a humanist take from Liberal Street Fighter

his was the story told by Ashley Smith back in March about her time as a hostage of Brian Nichols. To refresh your memory:

The woman held hostage in her apartment by the suspect in Atlanta’s courthouse slayings said the two spent hours talking about the killings, their families and God and that Brian Nichols “just wanted some normalness to his life.”

Ashley Smith said the ordeal began around 2 a.m. Saturday morning with Nichols sticking a gun in her side and tying her up. But Nichols, who is accused of killing three people at the courthouse Friday and a federal agent later, eventually let Smith go to see her young daughter, she said.

More to the tale, it turns out.
As she described her ordeal on numerous television shows at the time:

Smith said Nichols, 33, took her hostage in the parking lot of her apartment when she returned from a store.

“He said, ‘I’m not going to hurt you if you just do what I say,”‘ she said. “I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt anybody else.”

She said Nichols tied her up with masking tape, a curtain and extension cord and told her to sit in the bathroom while he took a shower.

But as the night wore on, she tried to win Nichols’ trust by telling him about her life.

“I knew if I made him feel comfortable then I could get things the way I wanted them and not the way he wanted them,” Smith told The Early Show.

Smith told Nichols about her daughter and bonded with him after he said that he had a son who had been born the night before.

“My husband died four years ago, and I told him if he hurt me my little girl wouldn’t have a mommy or daddy,” Smith said.

Smith’s attorney, Josh Archer, said her husband died in her arms after being stabbed.

He eventually untied her, and some of the fear lessened as they talked. Nichols told Smith he felt like “he was already dead,” but Smith urged him to consider the fact that he was still alive a “miracle.”

“You’re here in my apartment for some reason,” she told him, saying he might be destined to be caught and to spread the word of God to fellow prisoners. She also read the bible to Nichols, reports CBS News Correspondent Jim Acosta.

“He told me I was his angel, sent from God, and that I was his sister and he was my brother in Christ,” said Smith.

Ms. Smith was hailed as a hero, given strenth by her faith and the lessons she’d learned from Rick Warren’s “Purpose Driven Life”. The story is actually featured on Purpose Driven Life dot com:

Two Prodigals

How Bad Choices Turn Good For Ashley Smith and Brian Nichols

March 15, 2005 – by John Fischer

“Does my life matter?” Rick Warren said recently at a celebration of the surprising success of The Purpose Driven Life. “I don’t know anybody who doesn’t want to know the meaning of life.” That statement certainly has new implications now. Even a killer on a rampage wants to know the meaning of life, enough to stop what he was doing and think about it, and eventually turn himself in.

All of this may very well be true, as far as it goes. The US media was full of stories this year pushing the idea that evangelical strains of Christianity held the solutions to all of life’s problems, stories that happen to coincide with the Bush Administration’s increasing moves to funnel government money to religious organizations to do work that used to be provided by shared societal action, through government agencies. We can see it at work now in the ravaged Gulf region.

However, Ms. Smith now reveals in her book, which she will be flogging with a new round of media appearances, that she may have been his angel for other reasons:

Ashley Smith, the woman held hostage for hours after the March 11 Fulton County Courthouse shootings, discloses in a new book that she gave alleged gunman Brian Nichols drugs the night he held her captive.

Smith, 27, was thrust into the spotlight after talking her way out of Nichols’ captivity and then calling police. In “Unlikely Angel: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Hostage Hero,” Smith shares details of her seven-hour ordeal as a hostage in her apartment near Atlanta.

Nichols asked her for marijuana, she writes, but she had only a small amount of crystal methamphetamine. She thought offering him the drug might curry favor, but she says she refused to take the drug with him.

“I was not going to die tonight and stand before God, having done a bunch of ice up my nose,” she writes.

So there is more going on here. This is not to say that religion did not play a part in these two people making the choices they needed to make to stay alive. However, if we look at the whole story, it’s plain that life is much more complicated than than the Bible camp fairy tales that we’re being fed on a daily basis by the evangelical right.

The sanitized marketed version is spelled out on Warren’s website:

There they sat, two lives dealing with bad choices. One was one her way back, the other was on his way down. The one who was tied up asked if she could go get something to read – something that had recently been a great help to her encouraging turnaround. For some reason, the one with the gun untied her and let her go get the book, and like a kid sharing something newly discovered, Ashley ran and got The Purpose Driven Life and started reading right where she had left off: Chapter 33, “How Real Servants Act.” What she read pierced the man’s heart. Over a breakfast of pancakes and eggs, they talked into the morning. […]

Across from the courthouse, at a memorial service the following day, Chaplain Warren L. Henry said, “On March 11, we arrived at the Fulton County courthouse to have our world totally rearranged. We witnessed a battle of good versus evil, right versus wrong, heaven versus hell.” And at an apartment the night before, that battle was fought in the lives of two ordinary people, both locked in a struggle, but a great victory was won by God. For as the conversation of that most unlikely of meetings came to a close, Ashley Smith went free to pick up her daughter who was waiting for her, and Brian Nichols, who knew she would call the police, hung a white handkerchief out the apartment window and waited alone for the inevitable.

I beg to differ. God didn’t make that ending happen, two human beings did. They may have used Warren’s book, and the Bible, to help them make their choices, but it could have easily been a Q’uran or some New Age tract. It could have been Sarte, for that matter. Two people made some choices, choices that led to life or to death. First she offered him drugs, then she offered him words, words that he could react to because they shared that common religious heritage.

I am pointing all of this out not to attack “Purpose Driven Life” … for all I know Rick Warren is sincere. Frankly, I’m so tired of evangelicals that I’m not going to go chase down whether he’s Jimmy Swaggart or Jimmy Carter. What I do object to is the marketing of this simple-minded, paint-by-numbers spirituality. Finding meaning in life is a constant struggle, a tumbling series of choices. It is dangerous for our government, and our media, to constantly be pushing one particular picture of how to make that journey. Evangelical Christianity may help many people to frame their lives. For others, like myself, it is a simple-minded, anti-human ideology that precludes choice. It is important for all of us to find a mask for God that fits OUR lives, not some preconceptions of a religious minority with far too much political influence.  

After all, a good high before going away forever was all that Mr. Nichols really needed. Who’s to say for sure?