Dylan Roof is the 21 year-old that murdered nine people in a Charleston, South Carolina, church last week. Roof is white and all his victims were black.
So what is your answer? Was he nuts or not? I have heard many people refer to Roof as that “nut job” in the same way one would refer to Adolf Hilter as a “madman.” I understand what people mean by these expressions, but Roof was not insane. In fact, I read his manifesto and it is clear that he was a person who well-articulated a belief system that led to his attitudes and his tragic actions.
Roof believes that white people are inherently superior to every other race and that they (whites) are under siege by black people. He wrote: “…White people are being murdered daily in the streets” by blacks without provocation. He also wrote of what set him on this path: “The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case. I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I decided to look him up. I read the Wikipedia article and right away I was unable to understand what the big deal was. It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right. But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words ‘black on White crime’ into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?”
He goes on later to write: “I have no choice. I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is the most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”
Does this sound like the random thoughts of a person gone mad? Of course not. This is a man motivated by revenge. He believes himself an avenger of all the innocent whites who have been murdered by blacks.
No, Dylan Roof’s actions were not the actions of an insane man. Dylan Roof’s actions were evil. There is a difference. There are people who are mentally ill. The man who goes outside naked and howls at the moon is crazy, for example. This person may do something terrible, but if he does not have all his faculties, the law and society take that into consideration. However, evil is a spiritual word that affirms what the Holy Bible says about the world we live in and the nature of man. The Bible teaches God is a being who is good and Satan is a being who is evil and that the human heart, without Jesus Christ, is bent towards Satan to one degree or another.
In Matthew chapter six Jesus taught his disciples to pray: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day, our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
Dylan Roof chose to be an agent for evil. May he seek God’s mercy on his soul and may God comfort the families of those he murdered.
