White Supremacy the Deadly Fantasy: Sermon on the Mount in the Shadow of the Atlanta Murders
You have heard it said to those of old, “Thou shalt not murder”; whoever murders will be subject to judgment. But I say to you, If you are angry with a sister or brother, you will be subject to judgment…. You have heard it said, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” But I say to you everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already adulterated her in his heart. (Matthew 5:21–22, 27–28)
White supremacy, in the fitting words of my colleague Stephen Long, is “a projected fantasy.” It is imagination, but an imagination manufactured to produce death and destruction. It promises sensuous pleasure, but it follows with the lie that pleasure can be fulfilled only through conquest — violent sexual conquest. White supremacy creates a land of make-believe, in which intruders, illegal aliens, and outsiders lurk around every corner and foreigners threaten their religion and immoral women corrupt their youths.
It is White supremacy that powers the Atlanta, Ga. shooter’s fetishization of Asian women. It is White supremacy that fills him with images of Asian women as objects of sexual desire and seductive temptresses. It is White supremacy that perpetuates the lie that such sexual fantasy can be fulfilled only by dominating, annihilating if necessary, all such foreign women.
It’s pointless to debate if the Atlanta shooter was driven to mass murder by a self-professed sex addiction or by racism. Both issue from White supremacy.
We don’t need legal jargons to tell us this is an anti-Asian hate crime. We just know it. From experience and from history.
Violence against Chinese miners during the gold rush of the nineteenth century. The Page Law of 1875. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The 1887 Hells Canyon Massacre. The Internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. The killing of Vincent Chin and the refusal to jail his convicted killers in 1982. The racist rhetoric used by our last President and broadcast by his enablers throughout the pandemic. They all had a hand in the shootings.
Furthermore, “sex addiction” is not a clinical diagnosis, but is a common self-description among subscribers of the “purity culture.” According to the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists, there is no empirical evidence to indicate that sex addiction is a diagnosable psychological disorder.
The biblical verse that weighs most heavily is the words of Jesus found in the Sermon on the Mount: “Everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28 NRSV; emphasis added). The Sermon on the Mount has been savaged in recent years. A prominent preacher from Dallas claims it can be used only for personal matters, because it’s too idealistic to address public and social norms in his estimation.
Little does he care, though, that once the Sermon on the Mount is ripped from its societal moorings, it is no longer capable of informing us how we ought to live with each other and what sort of world we are contracted to build for each other. It is reduced to a purity test for testosterone-driven men.
The words of Jesus aim at much loftier goals, however. They tell us that our imagination is capable of forming new worlds by projecting our thoughts onto society and onto other bodies. They tell us that our thoughts can become reality. Anger will realize itself as murder if it induces us to diminish the personhood of our sisters and brothers; anger will become extermination by subjecting others to our violence. White supremacy imagines a competition between ethnic groups, with Whites reigning supreme, before projecting it onto society to produce violent confrontations.
Violence, it says, is not only sanctioned, it is necessary for the recovery of this domination.
But anger does not need to lead to violence; it can also lead to reconciliation. Remember the humanity of our sisters and brothers, Jesus says, and be reconciled to them (Matthew 5:24). Remember what the reign of heaven is like. Envision what equality and peace look like.
Our collective imagination will turn our anger into a creative passion for reconciliation.
Fantasy is not the problem. Fantasy is capable of generating passion, creativity, even love. So let us not pervert fantasy by subjecting it to a system of oppression, discrimination, domination. Save fantasy from White supremacy!
Our sexual longings are a passion, a creative force. They are a biological function, an integral part of who we are as humans. But if we willfully relegating the Sermon on the Mount to the realm of the private, we make it into a harsh verdict which misogyny will transform into a lust for domination. “Thou shalt not commit adultery” was stipulated against a patriarchy that assumed wives to be men’s properties. Men could lust after other women as long as it did not violate the property rights of other men. The system was based on an exploitation and a devaluation of women. Marriage fidelity was imposed just on the woman, never the man.
In this connection, the NRSV translation of “committing adultery with her” is a poor reflection on the Greek, which comes closer to the sense of “violating her.” The man is the aggressor, subjecting the woman to his warped desires. The Jewish tradition forbids such exploitation, and Jesus further stipulates that restoration of equality between woman and man begins with liberating our thought-world from all forms of exploitations.
Far from harsh judgments on the very human emotions of anger and sexual yearnings, the words of Jesus turn our attention to our collective imagination, which is capable of transforming our raw passions into a creative force for the common good.
