But if you were a Christian teenager in 1999, the word “Columbine” doesn’t just make you remember feeling suddenly unsafe in places you thought were okay. It’s synonymous with both a whole cottage industry that sprang up around the shooting, a raft of commercial products that retold its stories — sometimes with dubious connection to the facts — and an ethos of martyrdom that seems in retrospect to have summed up what it was to be a youth-group kid at the turn of the last century. And the results have lasted far into the future. [...]
Understandably, the accounts of what exactly happened when both Scott and Bernall were shot are a bit muddled. But in the months that followed, the facts didn’t really matter. The Columbine massacre fit a previously constructed narrative for the country in 1999, with widespread ongoing fear about violent youth culture, video games, and music and how they were affecting kids and teens. It’s human nature to make the facts fit a narrative, rather than the other way around. Columbine was no different.
Reporter Dave Cullen, who was one of the first people on the scene, argued in his 2010 book Columbine — now considered the definitive book on the subject — that the event formed the template for the next nearly two decades of “spectacle murders,” particularly in the way mythologies and stories that form in the wake of such a tragedy are repeated over and over until they effectively become true. [...]
Those who guided Christian culture in the ’90s were on the hunt for teen-specific ways to inspire young people to stay true to their faith. Conferences, teen-focused books and publications, music that sounded like mainstream music but had Christian lyrics, and T-shirts and other cheap commercial products splashed with sayings like “WWJD” (What Would Jesus Do) and “FROG” (Fully Rely on God) abounded. Though youth groups had been around for decades, they exploded as centers of not just spiritual growth but also social life for teenagers across the country.
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