A Martyr Is Born
J. Bottum is Books & Arts editor of The Weekly Standard.

On the endless cable-tv talk shows, the call-in radio programs, and the newspaper editorial pages across America, the topic since April 20 has been Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the high-school murderers in Littleton, Colorado. The violence experts, the child psychologists, and the grief specialists have all had their turn. In an editorial from the White House, Hillary Clinton called for more government spending on therapists and counselors for our public schools: "In a world that can feel overwhelming and out of control, children need help managing their anger, resolving their conflicts, and solving their problems with words instead of weapons."

Meanwhile, from the nation's pulpits and youth prayer groups, at Bible study classes and after-church coffee klatches, across the e-mail distribution lists and the fax trees, another story has been bubbling up: the story of Cassie Bernall, the Christian martyr of Colorado, who was shot for her faith in God.

Eight of the murdered students at Columbine high school were serious Christians, four Catholics and four evangelicals. The killers went after 17-year-old Rachel Scott and 18-year-old Valeen Schnurr apparently for no other reason than that they had Bibles. The central image of Littleton, however, is that of Cassie-the 17-year-old with a gun to her head being asked if she believed in God. Strangers flew in from New York and California to be at her funeral. Young Life, the evangelical ministry that had been working in her Columbine High School, held an impromptu prayer service for her in Denver last week, and 1,500 students showed up. At an evangelical rally in Pontiac, Michigan, 73,000 teenagers wept along with sermon after sermon on her death.

You have to think about it for a moment to realize just how extraordinary this is. After the murder of 12 high-school students and one teacher-at the hands of two of their classmates, who giggled as they fired shotguns and set off pipe bombs-the topic being discussed by millions of Americans is not "How do we stop the violence in our schools?" or "How do we deal with our grief?" or "How can we make sense of this senseless tragedy?"

The topic is rather that on April 20, 1999, an American girl at a suburban high school was granted what is, in Christian theology, the highest and most beautiful gift that God bestows. "Now she's in heaven. She's so much better off than any of us," one of her Bible-study friends told a reporter. "I just thank God she died that way," said another. "She's in the martyrs' hall of fame," her pastor explained at her funeral. "I am just so happy that Cassie is smiling down on us right now," added one of the parishioners who knew her. "She's in a good place."

The actual murderers, well, yes, they were monsters who'd wandered the World Wide Web plucking flowers of evil: a little racism, a little Nazism, a little Satanism, a little instruction in making pipe-bombs. But who could be interested in Harris and Klebold, American Christians seem to be asking, when we have before us proof of God's goodness with the example of Cassie Bernall? In Denver after the tragedy, a Jesuit priest quoted the 20th-century French mystic Simone Weil: "Imaginary evil is romantic and varied, full of charm; imaginary good is tiresome and flat. Real evil, however, is dreary, monotonous, barren. Real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating."

As a religious phenomenon, the elevation of Cassie Bernall is a fascinating sign of the times, an almost shocking throwback to a spirituality that many social analysts assumed had disappeared from all but a few pockets of "post-Christian" America. In a poem her brother discovered on her desk the morning after her death, Cassie wrote of her willingness to "to suffer and to die" with Christ. On a videotape she made for her youth group, she vowed that she wanted most of all to "be a good example to nonbelievers and also to Christians." It's like something from the famous account of the martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicity in a.d. 203, or the tales of the thousands of early Christians who went joyously to their deaths in the Roman coliseums. Richard Mouw, president of the evangelical Fuller Seminary, compares Cassie to St. Eulalia. Robin Darling Young, a patristics scholar at Catholic University, mentions Catherine of Alexandria, Crispina, and Rhipsime. The first thought of a Catholic activist in Washington is to quote John Donne, "Affliction is a treasure."

As a social phenomenon, however, the elevation of Cassie Bernall is even more revealing. For with this anti-tragic picture from Littleton, this meaningful calamity, we are so far beyond the culture wars that there may be no turning back. The reaction to it seems straight out of Jonathan Edwards's account of the Great Awakening in New England, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, which begins: "At the latter end of the year 1733, there appeared a very unusual flexibleness, and yielding to advice, in our young people."

Across America, what's being preached to parents and children alike is a change of heart. Back when she was in eighth and ninth grade, Cassie had begun to dabble in witchcraft, alcohol, and drugs, her parents told ABC's religion reporter Peggy Wehmeyer. After discovering letters describing violent acts she and her friends imagined doing to their parents, Brad and Misty Bernall enrolled their daughter in a new school, sent her on an intense weekend Christian retreat, and prohibited her from leaving the house except to go to church. "It's hard," her father explained, "because you know you're taking a chance of driving your child further away from you." But one day Cassie came home, changed into a believer: "It's like she was in a dark room and somebody turned the light on, and she saw the beauty that was surrounding her."

A signal that the old categories of the culture wars no longer fit may be the fact that Cassie Bernall's story has been fairly well covered by a media often denounced by religious conservatives for anti-Christian bias. Barbara Bradley related on National Public Radio the details of Cassie's death in the first days after the murders. Peggy Wehmeyer reported the story repeatedly on ABC's evening news. The Washington Post carried Cassie's story on consecutive days, as did the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and many other papers.

There have been innumerable efforts to force the Littleton deaths into the well-worn grooves of social conflict-including some flat-footed attempts by Christian leaders. Franklin Graham, son of the evangelist Billy Graham, used the occasion to denounce the public schools. Boston's Roman Catholic cardinal, Bernard Law, criticized an American society in which guns are "too accessible and too acceptable." "What is causing all this turmoil?" asked Susan Swanson of Chicago's Luther Memorial Church when reached for comment by the Associated Press. "The media? TV? The Internet? Music? Or far-right-wing hate groups?"

Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals worries that "there are some Christian leaders who will use this as proof that there is a pattern of hatred for Christianity in America." An editor at a major Christian magazine complains about the "shameless manipulation of people's grief for evangelizing purposes." An important Protestant theologian warns that Cassie's story should be downplayed to keep it from providing ammunition to those Christian preachers who "pander" to Americans' "desire to pose as victims, when the real martyrs today are in China and Sudan."

When Vice President Gore made a mild speech calling upon God for help in mourning the Littleton students, he was attacked on culture-wars grounds from both the left and the right. In a column in the Washington Post, Richard Cohen mocked Gore for failing to make a strong call for gun control, and Focus on the Family's Tom Minnery demanded, "Why is it that only after it is too late . . . is secular government willing to acknowledge God?"

For a huge swath of Americans, this sort of rhetoric has come to seem quite dated in just the 12 days since Klebold and Harris put a gun to Cassie Bernall's head. They're hearing sermons about the surprising works of God in Colorado. They're reading Matthew 10:32: "Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father." They're listening to a Catholic radio station in Michigan proclaim that Cassie has received "the white crown." They're not thinking about gun control, or grief counseling, or public schools, or the separation of church and state. They're thinking about a change of heart. They're full of astonishment at the birth of an American martyr.