Ten years ago today, I was in San Francisco leading a retreat for Episcopal clergy from the western United States. During the afternoon break, someone handed me a slip of paper saying that there had been a shooting at a Colorado high school named "Columbine." It fell to me to announce the news to the group--a group that included a couple of priests from the Littleton area.
During the announcement, several people started to cry softly, others prayed, and a number gathered around the ministers from Colorado. But the response that was most memorable to me was the simplest--one woman asked, "Why? Why did they do it?" I replied, "I don't know."
On the tenth anniversary of the largest school shooting in American history, many people think they know "why" Columbine students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into their high school and started shooting--that they were the abused victims of a stratified teen-age culture who took vengeance on their outcast status by targeting popular athletes and evangelical Christian kids. This, combined with lax gun laws, formed the basis of "why." There just had to have been a reason behind this violence, and, correspondingly, a way to avoid it.
But journalist David Cullen in his new book, Columbine, claims that there was--essentially--no "why." According to Cullen's meticulous research, Harris and Klebold did not target individuals. There was no "trench coat mafia" at war with the "jocks." Quite simply, Harris was a psychopath who wanted to kill 500 people and who manipulated the clinically depressed Klebold into helping him.
A psychopath--an egomaniac with contempt for other human beings--killed a bunch of his classmates and wanted to kill more. He wanted to commit an act of domestic terrorism. That's it. That's the why.
From a secular perspective, this isn't very satisfying. There's not much to fix. No student cliques to break up, no law that could have contained the situation. It was inward, twisted, and dark. If the Harrises had known their son was a psychopath, they might have locked him up or put him on drugs--but there's no guarantee that medical invention has great success with psychopaths.
But, from theological perspective, Columbine demonstrates the power of a form of human evil--something the Christian tradition has called original sin. "Original sin" is the utter abandonment of human beings to their worst nature, to the point where they can no longer fathom either the love of God or neighbor. It is actually a pretty good spiritual description of Harris's pathology.
Religious progressives have often been slow to admit the extent of human sin, instead preferring to emphasize human goodness. But, Columbine should remind progressives that an abandonment of a theology of sin leaves too many questions unanswered. Those of us who uphold created goodness must not shy away from looking toward the dark corners of humanity, the evil place that the writer of Genesis described in the story of Cain killing his brother, Abel. Sin is old. Really old. As ancient as the human race. And the idea of "original sin" is one of the best theological explanations for the question, "Why?"
When I was in graduate school, I had a friend who was a Southern Baptist-turned Wiccan/feminist/lesbian/progressive (she used to quip that she was Pat Robertson's nightmare!). Once, I asked her, "Is there anything you still believe from your Christian days?" Without pause, she responded, "Sin. I believe in sin. There's lots of it and it is all completely original."
On this tenth anniversary, I think her words are an apt memorial to the events at Columbine--and that religious progressives might reflect on them: Sin. There's lots of it. And much of it is sadly, completely, lethally, original. Sometimes that's the only "why."
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