On the evening of June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof, twenty-one at the time, casually joined a group of African Americans gathered peacefully at the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, for a Bible study. For over an hour, he participated in the discussion, and then, without warning, he stood up, brandished a handgun and, uttering racist epithets, commenced firing. At one point during the attack, he shouted, “Y’all want something to pray about; I’ll give you something to pray about.” At the end of the rampage, nine people were dead, including the forty-two-year-old pastor of the church, an eighty-seven-year-old parishioner, and a twenty-six-year-old man who had tried to dissuade the shooter from his awful mission.
Later, under police interrogation, he blandly admitted to the killings and explained that it was his purpose to foment a race war in the United States. In a journal entry made some weeks after the murders, Roof wrote, “I would like to make it crystal clear, I do not regret what I did. I am not sorry. I have not shed a tear for the innocent people I killed.” During the sentencing phase of his trial, he insisted that he was not mentally ill and was, at the time of the shootings, fully aware of what he was doing and why. Even if we were to uncover personal struggles and psychological debilities that might mitigate his guilt, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Dylann Roof is, to use a word that has sadly fallen into desuetude, wicked.
In the wake of these terrible events, the pardon offered to Roof on the part of families of some of the victims was, depending on one’s perspective, edifying, puzzling, or unnerving. The daughter of a murdered churchgoer said to the killer, “I will never be able to hold her again, but I forgive you.” The relative of another victim insisted, “We have no room for hating, so we have to forgive.” She continued, bluntly, “I pray God on your soul.”
In many ways, the Charleston killings and their aftermath called to mind the massacre of Amish children that took place in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 2006. In that incident, a man named Charles Roberts, not Amish but known to the community as a faithful milk truck driver, entered a one-room schoolhouse and opened fire on ten children, murdering five of them and then taking his own life. As armies of reporters descended on the small village in order to make sense of the event, members of the Amish families immediately expressed their forgiveness of Roberts by visiting his family to offer pardon and condolence. As in the Charleston case, the relation between crime and reaction seemed, to many, incongruous. Did these acts of reconciliation not signal a refusal to take seriously the crimes that had been committed?