2021.03.21 | A Pastoral Response to the Misogynistic & Racist Massacre of Eight Atlantans

—Bulletin for Mar 21, 2021—

“A Pastoral Response to the 

Misogynistic & Racist Murders of Eight Atlantans”

Rev. Dr. Arlene K. Nehring

Eden United Church of Christ

Hayward, California

Fifth Sunday in Lent

March 21, 2021

 John 12:20-33 | [Español] 

I don’t often tear up a thoughtfully developed sermon on a Saturday afternoon--like I did this weekend--but when I do, it’s for a very good reason. 

My reason is that the Holy Spirit has led me to address Robert Aaron Long’s murder of eight Atlantans this past Tuesday, instead of sharing the message that I had initially prepared for today. 

The Holy Spirit has also led me to the conclusion that the things I need to say about this tragedy need to be said by a Christian pastor who is capable of both loving Jesus and critiquing some of the ideas and behaviors of the people who claim to follow him.

To begin, let’s consider some of the things that we learned about Robert Aaron Long, from reliable journalists who have published articles about these tragic events. 

According to an article that appeared in the Washington Post last Friday, Mr. Lang was a 2017 graduate of Sequoyah High School in Canton, Georgia. His peers remembered him as quiet and shy. He played the drums, carried a Bible, and was active in a Christian student club. 

Outside of school, Mr. Lang hunted deer and played video games. Leaders of the Crabapple First Baptist Church in Woodstock, Georgia acknowledged that Mr. Long and his parents were baptized members of their congregation, and that his father was a leader in the church. As a youth, Mr. Long was active in the youth group. He helped with children’s programs, and he participated in youth service projects.

Things appear to have begun unraveling for Mr. Long shortly after he graduated from high school. He attended one year of community college and then dropped out before completing any program. 

He developed a relationship with a woman from Chattanooga, who his parents did not approve of. When he told his parents on the phone one night that he wasn’t coming home from his girl friend’s house, his parents called the police and asked them to go get him and bring him home. The officer who called at the house explained to the parents that their son was of age, so they couldn’t just toss him in a patrol car and bring him home.

Two to three years ago, Mr. Long began frequenting spas and massage parlors. Because he deemed this behavior problematic, Mr. Long sought community-based and in-patient treatment for what he called a “sex addiction.” None of the programs or treatment centers that he sought help from were able to rid him of his interest in pornography or his practice of frequenting massage parlors.

II

So how does a 21-year old man from a church-going family, whose father was a youth pastor, end up a serial killer? 

Local police who interviewed Mr. Long stated at a press conference last Thursday that the suspect had confessed to the crimes with which he was charged, and attributed his actions to a “sex addiction.” New York Times reporter Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs verified in this article that Mr. Long had been a client at two inpatient addiction programs. The reporter who spoke with Long’s roommate at one of the facilities explained that Long typically discussed his shameful sex addiction in conjunction with his relationship with God and his parents.

Leaders at Mr. Long’s home church in Milton, Georgia, were quoted in Friday’s New York Times as saying, “...[that Mr. Long’s] extreme and wicked act is nothing less than rebellion against our Holy God and His Word…[and that] the shootings were a total repudiation of our faith and practice, and such actions are completely unacceptable and contrary to the gospel.” 

While I agree with the Crabtree church’s condemnation of the serial killings, I think that Long’s actions not only stem from his sinful actions, the ideas that led him to these actions are partly grounded in problematic tenants of the Christian faith run amuck, and that these problematic tenants of faith must be named, confessed, and dismantled. I also think that we, as modern Christians, must reclaim and reconstruct theologies of creation, humanity, and human sexuality that are more holistic and holy than some that we have received from our forebears in the faith.

III

Several of my thoughts about the murderous shooting spree in Atlanta and what led up to it have been captured in an article published by Religion Dispatches this past Wednesday. The author, Chrissy Stroop, is a self-described “exvangelical scholar,” a scholar who once identified with and was part of an evangelical Christian church, but who had left the church and the faith. The title of Stroops’ article is: “Don’t Discount Evangelicalism As a Factor In Racist Murder Of Asian Spa Workers In Georgia.”

 Here Stroop summarizes the vast body of research published by Joshua Grubbs, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Bowling Green State University. Professor Grubbs’ work deals primarily with the role of religion in shaping people’s attitudes toward sexuality and sexual behavior. 

 One of the most significant conclusions that Professor Grubbs has drawn from his research is that conservative Christian men’s religious values are strongly linked to feelings of sex addiction. “In particular, Stroop explains, “[conservative Christian men]...are likely to interpret normal sexual urges as pathological and then act on them in ways that they find to be problematic.” 

 For example, 21-year old Robert Aaron Long’s killing spree, by his own admission was, “an effort to ‘eliminate’ the ‘temptations’—that is, women—who he claimed exacerbated his ‘sex addiction.’

 And where did Mr. Long learn to think about himself and his behavior in this way, and where did he learn to objectify women?

 Sadly, he seems to have learned these ideas from his father, an evangelical youth pastor, and from the predominantly white evangelical church where he grew up. In Long’s experience, discussions of sex were and typically are steeped in purity culture that fosters a fear of sexuality and pressures young people to remain “pure”—that is, sexually inexperienced—before marriage. 

 According to Professor Grubbs, “Purity culture places heavy emphasis on temptation and evil. Pornography is considered evil and something to be eliminated.” Taken to the extreme, as Long seems to have done, the only way to rid oneself of the temptation is to rid the world of those who tempt you.

 IV

 In my view, purity culture in white Evangelical Christianity builds on 19th Century Victorian ideals of gender that define boys as “lustful” and teach that girls must morally police themselves and their male partners, or else both will be damned. 

 In evangelical churches, youth pastors (like Robert Long’s father) are the primary purveyors of these purity messages. As such, these church leaders play a key role in socializing youth into a dangerous culture that promotes toxic masculinity and feminine passivity, and which trades Jesus for John Wayne and the United Nations for Christian nationalism. 

 This purity culture that is commonly found within white evangelical congregations is grounded in a specifically American inflection of white supremacism, which hyper- sexualizes brown and Black bodies, promotes the view that white men must “protect” white women from Black men, and fetishizes Asian women like the women who worked at the spas which Robert Long targeted and murdered.

 A leader at an evangelical institution who uses the pseudonym, Akiko Bergeron, told the Religious Dispatches reporter Chrissy Stroop in a recent interview, “White supremacy holds Asians in a weird light, complimenting them on being the ‘good minority,’ while also devaluing women into sex objects who exist for their pleasure.” 

 “As an adult in the Southern Baptist Convention,” Ms. Bergeron explained, “I saw this fetish and devaluation from white men who thought I should have sex with them because as an Asian, I was a geisha (which they take to mean ‘sex worker’), and so it’s not really cheating or adultery for them [to make sexual advances towards me].”

 V

 While I am neither a professor of psychology nor an Asian leader in an evangelical institution, my anecdotal experience as a pastor and colleague of those who are, affirms the veracity of Professor Grubbs or Ms. Bergeron’s assertions. 

 In addition, as a Christian pastor who has served in Mainline and Progressive traditions, I am very aware that the white evangelical branch of Christianity is not the only one that  has propagated ideas and behaviors that are consistent with white supremacy and toxic masculinity--which are significantly reflected in Robert Long’s murderous behavior this past Tuesday. 

 The dangerous ideas and behaviors that fuel white supremacy and toxic masculinity are also associated with the school of Gnostic philosophy that was prominent in first century Rome, and that influenced the beliefs of some New Testament authors, who deemed the physical word as depraved and sexuality as tainted rather than being a gift from God. 

 So it is incumbent upon us as Progressive Christians to expose the ideas and practices within our tradition that defame the physical world and human sexuality, and counter them with more holistic and healthier ideas and practices that exist within scripture and that are being revealed through research and scholarship in the human sciences. 

 It is also incumbent upon us to counter gender stereotypes that define women as morally responsible for men’s behavior, and men as knights in shining armor. 

 In addition, it is incumbent upon us to denounce the fetishization of women in general and people of color, and to clearly and crisply affirm that all people are fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of God (Ps. 149:14). 

 Without embracing these challenges and taking them on, I guarantee you that the roots of xenophobia that perpetuate egregious hate crimes like the type we saw unfold in metro Atlanta this past Tuesday will continue to plague us and our posterity. 

 To be sure, this is a lot to ponder--the mass murder of eight innocent Atlantans, and the enormity of the recognizance and reconstructive work we have to do within the Christian church. 

 My prayer today is that God will grant us the wisdom and courage to face these troubling truths within our tradition, deconstruct them, and recommit ourselves to articulating and acting on Christian doctrines that affirm the goodness of God’s creation, the blessedness of human sexuality, and the inherent value of the whole people of God. Amen.