The Christians of Charleston Confront Their Crisis
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Comments. Considerations. Questions.
By Kenneth Bagnell
The tragedy of Charleston – in which a white youth stands accused of gunning down nine people in their church’s Bible study class – recalls for me too many instances where, in my travels, I’ve encountered Americans for whom the gun is virtually a utility to be used however needed. The first instance came about a full half century ago, in a Caribbean country, when at a small resort, a youthful Yankee manager assured me that if the local black people “got uppity” he had a stack of rifles in the cellar that would put them in their place. I have heard such utterances, with their obvious slant, for many years and too many times. So recent events coming from that cultural soil are not new.
The dreadful tragedies, of the great many that have taken place, now include the actions of Dylann Roof, in his early twenties, who seems to be obsessed by hatred of black citizens, deeming them inferior, dangerous and thereby meriting death by the gun, specifically his gun. He stands charged with the murder of nine citizens who were attending evening Bible study at Emmanuel Methodist Episcopal Church in the pretty, tree lined streets of the town of Charleston, South Carolina, a small city of 127,000 founded in the 1920s; it’s often referred to affectionately as the Holy City given its many churches. All those killed were black citizens, including the minister in the pulpit, a man named Rev. Clementa Pinckney. Obviously Dylann Roof’s motives were a psychopathic horror, one he almost seems to have developed very early in life.
(Given all this -and out of basic integrity – we are obliged to add that the US has countless decent citizens made obvious in recent years by leaders like Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Madeleine Albright, along with numerous others, including Americans of the most ordinary status as well as those in high state or federal office.) Ironically some of such unsung Americans have now become visible but not vocal. They’re the members of the Charleston’s Methodist-Episcopal congregation, the congregation in which nine were shot dead by Dylann Roof on that dreadful day. We owe them inclusion here:
- Susie Jackson, 87, a longtime member of the congregation.
- Daniel Simmons, 74, a retired clergyman.
- Ethel Lance, 70, a worker in the congregation for 30 years.
- Myra Thompson, also a senior clergyperson.
- Cynthia Hurd, 54, a librarian at Charleston’s Public Library system.
- Depayne Middleton, 49, retired director of Charleston’s Community organization.
- Sharonda Coleman–Singleton 45, another minister, as well as a speech therapist.
- Clementa Pinckney, the senior minister of the church and also a member of the State Senate.
- Tywanza Sanders, 26, a recent university graduate.
For whatever reasons, the broad public of North America tends to think of black clergypersons as weakly educated and theologically primitive. This is not so as the late Martin Luther King illustrated with his PhD from one of the Ivy League universities. So do many others. And it’s certainly not true of the late minister of Charleston’s Methodist Episcopal Church, Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who in addition to his parish work and Sunday sermons often delivered lectures across the state. (He graduated magna cum laude from his first university. Later, Princeton University presented him with an award that opened the door for his study toward a Business Administration Degree.) Upon his recent death a colleague at the state legislature said: “The state of Carolina has lost a giant.” Not long before the day he was killed he spoke to a public group saying: “Many of us don’t see ourselves as just a place to come to worship, but as a beacon, and a bearer of what makes us a people…. It (the church) is really about freedom, the pursuit of happiness; that is what church is all about: freedom to worship, freedom from sin, freedom to be fully what God intends us to be, and freedom to have equality in the sight of God… Sometimes you must make noise to achieve that……. sometimes you may have to die to do that…”
It’s quite, indeed highly probable, that Roof is deranged – probably a paranoid schizophrenic as were Andres Breivik in Oslo in 2011 who killed 77 and Marc Lepine in Montreal in 1989 who massacred 14 women, mostly engineering students whom he called “a bunch of feminists…” As for Roof he’d written several manifestos many filled with hatred of black people, accompanied by photos of himself. (They reveal a very angry-looking young man. He said nobody was doing anything to protect white people from a takeover so he had to do it. This is not to excuse his horrific acts in the slightest, but to suggest a pathway for psychiatry to take in trying to understand and confirm his deeply warped and ugly reasoning.
When the investigation is complete and the legal procedure begins, I hope one major advocacy group will be viewed with the skepticism it amply merits. It’s known in media circles as The NRA — The National Rifle Association. It’s the main lobby group for gun rights and less regulation, if any at all. Over the years, it has been responsible for many bizarre and deeply irresponsible if not psychopathic admonitions concerning gun use. (It claims 4.5 million members but isn’t able to back it up. Like many others I share that doubt.)
The Charleston tragedy offers us a perfect example. When it happened, one of the NRA’s Board Members, made a comment which can only be described as beyond extremism: he said that from now on people going to church should be able to carry a gun to their pew. Can you believe it? (If the congregation won’t allow it, another NRA backer added, just find another church, one allowing you to bring a gun!) Does this not prove what is written above, namely that the NRA is gun-crazy, irresponsible and should never be taken seriously? It should have no influence whatever on the Charleston tragedy. Even the President, Barrack Obama, said a day or two ago, that he is “disgusted” that the grip of the NRA on Congress is “extremely strong.”
It is not possible to avoid addressing the peaceful response of the Charleston congregation to the nonsense mentioned above by Dylann Roof after his claim that he killed the parishioners because they raped and pillaged “our white culture.” It was answered, not by a casual observer, but by a history professor at the University of South Carolina, Lacy Ford, and carried, June 22, on the front page of The Globe and Mail. “There is,” the scholar said, “probably nothing more central to Christian theology than the idea of forgiveness. In an hour of just monstrous wrong, the families of the victims bore witness to the influence of that message in a way that has been enormously powerful. It has shaped the response to the shooting and in some ways helps people recover from an act of malice and hatred.” Right. That’s why, as our world seems not just wounded but deeply confused, the progressive black community, is, in this tragic experience, virtually showing the rest of us the way ahead.
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All my past blogs are archived on my website: your comments are welcome there: www.kennethbagnell.com.