Ironically, this true story is about a man named Christian, like an allegory from Pilgrim’s Progress or something. Christian was bullied as a kid, relentlessly bullied by the same kid for all of elementary and middle school. One day they met on the playground after school. Christian threw the first punch, knocked the kid down, jumped on top of him and pummeled him.
Instantly he went from being bullied to being a bully. That led him down a really dark path that changed the course of Christian’s life.
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ONE DAY, IN 1987 at age 14, as he stood in an alley smoking a joint, a guy drove up in a car. The guy walked up to Christian, snatched the joint from his lips, and looked the teen in the eyes, and said, “That’s what the communists and the Jews want you to do to keep you docile.”
This guy was Clark Martell, America’s first neo-Nazi skinhead leader. Christian joined the group because for the first time he felt welcomed, accepted and cared for.
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HE BELIEVED THE LIES that blamed every Jewish person in the world for white European genocide. He blamed people of color for the crime, the violence and the drugs in the city. He blamed immigrants for taking jobs from white Americans.
■ For eight years, Christian watched as the leaders of this organization targeted vulnerable young people who felt marginalized and then drew them in with promises of paradise.
■ For eight years, Christian saw friends die, others go to prison and untold pain inflicted on victims and their families’ lives.
■ For eight years, Christian committed acts of violence against people solely for the color of their skin, who they loved, or the god that they prayed to.
■ For eight years Christian stockpiled weapons for what he thought was an upcoming race war.
■ For eight years he wrote and performed racist music that found its way, 25 years later, to the playlist of a young white nationalist who walked into Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., and massacred nine innocent people.
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BY THE TIME CHRISTIAN became an adult, he was a skinhead leader. But then something happened. He met a girl who was not in the movement. They got married and had a child.
Suddenly, he became very confused with who he’d been for the last eight years. So he stepped back as a leader and opened a record store that sold white-power music.
People would drive from all over the country to patronize his store and purchase his racist music. Seventy-five percent of his revenue came from white-power music sales. What made up the other 25% of sales? Christian knew if he just sold racist music, the community would not allow him to be there.
So he also stocked other music — regular music, culturally acceptable music. A few customers came in to buy that music. (This is where I really got hooked on Christian’s life story.)
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EVENTUALLY, THESE regular customers started talking to Christian.
They knew who he was. They knew his reputation. They knew the hateful type music he made and sold. At first, when they came in, Christian didn’t really talk to them. But these regular, ordinary people kept coming back. Over time, conversations started.
Soon conversations became more personal.
It was in this interaction with other people — people not like him; people who knew his skinhead story but chatted with him anyway; people who treated him as a person of worth apart from his hatred and white supremacy views — it was in this interaction with other people that Christian started to recognize that he had a lot in common with these strangers, these people of different beliefs and customs and racial backgrounds. People whom he had kept outside of his social circle.
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HE SAID, “I STARTED to receive compassion from the people that I least deserved it from when I least deserved it. And that to me was the most powerful, transformative moment.”
Christian Picciolini is now the founder of the Free Radicals Project. It’s an organization dedicated to helping members and their families disengage from hate groups. https://www.npr.org/…/christian-picciolini-how-do-you-unlea…
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ZACCHAEUS AND CHRISTIAN are transformed by welcome, acceptance, compassion. Love. But, really, we cannot truthfully place ourselves in comparison to either of those characters. The crowd is us and is worthy of our attention.
There are two conversions in the biblical story. Zacchaeus and the crowd. The crowd’s reaction is our reaction. Muttering. Feelings might range from disbelief (Zacchaeus couldn’t change; Christian can’t change) to disgust with Jesus for reaching out to such a sinner (or why do those good people hang out in that music store) Or, maybe, just maybe, amazed acceptance of what happened. People can change.
If it’s amazement that people can change, maybe we can change. Maybe we can become the welcoming stranger, the record-store customer, the friend of sinners.
— Keith Cardwell
