In my senior year I hit and killed a drunken pedestrian. Fortunately he was not just a drunken person but a well-known drunk who had been staggering down the street (witnesses said), and I was not charged. But the reaction among my community of that time was telling and formative.
I had not been religious prior to this event and I became even more virulently anti-religious when I received several phone calls from local Baptists, who offered me the solace of Jesus’s love. The first call angered me, but I didn’t express the depths of my anger. When others began to call, almost in a chain, I exploded and began cursing their pure effrontery and hypocrisy.
The reaction of the high school bullies was different. I was vested with an aura of respect. I had after all killed someone, more then they, hopefully, would ever do.