Page 181 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

164 Sarah M. Pike

(Hoover 2006: 10). Other expressions of the new civil religion appeared
after the Oklahoma City bombings, in Colorado after the Columbine High
School shootings, and in New Orleans after the devastation of Hurricane
Katrina. These events provided opportunities for personalized expressions
of national solidarity in spontaneous altars and shrines. In so doing, they
called into question the adequacy of traditional religious sites to meet the
needs of grieving Americans.
The Columbine shootings in 1999 were an occasion for public
memorializing that has involved ongoing controversy. Conflicts over how
to remember the teenagers who died began almost immediately after the
tragedy when Greg Zanis, a Christian carpenter from Illinois, erected fifteen
crosses on a hill in a public park near the school. Each cross was marked
with the name of the person who died and was intended by Zanis as a way
to extend love to all the grieving families, including the families of the two
shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. What art historian Erika Doss
has called the “material culture of grief” was immediately under way as the
crosses became pilgrimage sites where people left stuffed animals and flowers
and wrote messages on the crosses themselves, as Zanis had intended (he left
pens at each cross) (Doss 2006). The victims’ crosses were covered with
messages of love and loss, while writings on Harris’ and Klebold’s crosses
ranged from sympathetic messages to “murderers, burn in hell,” written by
Brian Rohrbough, the father of one of the victims (Zoba 2000: 47). Ten
days after the shootings, Rohrbough and the family of another murdered
student tore down Eric’s and Dylan’s crosses. Rohrbough was quick to justify
their actions: “We don’t build a monument to Adolf Hitler and put it in a
Holocaust museum—and it’s not going to happen here” (Zoba 2000: 49).
When they extended the space of mourning beyond churches and funeral
services into the landscape, the memorial crosses became a focus for public
debate over the meaning of Columbine.
Because the Columbine killers were excluded from public mourning and
memorializing, their friends and sympathizers created online shrines and
memorials. High school students also turned to these online memorials to talk
about the relationship between popular media and youth violence. “Michael,”
who created a Columbine memorial site, explained his motivations: “I’m not
a Nazi, neither am I Hitler’s fan. Indeed I’m a Nine Inch Nails fan, but I
don’t think it has something to do with the Colorado shootings.” Michael’s
Web site included icons of burning fires and photos of Eric and Dylan. Text
under the photos read, “They tore down your crosses—great! You don’t need
them” (Michael 2000). Many messages archived on Michael’s site called
the media to task. “Foxtrot” asked, “Why does the media try to hide the
reality of this tragedy? One word ‘entertainment.’ Open your eyes world, it’s
going on in every school around the world and don’t bother with the “facts”