Emanuel AME Church, Charleston, SC — site of the murder of nine people.
Credit: Darryl Brooks, courtesy Shutterstock
God wept this past week.
Dylann Roof, age 21, entered Charleston’s historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and he went to Bible study. We do not know what precise sacred text the congregation was studying when Dylann opened fire on them. Nine people died. It was the largest mass killing in America since 2013. It was an act of terrorism.
Here comes the “duh” statement: this was an attack on black people, by someone with a white supremacist ideology. Roof wore the insignia of apartheid South Africa and the former Rhodesia, Remember what he said before he opened fire: “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” Read his manifesto, in which his hatred (predictably) spills over onto Jews and other groups. I have known people like this, and they are scary.
Ironically, this happened just as Abraham Foxman prepares to retire next month as the head of the Anti-Defamation League. It only proves the organization’s ongoing relevance and necessity.
Some say that this was an attack on religion itself.
Senator Rick Santorum has said that the attack on the church was the result of anti-religious sentiment in this country – in particular, that it was an attack on Christianity. As he said on New York’s AM 970: “It’s obviously a crime of hate. We don’t know the rationale, but what other rationale could there be? You’re sort of lost that somebody could walk into a Bible study in a church and indiscriminately kill people…We’re now seeing assaults on our religious liberty we’ve never seen before.”
An attack on religious liberty? Many on the right believe that Christians are now an aggrieved minority, whose religious rights are under attack. They seem to want to back burner the racial element in this attack.
On the other hand, others see it as only an assault on blacks. They are in denial about the specifically religious element in this attack, as if it were only an interesting afterthought.
In fact, both sides are partially right. This was an attack on race, and it was an attack on religion.
The attack in Charleston was an assault on the most important African-American institution — the church. Studies show that 53 percent of African-Americans attend religious services at least once a week, compared with 39 percent of Americans overall. (23 percent of American Jews attend services at least monthly; we might covet the religiosity of our black neighbors).
(That intense religiosity has enabled some relatives of the victims to forgive Dylann, which to this Jewish mind seems incomprehensible. Dylann has not asked for forgiveness; quite the opposite.)
So, yes, the Charleston attack was an assault on religion. It was an assault on God’s house. The very name of that church, which is also the name of countless synagogues, is Emanuel – “God is with us.” God was with them. They invited God in, because they were studying God’s words, trying to discern the meaning of God’s revelation. No doubt they found the very presence of God in the midst of their sacred community, and in their history.
So, yes, Dylann aimed at black people.
Yes, Dylann took aim at a church. We pause to remember the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963, which claimed the lives of four black girls. And the spate of church burnings in the Civil Rights era South. And the church burnings several years ago. And the synagogues in the South bombed during the Civil Rights era.
Yes, Dylann aimed at religion.
And Dylann was also taking aim at God.
White supremacists have numerous ties with neo-Nazis. And what would they have learned from their role models?
Consider the title of Lucy Dawidowicz’s classic history of the Holocaust is The War Against the Jews.
Actually, it wasn’t “just” a war against the Jews. It wasn’t even “just” a war against Judaism.
The Nazis were waging a war against the biblical God, because they hated the idea of a God-given morality. The Nazis were anti-Christian. They preferred the ancient Teutonic gods of blood and fire. That is why the Nazis admired the composer Richard Wagner. The ultimate Nazi fantasy: a Europe consumed in gotterdamerung, a Wagnerian war of the gods.
It wasn’t enough for the Nazis to kill Jews. They wanted to kill Judaism as well. They took particular glee in destroying synagogues, arks, and Torah scrolls. On Kristallnacht, hoodlums pulled the ark off the wall of a synagogue in Essen, Germany. The ark bore the traditional words: “Know before Whom you stand.” They threw the ark into the street. And then, they scratched those words off the ark.
They knew what they were doing. They were saying: “There is no one before Whom the world stands.” The Name of God, also, is a victim, because God was also an intended victim.
So, yes – Dylann Roof intended to kill black people. But he did not wander the streets of a black neighborhood. He did it in a historic black church, in God’s house, while people were studying God’s word. He deliberately chose to sit next to the pastor, so as to make sure that he would kill him.
So, yes – God is weeping.
And wondering: what are we going to do to fix this?
