Evangelical Masculinity and Atlanta
Last week a White evangelical man committed mass murder in Atlanta. Six of the eight persons killed were Asian American women, the shootings happened in massage parlors (or spas), and the shooter claimed he was motivated by sexual temptation associated with such establishments.
The shooter was active in a Southern Baptist congregation that teaches celibacy for the single, promotes male headship in domestic and church life, and explicitly rejects critical race theory. Many people surmised a link between the specifics of this mass murder and the life of congregations like these. For example, in the New York Times Mihee Kim-Kort sets forth the intersections of toxic theology with anti-Asian racism and male dominance.
But few White men, particularly those of us with deep experience in the evangelical world, have testified to this reality in our own experience. Predictably, many White evangelicals spoke out to condemn the murders and deny a link between their teachings and this tragedy. I am sure most of them believed their denials. I am sure the denials of White evangelical racism were more important to them than were the condemnations.
My own experience as a White, formerly evangelical, man reinforces my suspicion that the details of this atrocity have lots to do with White evangelical culture, especially Southern White evangelical culture and its masculinity codes.
I’ve written about evangelical masculinity for at least a dozen years, but I’ve avoided some details of my own experience because they involve other people and they’re embarrassing. This may be the time to say more.
One college summer I participated in a seven-person summer ministry team. For my own part, I was in a serious relationship, and we were doing our best to negotiate the expectation of celibacy while managing the passions of being young and in love. I’m not here to condemn the expectation of celibacy, but I will observe that it’s a challenging demand in a modern society — and not exactly biblical.
But I want to talk about two of our team members. One young man daily agonized over his sexual temptations. I assume he was straight. When he would pray, he’d weep bitterly, turning red in the face and physically trembling. Had he been nurtured in a different spirituality, I would have expected him to punish his own body. In a serious way, this young man was disabled by his spiritual agony.
I feared for my friend. I felt enormous compassion for him. He expected perfection from himself, understood as the absence of lust. And there we were, away from home during the summer in a place young people literally sought out for near-anonymous sexual encounters. How was he supposed to escape lust? I didn’t even try. His pain was traumatic, both to him and to me.
Another member of our team literally disappeared in the middle of the summer. We discovered that he had built a relationship with another man and may have begun living on the street. We also learned that he had broken into our group home to steal clothes and other necessities from us.
Had this second friend fallen in love with a woman, we all would have understood. Even though dating was against the rules, we would have understood. But a same-sex relationship was completely off the map in that context. It could not be spoken out loud without the imposition of crushing shame. Rather than come out, our colleague fled to the streets. I have no idea what became of him.
The evangelical masculinity code imposes intense demands upon young men, many of them contradictory. You’re supposed to demonstrate aggressive masculinity. The “best” ways to do so include being a successful athlete and dating beautiful young women. Meanwhile, you’re literally encouraged to desire women intensely but not to cross certain lines of sexual behavior.
Even the young men who can meet all those expectations struggle to do so. Not many can live up to the code.
The subculture had countless ways of reinforcing these values. It wasn’t rare for my congregation to invite a Miss Alabama or a college football star as a guest speaker. The youth group went to see something called “The Power Team,” a group of men that evangelized through power lifting demonstrations. People in the church, including pastors and youth leaders, would comment on our dating lives, including direct assessments of our dating partners’ attractiveness.
Here’s something I’ve never discussed before because it is embarrassing to me and could be hurtful to other people. It was a long time ago, and I honestly don’t know how much it has changed. I suspect not much. Racism played a role in these expectations. We would have denied it to our deaths, but it’s true.
Being White, Southern, and Christian, we imagined ourselves partnered to White women. And we imagined non-White women according to racist codes. I don’t recall those codes being named aloud, but I’ve learned that we White people have a way of erasing our racism from our memories. On the few occasions I dated young women who weren’t White, I was aware most people would be surprised. This is painful to say: I imagined those relationships as fun, but my mind didn’t move beyond fun. I remember meeting the family of one Asian American woman on a first date. I anticipated that ritual for first dates with White women, but I literally hadn’t thought through the implications with an Asian American family. That’s how constrained my thinking was.
I’m profoundly glad I’ve moved beyond those scripts, but they are real.
In our twenties one dear friend moved to South Asia to do missionary work. I supported this friend until I received an annual newsletter. Mission work there was hard, my friend wrote, because the people there didn’t appreciate logic. What would be more racist than to deny a culture’s capacity for logic, to explain one’s own failure to communicate as a cultural fault of the other?
Over the past week Chuch Anew has shared reflections from Asian American and Pacific Islander church leaders like Sam Tsang, Ekaputra Tupamahu, Mary Foskett, Sze-kar Wan, and John Thatamamil. White Christians are obliged to listen with humility. Among my Asian American friends not one buys the line that racism has nothing to do with this atrocity. Walter Kim, an Asian American and president of the National Association of Evangelicals, signed a document that interprets the massacre as “a deliberate, preconceived plan to target Asians, and particularly Asian women.”
According to Mihee Kim-Kort, our culture often reduces an Asian American woman to invisibility: “a ghost, invisible, unknowable, stripped of her identity, making her both desirable and expendable.” Does anyone seriously believe it’s a coincidence that this young White evangelical man frequented massage parlors staffed by Asian American women, felt intense remorse, and did not value those women enough to restrain his murderous impulses?
I do not. Given that so many White evangelical Christians are climbing over themselves to deny that racism has anything to do with this atrocity, I feel compelled to explain why.
