Purposelessly Driven Lives

When the same self-help book, a cult favorite, figures prominently in two news stories on the same day, both involving multiple murderers, it ought to raise some eyebrows.

According to this report, the young mother who was extolled as a heroine last March when she persuaded her kidnapper to release her after reading passages from the Christian self-help guide The Purpose Driven Life has now admitted that she was a drug addict at the time and had given her kidnapper the crystalline methamphetamines she had on her during the ordeal.

Immediately embraced at the time by Christian evangelicals and social conservatives and held up as an example of the redemptive power of faith, Ashley Smith, already the recipient of $70,000 in rewards, is cashing in once again on her story with a new book from the same publishing unit that by no coincidence brought us The Purpose Driven Life.

Bearing the apparently modest but in fact grossly self-promoting title, Unlikely Angel, the book reveals that Smith not only handed the accused rapist/murderer Brian Nichols her stash of crystal meth — a drug that, because it stimulates the nervous system and lowers moral inhibitions, is associated with risky and perverse sexual acts — but she then "lifted up her tank top several inches to reveal a five-inch scar down the center of her torso — the aftermath of a car wreck caused by drug-induced psychosis," purportedly to warn him about the consequences of irresponsible drug use.

In a column last April that manages to be at once bitter and triumphalist, Ann Coulter wrote of the incident: "Smith could see God's hand in a multiple murderer holding her hostage. By showing him genuine Christian love, Smith turned Nichols from a beast to a brother in Christ. This phenomenon, utterly unknown to liberals, is what's known as a 'miracle.'" Apparently touched by the miraculous power of The Purpose Driven Life, Coulter concludes without her typical cynicism: "When the police arrived, Nichols surrendered without incident, an utterly transformed human being." Now we know what Smith actually showed him, what induced the so-called "miracle," and in what Nichols' apparent "transformation" consisted.

The second story is about an ex-employee at the Verla nail-polish factory in the Hudson Valley who returned to the premises and discharged bullets into the heads of the two owners and an office manager, before killing himself. He'd been fired after child pornography was discovered downloaded on his office computer. He'd also been previously arrested for "unlawful dealings with a child." Ann Coulter, to her credit this time, did not embrace this man. However, shortly before the multiple murders, he'd bought a copy of — wait for it — The Purpose Driven Life, a book that of course inculcates the idea that every action and event in the world is part of God's plan for us.