She Said Yes

(Trigger Warning: References mass shooting)

We should’ve grieved,
Mourned the senseless, horrific tragedy.
Parents and pastors,
They should have tried to comfort us but
Instead they asked,
“Would you be willing to die too?”
She said yes.
She didn’t dare deny her deeply held faith
Or her Lord.
“Would you be willing to die too?”
Youth pastor asked,
Fox’s Book of Martyrs—four-hundred bloody
Pages of beheadings,
Hangings, and torture—sitting neatly, pristinely
On his bookcase.
Her name could’ve been added to the awful list.
The Columbine Martyr,
Just a young American teenage girl, became
A symbol and
A role model for Evangelical youth being
Taught to die.
“Would I be willing to say yes to death too?”
I frequently worried.
If one day a gun was head at my head, I hoped
That I’d die
Rather than live with the shame of having
Denied my Lord.
We were child soldiers in the Lord’s army
Learning to die.
We were suicide bombers for the Almighty
With one objective,
And that didn’t involve making it out alive.
We were soldiers,
Prisoners of war with classified information.
Better to die
Than to live with the never-dying shame and
Sense of treason.
“Would you be willing to die too?”
She said yes.

Author’s notes: I feel like this piece requires a little more explanation for those of you who either aren’t familiar with American Evangelical youth culture (or haven’t been familiar with it for a while).

So after the Columbine shooting  there were several very popular books written specifically for Christian teens: She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom Of Cassie Bernall and Rachel’s Tears: The Spiritual Journey of Columbine Martyr Rachel Scott.

An extremely popular Christian recording artist, Micheal W. Smith, also wrote a song called “This is Your Time,” which played nearly constantly on the Christian radio station. The song begins:

It was a test we could all hope to pass
But none of us would want to take
Faced with the choice to deny God and live
For her there was one choice to make.

He continues on with a question the listeners:

What if tomorrow
What if today
Faced with the question
Oh, what would you say?

This is the same question that youth pastors began asking the teens under their charge: “Would you say yes? Would you die?” Basically, the message was that if you didn’t love Jesus enough to say “Yes, I am a Christian” if that meant that the gun being pointed at your head would be fired, then you weren’t taking your faith seriously enough and you had better get your shit together. A scare tactic if there ever was one. (To my horror this song still gets stuck in my head sometimes.)

The shooting happened in 1999 but even when I graduated from high school in 2005, it was still a question being asked of teens. And my sister, who is eight years younger than me, experienced the same thing as a teen and at a completely different church than I spent my teen years at. I don’t doubt that Columbine is still being used to manipulate and haunt many Evangelical teens to this day.