BILL TAMMEUS The evil in serial killers -- and all of us

"The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?"
-- Jeremiah 17:9
The worship bulletin at Christ Lutheran Church in Park City, Kan., for Feb. 27 had been printed several days earlier. So it still listed the church president, Dennis Rader, as sound technician for that service. But, of course, Rader wasn't there. He was in jail, having been arrested on Feb. 25, accused of being Wichita's fearsome BTK serial killer. (Rader was charged in court last week with 10 murders.)
One person who was at the service, however, was Bishop Gerald L. Mansholt, who leads the Central States Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. He went to encourage stunned parishioners to keep the faith and support one another in this terrible time. But Mansholt, too, was profoundly shaken by Rader's arrest.
"What is so bewildering to me," he told me, "is the total disconnect. Here is a man who regularly worshiped with people, prayed with people, began each service using the words of corporate confession of sin and yet had this whole other part of his life that seemed to be isolated from that, totally separate from that.
"People in the congregation could not reconcile the BTK killer, whom they despised, with the person they know in church life."
Indeed, if Rader is guilty, he was living a double life. How were members of his congregation supposed to suspect that? The answer is plain but shocking and hard to accept: We all live double lives. Few of us ever degenerate into the radical darkness of serial killing, but we all do hurtful things, things we regret, things that shame us, things we want to keep hidden.
That mysterious failing is a reason for being in a faith community. But people sometimes prefer to think they belong to one because they are perfect and getting better.
The purpose of belonging, however, is not to impress God with our faithfulness. Rather, we are there because we need forgiveness and support as we try to find our way back to the right path. Some faith traditions put more emphasis on that than others, but it's an understanding that underpins much of religion.
Dennis Rader was not the only sinner who regularly showed up at Christ Lutheran Church. Everyone there -- and elsewhere -- struggles with the deceitful human heart that the prophet Jeremiah described 27 centuries ago. What may have made Rader different was not only the unspeakably heinous nature of his alleged secret life but also his uncanny ability to hide it from everyone.
"Unimaginable" is the term Bishop Mansholt used.
The same day I spoke with Mansholt, I met with the Rev. Daniel Vestal, national coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, based in Atlanta, and asked him how people of faith are to understand the BTK story.
'Alarming'
"It's disturbing, confusing, alarming, mystifying," he said. "We're all capable of great shame and great glory."
Exactly. It's the human condition. Many people do magnificent, generous, helpful, selfless things. Some even die so that others may live. And yet we all are capable of evil.
If Dennis Rader really killed and killed and killed even as he was a church leader, he took this anguishing dichotomy to extremes rarely seen in history. And I can't imagine how he was able to do that.
"This is mystifying to me," Mansholt said. "For most of us, we can acknowledge that we are both saints and sinners. We know that at times we walk in the way of Christ and at times we don't.
"Sometimes we're characterized as being hung up on our guilt. And theoretically we've often talked about the human capacity for guilt. But what is so difficult to grasp and to understand is a person who has been a husband, father, active leader in the church and at least in that realm of life gave no indication of something out of the ordinary."
Perhaps it's beyond explanation. But the fact that each of us is capable of evil is not. As Genesis describes it, the first generation of humans broke rules and the second generation committed murder.
So even as we condemn such behavior and even as we seek to comfort the families of victims, it's important to recognize our own capacity for destructive behavior and not to imagine BTK was the only evil person in Kansas.
X Bill Tammeus is a columnist for The Kansas City Star. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.