Dylann Storm Roof, whose birthday is April 3, had just barely turned twenty-one. Twenty-one used to be the age of legal majority in America—the age at which society allowed one to vote, enter into a contract with someone else, get married without parental consent, drive a car, go to war. “I'm free, white, and 21” was a declaration of independence for generations of good-ole boys in the South. Young Mr. Roof celebrated his 21st birthday by using gift money to buy a .45-caliber revolver and then going to Charleston to start a war of his own in the city where the Civil War began 133 years before he was born.
Roof was a baptized and, presumably, confirmed member of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Columbia, South Carolina. We do not know much more about his personal commitment to the Christian faith. We do know that one of the racist websites he frequented touted white supremacy as a “Christian value.” But what did his baptism mean to him? Did he remember his confirmation? Luther's own baptismal liturgy includes exorcism, a required renunciation of the devil and all his pomp. It is not possible to tell the story of what happened at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston—popularly known as Mother Emmanuel—without reference to the Evil One. Not that blaming it on the devil gets anyone else off the hook, but whatever “rational” explanations for the massacre—a shooter on drugs, Internet violence, gun control policies—something deep and demonic, something sinister, was at work.
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