On Tuesday, eight people were shot and killed near Atlanta, Georgia.
The killer was apprehended and has confessed to the killings.
Seven of the eight people killed were women. Six of the eight people killed were Asian women. The killings took place at two different spas. When the killer was arrested he was on his way to kill some more people, apparently headed to a location where pornography is filmed in Florida.
There has been much discussion about whether the killings were motivated by racial hatred. The facts of the case point to layers of identity in the targeting of Asian women at spas. Six of those killed were Asian, they were women, they worked at or were present at spas.
When the killer confessed he stated that his motivation was not race (do not take his word on this), but rather that he felt he had a sex addiction and wanted to rid himself of this by removing that which he experienced as temptation.
This is fucked up, to be sure, but it makes a kind of sense if you are familiar with purity culture within the evangelical church.
I will offer no exhaustive look into purity culture here, but rather a quick definition and some notes pertaining to this horrible crime.
Purity culture refers to an entire way of seeing sex and sexuality and gender. It is focused on sexual purity which is defined in various ways but focusses on saying that the following are sinful:
sex before marriage
masturbation
homosexuality
While the above is seen as sinful, an unquestioned positive is placed upon female modesty.
Purity culture often casts young women and teenage girls as temptations to teenage boys and men. Girls are taught that they are largely responsible for the sexual sin of boys and men. Boys are taught that sexual sin (including masturbation) is just about the worst of all sin.
The young man who killed the eight people in Atlanta was a regular youth group participant and a youth leader in his church. It appears that he received the messages that purity culture perpetrated. He expressed that he felt his sexual desires were sinful and evil, so much so that he felt he could erase them by killing people who he saw as representative of the temptations themselves.
If this young man had achieved some kind of award for humanitarian success I am guessing that the church would not so readily say it had nothing to do with him.
His views of women, his views of race, his views of sex, his views of sin and temptation all played into his acts.
Where did he pick up such views?
I’ll file this story and the church’s response under the question:
I think that those eight people who were killed were, in part, victims of evangelical purity culture. I think that the killer was a victim of that as well, but his church will apparently do no soul searching. They must think that is for other people.
There are those who would fear that the alternative to purity culture is an open door to sexual freedom. Perhaps these issues are best addressed with family communication.
Our family did not look to the church to educate our children about sex.
The church does not belong in our bedrooms.
More comments from the church. Again, not one bit of consideration of how their teaching and faulty theology might require some rethinking. In fact, if someone formed in their midst does wrong they conveniently disown him and say that he never really was a Christian. Another example of evangelicalism continuing its march further and further away from Jesus.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/crabapple-first-baptist-church-robert-aaron-long_n_60552856c5b6d6c2a2a704e4