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TIMOTHY MCVEIGH, CHRISTIAN TERRORIST? By Maggie Gallagher Not again, I thought. In the middle of a cogent argument against giving in to terrorist demands in a vain attempt to win their hearts and minds, New York Post columnist Jonathan Foreman tries to construct an analogy to the Oklahoma City bombing: 'It was committed by young white Christians who felt great rage again the United States government. ... What would winning the hearts and minds of these people have involved? Mandatory Christian prayer in schools, perhaps?' Timothy McVeigh, Christian terrorist? I certainly did not remember him that way. Where had any responsible journalist gotten the idea that McVeigh murdered 168 Americans in order to get prayer in schools? I spent the afternoon looking over years of press clippings probing the mind of McVeigh. In contemporaneous accounts, McVeigh was never described as killing out of religious motives. Nor was there any evidence that, at the time of the bombing, he even considered himself a Christian. On the two great state occasions McVeigh had, at his sentencing and his execution, Jesus made no appearance in his rhetoric. At the sentencing, McVeigh quoted from Louis Brandeis' 1928 decision: 'Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.' McVeigh's last public act before he was executed was to distribute copies of the 1875 poem 'Invictus.' It begins: 'I thank whatever gods may be/ for my unconquerable soul,' and ends 'I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul' -- sentiments that to a Christian are at least vaguely blasphemous. In a letter to the Buffalo News and in conversations with author Dan Herbeck, McVeigh said he had no firm convictions about an afterlife: 'And he told us that when he finds out if there's an afterlife, he will improvise, adapt and overcome, just like they taught him in the Army,' Herbeck said. In May 2001, Esquire published 13 letters
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