Fantasy and Reality: The Tragedy Of An Eager Evangelist's Suicide

I read a story this morning that upset me badly. Not to the point of shedding tears of sorrow, although the story is very sad. Rather, I was closer to outrage. I'll explain this in three parts -- first by providing a bit of personal background, then by relating the facts, and finally by explaining what made me so upset about the whole thing.


1. How Dungeons & Dragons Helped Teach Me To Distinguish Fantasy From Reality

When I was a teenager in the 1980's, I was a Dungeons & Dragons geek. My parents tolerated this surely-annoying behavior because they knew that if it wasn't Dungeons & Dragons, it would have been something else instead. And as unproductive teenage hobbies went, Dungeons & Dragons was more or less harmless and not particularly expensive for them to indulge.

Now, recall that in the at the time, there was an appreciable cultural backlash to this game. It was centered on churches and in particular on those churches that today we would classify as "evangelical" (at the time, we used the word "fundamentalist"). They seized on a handful of instances in which high school or college kids committed suicide -- and all of these kids played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons. Their story was that they were peer-pressured into playing the game, discovered that a facet of the game includes characters consorting with demons and devils, which led to worship of those demons and devils in the game, which in turn led to worship of the devil in real life, which in turn led to insanity and ultimately suicide. Same thing with the heavy metal music -- that apparently also caused kids to worship the devil and suicide, if you believed what certain pastors were trying to sell their credulous congregations.

My folks had the eminent good sense to quickly decide that all of this was utter and complete nonsense and to leave me and my friends to our own devices in outgrowing the pastime. The biggest danger we faced from playing Dungeons & Dragons was not meeting girls, and eventually we all figured out that girls were indeed more interesting than little lead figurines and the anthropology of the fictional Wood-Elf. So my folks, and my friends' parents, all made the correct decision to ignore the religious fearmongers and allow their geeky teenage boys to develop on their own, and everything worked out more or less fine for all of us.

The result of a good upbringing and being given enough respect for my own intelligence was that I instinctively knew that the demons and devils of Dungeons & Dragons were creatures of pure fantasy -- no one could really believe in the objective existence of the monsters in the game. Teenagers playing Dungeons & Dragons would sneer at the proposition that a creature like a Beholder could actually exist. The Beholder is obviously a fanciful creation.

Meanwhile, at this point in my real-world development, I was going through the motions of worship in the Roman Catholic tradition in order to please the adults in my life. But pretty much as soon as I established a mental and personal identity of my own, I worked out for myself that I didn't really believe in any of the mythology being peddled by the RCC. Transubstantiation makes as much objective sense, in the world of reality, as wizards casting fireballs out of walking sticks.

By trivializing the devil and making the Forces of Evil simply another fantasy monster to be overcome in a quite obviously fictional game, Dungeons & Dragons didn't make me want to worship Satan. Rather, it made me doubt Satan's very existence. And given the nonsense I was being told about Jesus and God -- he came back from the dead, he walked across water, he cured leprosy without medicine, and his flesh was apparently made of stale bread -- it was not a big step at all to question whether, if Satan so obviously could only exist in a fantasy world, whether God was a fantasy as well. Christianity was merely another mythology, like that of the Norse, or the Romans, or the Chinese, which had little to do with reality. This particular mythology had survived to the present day, but I was able to see that was simply an accident of history and going forward with my education, I realized I would be better-off dispensing with the mythology and dealing instead with reality.

But coming to that realization did not drive me to suicide.


2. The Death Of Jesse Kilgore

It is from that perspective that I read and react to the story about Jesse Kilgore, which I first came across on PinPonPun. This young man kept a blog himself and apparently enjoyed the role of Christian Warrior, debating with friends, teachers, and anyone else willing to discuss issues, all sorts of things like religion, politics and in particular issues of interest to social conservatives like abortion and stem cell harvesting, and so on.

Jesse came from a very religious, Christian family, and he responded to that kind of environment by adopting the role of Eager Evangelist, ready to debate all comers. This surely pleased his parents and pastors. It also surely helped him fashion his own identity.

He followed in his father's footsteps and served in the military; when his four years after high school were up, he enrolled at Jefferson Community College in upstate New York, nestled between Lake Ontario and the Adirondacks. I can't figure out what he was studying, and I'm hesitant to apply the usual condemnation of community colleges because it seems to me that there is a place for them and Jesse seemed destined for a four-year school. Some families can't afford to send their kids to four-year schools for all four years, and there should be an affordable gateway for them, and that's one of the reasons why community colleges exist. But in sum, Jesse was a promising young man with a bright future.*

Most Readers probably know, or have known, someone like Jesse; I certainly have run across a lot of people like that -- young, bright, well-intentioned, strongly-opinionated, perhaps a little more aggressive with broadcasting those opinions than is strictly socially appropriate. Reminds me of myself in college, including the rightward slant on things, although it should be noted that left-wing specimens of this type may also be found in abundance.

It is easy to see how his family and friends were devastated when Jesse wandered into the woods outside of his college and took his own life. It is easy to sympathize with his pain and grief. It is easy to understand his father Keith's search for an explanation for why his magnificent son would do such a thing by way of finding some kind of consolation.

What Jesse's father found was that Jesse's biology professor had challenged Jesse to read Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion shortly before Jesse killed himself. Jesse was apparently persuaded by what he read. A long quote from the article:

"She was in tears [and said] he was very upset by this book," Keith Kilgore said. "'It just destroyed him,' were her words.

"Then another friend at the funeral told me the same thing," Keith Kilgore said. "This guy was his best friend, and about the only other Christian on campus.

"The third one was the last person that my son talked to an hour before [he died,]" Keith Kilgore told WND, referring to a member of his extended family whose name is not being revealed here.

That relative, who had struggled with his own faith and had returned to Christianity, wrote in a later e-mail that Jesse "started to tell me about his loss of faith in everything."

"He was pretty much an atheist, with no belief in the existence of God (in any form) or an afterlife or even in the concept of right or wrong," the relative wrote. "I remember him telling me that he thought that murder wasn't wrong per se, but he would never do it because of the social consequences - that was all there was - just social consequences.

"He mentioned the book he had been reading 'The God Delusion' by Richard Dawkins and how it along with the science classes he had take[n] had eroded his faith. Jesse was always great about defending his beliefs, but somehow, the professors and the book had presented him information that he found to be irrefutable. He had not talked … about it because he was afraid of how you might react. ... and that he knew most of your defenses of Christianity because he himself used them often. Maybe he had used them against his professors and had the ideas shot down."

The picture we are left with is of an intense, intelligent, very devoutly Christian young man who was suddenly confronted, in a biology class, with a look at some of the evidence for evolution; whose resistance to absorbing the material manifested itself reflexively in the challenges and debates that had served him well and the use of the verbal ripostes that his father had taught him to use; and who, perhaps for the first time in his life unable to reach a position where he felt he had presented an intellectually superior argument for creationism, Jesus' message, and even the existence of God, reached a point of spiritual and emotional despair. His identity as a culture warrior collapsed like a house of cards and he felt as though he had been living a lie for his twenty-two young years. In the manner of Victor Hugo's Inspector Javert, rather than revise his life and reconcile himself to a new view of the world, instead he opted out of a world that suddenly no longer made any sense.


3. Exploiting Jesse's Death

My heart goes out to Jesse's family and his friends. Their son, brother, and friend is gone. Worse, they must live with the fact that at the end, he fell into a deep depression and ended his own life. How frustrating for them that he did not reach out to them for the emotional support and love that they would surely have so eagerly offered him in his time of need. Most of all, what a terrible thing for his parents to have to bury their son.

So in the midst of all this grief and sorrow, it is sickening to see him used as cannon fodder in the culture war. The whole worldnetdaily article is an attack on atheism and Dawkins' book in particular, and more elliptically on science and higher education as challenges to Christian faith. And a lot of what's in the story really is aimed at demonstrating that atheism, science, evolution, and a liberal (small "l") education in general are evil, or at minimum very dangerous and best avoided by right-thinking people.

This is what made me upset. Atheism didn't kill Jesse. Evolution didn't kill Jesse. Richard Dawkins' book did not drive Jesse to suicide. Jesse's biology professor did not drive Jesse to suicide, either -- he was doing his job, which is to challenge Jesse on an intellectual level so that he could grow. Instead, we have only the reported surmise of one or two sources that these things were on Jesse's mind before he took his own life. We do not know what else was going on in Jesse's life -- and it's entirely possible that he would not have shared some of those things with the people who now grieve his death.

Let me suggest a few possibilities of other things that might -- might -- have been at play.

Most of us are closer to the danger of addiction to substances than we care to admit, and anyone could fall into that seductive trap rather easily. Jesse would not have been immune from that, or the emotional roller-coaster that goes along with it. With the background described for him, it is not difficult to imagine that if he did have that kind of a problem, he would have taken great pains to conceal it.

Jesse was a twenty-two year old man. Twenty-two year old men very often look for love, and very often it doesn't work out well. The despair of heartbreak or unrequited love is intense for anyone, and for a young person who has not experienced it before it can be overwhelming. Jesse would not be the first young person to suicide because of a failed romantic adventure and the broken heart that goes along with it. We don't know if he was open about that sort of thing with his family or not.

Very likely Jesse was straight. But if he discovered within himself that he was gay and finally admitted this to himself, or if he had a homosexual encounter (either from desire or by way of a youthful experiment) and later could not reconcile that with his religious upbringing, he would not be the first young gay man to be unable to resolve that dissonance and suicide.

We are all of us imperfect and maybe Jesse had done something -- cheated on a test, hit something with his car and not left a note to take responsibility, or participated in a cruel practical joke -- that he later realized was a moral lapse, and that he felt very guilty about. If a friend or family member of his were to protest that no, Jesse wasn't that kind of guy, I'd believe them. All indications are that he was a moral, thoughtful young man. But all of us screw up every once in a while. That wouldn't make him a bad person, it would mean that he made a mistake. But he would hardly be the first person to commit a momentary moral lapse and, in a fit of guilt, check himself out.

These are only some things that come very quickly to my mind when thinking about why a young person might suicide. I say these sorts of things "might" have been at play because there is no way to know. Nor is there much use in trying to decide if they were at play. Our minds are delicate enough under the best of circumstances and all sorts of things can serve as stressors. What stressors were working on Jesse before he died don't really matter to him or his family. What matters is that he's gone and his survivors must come to terms with their loss.

And they're not there yet. They have to get their in their own way and their own time. In time these peoples' pain will dull, but unfortunately it will probably never fully heal, it will always be an empty space on their souls. Jesse's father, who served as a chaplain in the military and so can be expected to have become familiar with the process of grief while ministering to soldiers and their families coping with losses, admits that he is still in the "anger" stage in the latter half of the article.

Angry people facing a loss look for someone to blame. Jesse's father was a chaplain. Jesse himself wore the label of culture warrior proudly. His friend wrote to his father that Jesse used the arguments taught to him by his father frequently. Those arguments seemed to fail Jesse shortly before Jesse's death. Thus, the forces that caused those arguments to fail are a convenient target for Keith Kilgore's anger.

What gets me upset is not that Keith Kilgore would lash out at forces larger than he or his son -- atheism, biology, critical thought -- but that his angry, grieving remarks would be exploited by the likes of culture warriors looking for ammunition.

Whether Jesse lost his faith or not before his death is something that we can at best guess at and never really know. Even if we agree that his response to losing his faith was suicide, that does not mean that faith either kept him alive or that the faith was well-placed. Richard Dawkins has either made intellectually sound arguments in The God Delusion, or he has not.

Culture warriors do not care about that. They care about making emotional attacks against their targets. The suicide of a young man is obviously an emotional event and it has now been converted into an attack on popularizations of atheism, questioning of faith, science, and education and the critical thought associated with it in a general sense.

Education is a good thing, not a bad thing. Critical thought is a good thing, not a bad thing. If exposure to these things -- seeing a compelling argument for an opposing point of view for the first time -- was unsettling to Jesse, that is understandable but the blame does not rest there but elsewhere. The blame rests with whatever or whoever created a mental state within Jesse such that his ego completely collapsed after this pillar of his identity was collapsed. The blame rests with whatever or whoever taught him that being right about God, evolution, cultural conservatism, or whatever it was that got punctured in his mind, was more important than life itself.

My instinct is to take the final jump and say that it was a tightly-disciplined religious upbringing that created this mindset in Jesse. A part of me would like to say that being raised in an environment where fantasy was taught to be reality, where critical questioning of that fantasy was discouraged and possibly even punished, created a mindset in this young man where existence itself was tied up in the absolute, inerrant truth of Christian mythology -- that this, not anything at that college or in Dawkins' book, was what warped Jesse's mind. This mythology, in other words, became the trellis upon which his ego grew. When confronted with objective proof of the errancy of that mythology, exposed to a persuasive statement of an irreconcilably different world view, the trellis was suddenly taken away and the identity left behind was not strong enough to stand on its own.

The first section of my post here -- explaining how I came to be comfortable with separating fantasy from reality, even those fantasies that a lot of grownups demanded I publicly adhere to -- is there to suggest that I was better-armed for the intellectual discomfort of discarding a fantasy because I had been through an exercise that required me to distinguish fantasy and reality for much of my teenage years. The second section, describing the circumstances of Jesse's death, strongly suggests to me that being confronted with reality full-force presented Jesse with enough of a psychic shock that he chose suicide rather than discarding a fantasy that he had been raised to believe was real.

But having come to that precipice, I'm going to back away from it. I can't be sure that was what Jesse's mind was really like. I didn't know him. I don't know his family. I can't be sure that his upbringing was like that, even with what I've learned from the publicity surrounding this event. The reason is, I'm seeing most of these facts through a particular lens, and my response to that distorted, filtered reporting of reality is to correct back to something I can understand. If I go further and take the mental leap I describe in the paragraph above, I may be inserting my own biases and preconceptions about things in the place of information that I cannot reasonably infer to be accurate. Yes, it's entirely possible that Jesse had never before, either in a very religious upbringing or in the military, been faced with intellectually strong challenges to his world view -- and he apparetly made a very substantial investment of his own identity in being a proponent of that world view.

But I cannot bring myself to place the blame for whatever happened in Jesse's mind at the doorstep of any person or any thing. I don't feel that I have enough information to do that.

Here's what I can say with confidence. College is supposed to challenge you -- to present you with new ideas and give you new ways of thinking. If we believe what we're told in these articles, Jesse Kilgore reacted poorly to that challenge because it demonstrated that the mythology he had build his identity around defending was exposed as a lie. So he grew depressed to the point of suicide.

That, however, is not the fault of the college or the intellectual challenges that go along with it. It would be the fault of mythmongers who convinced Jesse to invest his entire ego in evangelizing a fairy tale. Which makes using Jesse's death to attack on atheism, biology, college, and education represensible -- these are the very things that, if Jesse had been exposed to them and allowed to work things out for himself could have given him the tools to handle the complexities of the real world.

There is real danger in buying into this kind of mythology even if it is well-intentioned; if my guesses about what happened to poor Jesse Kilgore are right, growing up in a balkanized, ultra-Christianized subculture that excluded it created in him a psychological framework that, once its central support was exposed for what it was, made death seem preferable to life.

UPDATE: Apparently, Chaplain Keith Kilgore was, and may still be, a member of something called the Presidential Prayer Team. Perhaps another piece of the overall picture.


* I hesitate to link to a photograph of Jesse here. You can see it in Jesse's blog, which survives him. I would post it because the intelligence and happiness of this young man is obvious from his picture; I would post it as a sign of respect for him. But I fear that in the event that his family stumbles across this blog, which has a very different view from that which they would prefer to see, they would take it as an offense. Now, I do challenge some of what Keith Kilgore says about the situation here, but not from a place of disrespect. Because Mr. Kilgore's son is recently dead, and because he seems intent on blaming an unnmaed biology professor, Richard Dawkins, and atheists generally for his son's death, it is easy to anticipate an emotional response to what I write today. If you are reading this post, Mr. Kilgore, please understand that no disrespect to you or your son is intended herein, and know that you and your family have my deep sympathies. I write to suggest that your anger is misplaced and that you take a step back to examine the motives of the people who are giving you this sure-to-be-very temporary burst of publicity.