Terror In The Sanctuary

Here is the way one survivor tells it. When Larry Gene Ashbrook walked into the church sanctuary with his guns--a 9-mm semiautomatic and a .380-cal. one--he paused. He had already started a shooting spree outside that left two dead. But once inside he was approached by one of the teens who had been singing along with a Christian rock 'n' roll praise band. What the youngster offered the black-jacketed killer was heaven, saying, "You need Jesus." Ashbrook, 47, answered, "It's all bulls___, what you believe!" It was only then that he opened up on the over 100 defenseless worshippers, killing five more, wounding seven, creating martyrs.

Last week's massacre at Wedgwood Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, may not have happened quite that way. That's a version being offered by someone who was there, but it's unconfirmed. Yet even if it is pious invention, it gives a glimpse of the way some evangelical Christians, children and adults alike, are thinking these days about the string of killings around the U.S. in which they have been victims. Last week's toll was added to the count of Christian teens killed at Columbine and three students killed at a 1997 prayer circle in West Paducah, Ky. Many evangelical leaders have begun to see "committed Christians" as the latest victims of hate crimes of the sort perpetrated upon blacks, women and gays. They have also begun to view those attacks in terms of the history of their faith--as acts of Satan, and as part of a persecution that stretches back to the earliest days of Christianity, during which countless believers suffered and died for professing their faith.

It's an explanation that allows the bereaved a certainty and solace in the face of a horrible riddle. And faced with the same endless series of senseless bloodlettings, even more secular precincts of America have been giving such claims a respectful hearing. After the shootings a moist-eyed George W. Bush said, "There seems to be a wave of evil passing through America." Today show's Katie Couric, interviewing Wedgwood's pastor, Al Meredith, listened as he offered the standard explanation for the crime: the killer was "deranged and deluded." Then, almost hesitantly, the pastor noted, "There's some possible theological, religious reasons you may not be interested in." Said Couric: "Well, go ahead." And Meredith explained that because of all the seminary students attending Wedgwood, "if I were Satan, and if I were real, and I wanted to deliver a death knell to the kingdom of God, I would target this church."

The man wore jeans and was smoking a cigarette. The first person he shot was Jeff Laster, a seminarian working as a custodian who asked him to put it out. Next was Sydney Browning, the children's choir director, resting on a sofa in the foyer, followed by a young man who had been selling Christian CDs. In the sanctuary, the shooter found a roomful of adolescents, happily celebrating that morning's observance of See You at the Pole, an annual national event in which Christian teens gather around their school flagpoles before classes to pray. A band called Forty Days was playing a song titled Alle, alleluia, when Ashbrook was allegedly invited to accept the Lord. He moved to the back of the sanctuary, banged a door to get his audience's attention, and started firing again.