‘Christian America, this is YOUR Columbine’

David Aikman

Isn’t this a hate crime?

There is something very perplexing in the mainstream media response to the shootings at a Youth With A Mission center in Arvada, Colorado, and New Life Church in Colorado Springs, seventy miles away. The shooter, Matthew Murray, 24, initially murdered two staffers at the Youth With A Mission training base in Arvada, Tiffany Johnson, 26, and Philip Crouse, 24, shortly after midnight on December 10. Several hours later, he drove seventy miles to the large Colorado Springs church and murdered two more victims, young sisters, Stephanie Works, 18, and Rachael Works, 16, before being shot at by a female security guard, falling to the ground, and then shooting himself.

Between the two shootings, Murray took time to go on websites he had frequented in the past and posted a venomous rant against Christians and Christianity. “Christian America, this is YOUR Columbine,” he posted on the Usenet forum alt.suicide.holiday, an Internet message board originally set up to discuss suicide and possible ways of accomplishing it. Columbine, of course, is the school in Colorado where two teenagers shot to death twelve students and a teacher in a widely reported shooting incident in April 1999.

In Murray’s rant, later published in part by the Denver Post, he wrote, “You Christians brought this on yourselves . . . . I’m coming for EVERYONE soon and I WILL be armed to the @#%$ teeth and I WILL shoot to kill. . . . God, I can’t wait till I can kill you people. Feel no remorse, no sense of shame, I don’t care if I live or die in the shoot-out. All I want to do is kill and injure as many of you . . . as I can especially Christians who are to blame for most of the problems in the world.” This is the printable part.

In short, if what took place in Colorado on December 10 wasn’t a “hate crime,” I simply don’t know what a “hate crime” is. Perhaps, in the view of some reporters, a crime isn’t a “hate crime” unless its victims are homosexuals or members of ethnic minorities. In any event, there were no long, anguished panel discussions on C-SPAN or by talking heads on CNN or Fox on what dastardly motives had propelled Murray to his incredibly cold-blooded acts of violence. At the Arvada shootings, the body of one of the victims, according to someone close to the scene, had about seventeen bullets in it from a nine-millimeter semi-automatic handgun. According to other witnesses of the Arvada shootings, Murray was laughing as he shot repeatedly into the YWAM staffers. In the car in which Murray drove to New Life Church, he carried a thousand rounds of ammunition, other handguns, and at least one rifle.

Police in Denver confirmed that, since November 2006, Murray had bought, quite legally, the following firearms: a Springfield Armory semi-automatic 9 mm pistol, a Beretta .40 semi-automatic pistol, a Bushmaster XM-5 assault rifle, and an AK-47, the famous Russian Kalashnikov used by guerrilla armies all over the world.  Obviously, Murray was not preparing for a vacation of duck-hunting in Delaware. Deranged by an unfathomable hatred, he just wanted to kill a large number of people.

At the Arvada YWAM base, someone who leaned out of the window after hearing the first shots saw Murray run away, then try to get into the dormitory through another door, fortunately locked. His hammering on the door was only interrupted by two cars that happened to drive up to the dormitory about that time. After crouching for a while by the small lake on the property, Murray made good his escape and began to prepare for his second shooting spree.

It would be unfair to speculate what role Murray’s upbringing played in his demented worldview without his parents’ being asked for their view of things. His mother and father, devout Christians, had home-schooled him. On various Internet chat sites in the past five years he posted comments under the names “chrstnnghtmr,” “DyingChild_65” and “nightmrchld26” and complained about an intrusively legalistic upbringing in which he was not allowed to listen to certain music or watch certain movies and was even, he claimed, “patted down” after visits to CD or video stores in case he had purchased offending material. There is no way of confirming these allegations.

What seems clear is that by the time he enrolled in a YWAM Discipleship Training School in Arvada in 2002, he was in a state of deeply serious rebellion against the entire Christian environment. A roommate, currently a missionary in Brazil, told the Denver Post that he had awakened one morning to hear Murray sitting on his bed talking to “voices.” When the roommate expressed dismay at this seemingly irrational behavior, Murray reassured him, “Don’t worry, Richard. You’re a nice guy and you have nothing to worry about. The voices like you.”

But when the traditional “love-feast,” took place—a sort of farewell banquet for DTS students before they depart for two months on overseas Christian outreach—Murray offended and frightened many fellow students by singing a Marilyn Manson song. (Marilyn Manson is a rock singer who specializes in anti-Christian and blasphemous lyrics). At Arvada, YWAM base leaders contacted Murray’s parents and advised against sending him on the outreach. They agreed.

Murray’s postings, collected with perhaps morbid curiosity on the site www.thoughttheater.com, reveal a young man who was not only depressed, but suicidal, and had, since his conscious desire to reject Christianity (probably some time in 2004) plunged into a phantasmagoria of dark philosophy: theosophy, Marylin Manson’s lyrics, occultism (especially the writings of the English occultist Aleister Crowley), and twentieth-century spiritist Madam Blavatsky.

Even more disturbing is the fact that, in his last postings before the New Life Church shootings, he quoted almost verbatim from the words of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the two murderers in the 1999 Columbine school massacre. Significantly, Cho Seung-hui, the murderer by shooting of thirty-two students and faculty at Virginia Tech, had spoken in his own video about “we martyrs, like Eric and Dylan.”

There is, in the United States today, a dark underworld of hatred, blasphemy, and murderous fantasies that can be easily accessed through the Internet. Often, it seems, the very prohibition against viewing these sites imposed by well-intentioned adults seems to heighten their attraction to disturbed young people, as forbidden fruit always seems more delicious to its beholder. The very serious challenge for Christian parents and leaders, therefore, is how to discern emotional disequilibrium before it transmogrifies into plain old murder, and how to cure it without setting off the very sparks that can set it ablaze.

The Colorado shootings constitute the most disturbing incident in American Christendom in recent decades. As for American reporters, some of them need to be questioned more closely on what “hate crimes” are.  

Dr. Aikman, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, was for many years senior correspondent for Time.

2 Responses (comments are closed) • Columns, David Aikman, Good and Evil, Society, Fri 21 Dec 2007