that may be said is that there isn’t a word of this degrading nonsense that isn’t totally commonplace amongst Southern Baptists.

That the publication of the “Origin of Species” marked an epoch in the development of the natural sciences is well known to the layman. That the combination of the very words origin and species embodied an intellectual revolt and introduced a new intellectual temper is easily overlooked by the expert. The conceptions that had reigned in the philosophy of nature and knowledge for two thousand years, the conceptions that had become the familiar furniture of the mind, rested on the assumption of the superiority of the fixed and final; they rested upon treating change and origin as signs of defect and unreality. In laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency, in treating the forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and perfection as originating and passing away, the “Origin of Species” introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion.

John Dewey

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

Alfred North Whitehead

Plato believed that, for everything we encounter in the corporeal world, there is a perfect instance of it in a world that exists someplace else. Consider dogs, for instance; we have big dogs, little dogs, dogs of all colors, dogs with long snouts, dogs with smooshed-in snouts. Plato believed that in the other world there existed the form of an ideal dog of which all our familiar dogs are merely poor copies.

Christianity adopted that idea, layered-on Original Sin to explain why we are unable to enter that other world and encounter the ideal dog, its form, and that dubious bit of nut-jobbery has indeed shaped the thought of the West for the greatest part of 2000-years.

It’s important to understand that bit of intellectual history to grasp why Darwin’s insight had such a seismic effect; literally, he rocked the organizing principles of Western thought — its metaphysics, the ideas that enveloped everything else. Darwin didn’t merely undermine the Adam and Eve tale, he said reality itself is not what Christianity has always said — a poor, corrupted copy of a perfect world someplace else — but a relentless shape-shifter.

Darwin was right and Christianity is wrong, or Christianity is right and Darwin was wrong; it comes down to that; there is no middle ground.

Our relentless, contemporary fights over the content of science curricula are relatively recent; such things were all but unknown when I was in high school. They have accompanied the rise of the Evangelical Right, from Jerry Falwell’s founding of the Moral Majority in 1979, which is reacting against the advances of science and the associated death of their failed ideas — their organizing principles.

Now, rather than face reality, the yahoos have successfully installed a deeply anti-science cohort in the White House and Congress, and science and reason are under attack as never before. The reality of global warming is denied, belligerent morons like Franklin Graham have Trump on their speed-dial, Creationist buffoons like Ken Ham (proprietor of the so-called Creation Museum) are figures of regard rather than objects of public ridicule.

All of which is why you should find the location of the nearest March for Science on Saturday and make an appearance. The progress of The Enlightenment itself is at stake, and it will be lost if we don’t conscientiously defend it.

Top that one for irony.