On June 17, 2015 Dylann Roof walked into the Mother Emmanuel African Methodist-Episcopal church and sat down to join a Bible study group.
Dylann was welcomed by all, and invited to sit with them. As everyone’s eyes were closed for the final prayer, Dylann took out his gun and killed nine people, shooting them at point-blank range.
One of the victims was the leader of the group, 59-year-old Myra Thompson, a retired public-school teacher and guidance counselor, who
just hours before had just been licensed to preach in that very church.
Mrs. Thompson’s husband, the Rev. Anthony Thompson has recently published a book entitled Called to Forgive: The Charleston Church Shooting, a Victim’s Husband, and the Path to Healing and Peace (Bethany House, 2019).
I heard about Rev. Thompson’s book while listening to a local Christian radio station. Rev. Thompson was telling his amazing story of what it had taken for him to forgive Dylann Roof for the crime of killing his wife.
More than that, Rev. Thompson mentioned his continuing attempts to befriend Roof and visit with him in prison, where he is serving a life sentence with no chance of parole.
I heard a powerful story about the healing power of Christ’s forgiveness and the personal resolve of a deeply compassionate, unusually obedient disciple of Jesus Christ.
It was a story that might normally bring tears to my eyes, were it not for the one thing that the interviewer and host of the program failed to mention – the very thing that I had suspected would go unremarked.
The interviewer and hosts failed to mention that Dylann Root is an avowed
white supremacist and neo-Nazi. His most chilling statement from prison was a declaration that he had no regrets. He was not the least bit sorry, remorseful or apologetic for what he had done.
Neither did the radio hosts mention that Root had chosen the Mother Emmanuel African Methodist-Episcopal church because it is a black congregation.
Root deliberately chose a venue for his act of terrorism where he knew every bullet fired was guaranteed to penetrate the body of a black person.
Slaughtering African-American men, women and children was Root’s one and only goal.
None of the white people hosting the interview with Rev. Thompson bothered to connect the Charleston church shooting with the shocking rise
in Right-Wing, conservative terrorism in this country.
No one bothered to point out that Root’s online manifesto, entitled The Last Rhodesian, was a white-supremacist screed calling for a race war against all people of color in America. Root confessed that he hoped his massacre would trigger that war.
No one mentioned that the Rev. Thompson’s Christ-like act of forgiveness is (or, at least, I assume it is) a very old, well-practiced act of Christian discipleship exercised within the African American church. A community that continues to confront the never-ending story of racism, discrimination, white violence, lynching and Jim Crow in this country.
I realize that my reader may object.
“Perhaps the radio producers wanted to keep politics out of it,’ you say. “They didn’t want Rev. Thompson’s story about the power of forgiveness to be overshadowed by a political message.”
My response, however, is baloney!
American Christian radio is one of THE most politically driven media outlets available today.
The problem is: Christian radio is driven by conservative, right-wing, Republican politics. A brand a politics that refuses to admit its heinous contribution to the rise of white supremacy in this country.
So, the producers at the right-wing, Christian radio station offer their obeisance to the toadies of the Religious Right political movement and reframe the heartbreaking story of an explicitly racist, white-on-black mass-murder as a heart-warming, tear-jerker testimony to “the power of forgiveness.”
This sin of omission tells us everything we need to know about the Right, including the so-called Christian Right.
Framing is everything.
By trying to avoid politics, a story becomes disgustingly political in the worst way possible.
For this particular framing of the Mother Emmanuel African Methodist-Episcopal church shooting is blatantly racist.
It’s silence shouts all too loudly, “We will not face the truth about who and what we are as white, American evangelicals.”
“We will support Donald Trump’s racist border policies. But we will not tell the truth about our implicit racism towards our black brothers and sisters in Christ, about whom we know so little. And for whom we care even less – unless, of course, we can turn your experience of pain and suffering in white America into a warm and fuzzy feel-good story for our largely white, evangelical, pro-Trump listening audience.”
I too am a white, American evangelical, and I continually feel ashamed of my community.
