When Brad Onishi learned that the man accused of violence in three Atlanta-area spas told detectives he had carried out the attacks as a way of eliminating his own temptations, the statement sounded painfully familiar.
Onishi, who grew up in a strict evangelical community in Southern California that emphasized sexual purity, spent his teens tearing up any ads in surfing magazines that showed women in bikinis. He exchanged his passwords online with friends to take responsibility.
“We had a militant vigilance: don’t let anything into the house that might tempt you sexually,” recalled Onishi, now an associate professor of religious studies at Skidmore College.
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The evangelical culture in which he was raised, he said, “teaches women to hate their bodies as a source of temptation, and teaches men to hate their minds, which leads to lust and sexual immorality.”
Robert Aaron Long, the suspect in the massacres that left eight people dead, told police last week that he had a “sexual addiction” and that he had been a client at two of the spas he shot. He was so determined to avoid pornography that he blocked several sites on his computer and sought help at a Christian rehab clinic. A former roommate said that Long suffered from the possibility of “falling out of the grace of God”.
When Long, 21, was arrested Tuesday on his way to Florida, the police said, he told officers he planned to carry out another attack on a company linked to the porn industry.
Many people saw clear signs of misogyny and racism in the attacks, in which six of the victims were women of Asian descent.
But Long’s characterization of his motivations was also very recognizable by observers of evangelicalism and some evangelicals. He seemed to have a fixation on sexual temptation, which can lead to despair among people who believe they are failing to follow the ideal of abstaining from sex and even lust outside heterosexual marriage.
Combating pornography and inappropriate sexual desire is a persistent theme in contemporary conservative evangelicalism. In churches, men partner in “responsibility groups” to hold each other accountable for avoiding sexual temptation and other moral dangers. Others use “accountability software” like Covenant Eyes, which monitors screen activity and sends reports on the use of pornography to a designated “ally”. Countless books promise spiritual and practical strategies to get rid of the habit.
Historically, some evangelical leaders have also drawn a direct line between pornography and violence. James Dobson, the influential founder of Focus on the Family, recorded a video interview with Ted Bundy the day before the serial killer was executed in 1989. Bundy’s message was that a pornography “addiction” fueled his crimes.
“What a tragedy!” Dobson later wrote, referring to Bundy’s violence. “There is a possibility, at least, that it would not have happened if that 13-year-old boy had never found pornographic magazines in a garbage dump.”
In the past few decades, many conservative evangelical leaders and their churches have begun to speak more candidly about sex.
“There is a lot of talk that God created sexuality, it is something not to be ashamed of, and that God created it for his purposes,” said Anson McMahon, pastor in Buford, Georgia, who was a guest speaker on several summer trips to young people in the early 2000s at the Baptist church later attended by Long.
But if conversations about sexual issues have become more frank, the message that sex is reserved for heterosexual couples has remained unchanged.
Many Christians date back to Jesus as their condemnation of pornography.
“I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman with desire has already committed adultery with her in his heart,” he is quoted as saying in the Gospel of Matthew.
For Protestants in particular, whose faith prioritizes correct internal beliefs and spiritual attitudes, this passage has contributed to a worldview in which inappropriate sexual thoughts are as sinful as wrong actions.
The problem with pornography, from this point of view, is how it affects a person’s mind and heart.
“Masturbation in itself, the act is a biological act,” said Heath Lambert, chief pastor of the First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida, and author of a book for evangelical men struggling with the use of pornography. “What’s wrong is lust. What is wrong is what happens in my heart. “
The attacks on the spas violated all church teachings, Lambert said, and he thought the obvious root of the violence was the pornography that the accused sniper “was using and trying to escape from”.
White evangelicals use no more pornography than other demographics, said Samuel Perry, a sociologist at the University of Oklahoma who researched the role of pornography in the lives of conservative Protestants. In fact, white evangelicals who regularly attend church see less pornography than the general population.
But they report much more anguish around the practice. Nearly 30% of white evangelicals say they feel depressed after using pornography, compared to 8.6% of white liberal Protestants and 19% of white Catholics, according to a survey that Perry co-conducted in February as part of the Public Discourse and Ethics Survey. White evangelicals are also significantly more likely to report that they are “addicted” to pornography.
Perry described a phenomenon in some parts of evangelical culture that he called “sexual exceptionalism”, in which sexual sins are considered more serious than other categories.
“Many men summarize how they are doing spiritually with the frequency with which they have recently seen pornography,” said Perry, reflecting on his research in evangelical contexts. “Not if they grew in their love for others, gave themselves generously of their time or spent time connecting with God, but masturbated.”
For some with experience in evangelical youth culture, Long’s fixation on sexual temptation was a reminder of a harmful approach to teaching young people how to deal with sexuality.
“It presents a very degrading view of masculinity,” said Rachael Denhollander, an evangelical advocate for victims of sexual abuse. “Every time you teach a woman in the presence of a young man it is your responsibility to prevent a man from coveting and that she has the power to keep you from sexual perversion for what she wears and what she does, what he hears is that it’s her fault. “
Jeff Chu, a Michigan writer, attended an evangelical primary and secondary school that, like many similar schools, imposed strict rules on the length of girls’ skirts, in order to encourage modesty.
“It was rarely about men controlling their own desires and often about women not being tempting,” recalled Chu. “Many of us who don’t fit the norms of that culture, whether women or queer people, are always seen as the problem.”
And while the police said that Long claimed he was not racially motivated, some saw a connection between strict sexual beliefs and violence against Asian women in particular.
“The culture of purity teaches young men to see girls who do not try to maintain modesty as sinister forces,” said Onishi. “It is hard not to think about the fact that Asian women have been sexualized and configured to be seen through the lens of another exotic who is sexually desirable.”
Despite evangelicalism’s concerns about individual sexual morality, the failures of its leaders are so numerous that they have become clichés. In the most recent example, Ravi Zacharias International Ministries announced last month that its eponymous founder had a pattern of groping and exposing himself to massage therapists, among other sexual misconduct. Zacharias, who died in 2020, owned two-day spas in the Atlanta area.
Long sought treatment for what he described to the police as a “sex addiction” at HopeQuest, an evangelical treatment center in Acworth, Georgia, the city where one of the attacks took place. The center advertises its treatment of “sex addiction” and “pornography addiction”, in addition to drugs, alcohol and gambling. The center lists indications for sex addiction, including “‘crossed lines’ of beliefs or personal values in their behavior, which results in extreme emotional distress and feelings of guilt and shame.”
Addiction language is often used in evangelical circles to describe someone who uses pornography or engages in other sexual behaviors that violate their own values, but do not necessarily reach the level of clinical addiction, Perry said.
“Sexual addiction” is not an established psychiatric diagnosis and there is debate in the mental health community about how to define and treat compulsive sexual behavior.
“There is no evidence-based treatment for sex addiction,” said Joshua Grubbs, assistant professor of psychology at Bowling Green State University and clinical psychologist.
The treatment of evangelical sexual addiction tends to emphasize total abstinence from any sexual behavior outside heterosexual marriage.
“They don’t take into account that humans are creatures with sexual desire,” said Grubbs.
Long and his family were active members of the Crabapple First Baptist Church in Milton, Georgia, which is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. In the church youth group for high school students, Long was “one of the main young people involved in everything we did,” said Brett Cottrell, a former youth and church mission pastor.
In November, an associate pastor at the church, Luke Folsom, preached a sermon on the “battle” against sin. He quoted a verse from the Gospel of Matthew in which Jesus tells his followers that it may be worthwhile to take out an eye if it leads them to sin.
He continued, addressing the use of pornography directly.
“Eliminate that by getting rid of your smartphone, getting rid of the internet connection, anything and everything that would allow you to do that,” he said. “Your soul is at stake.”
Lust, he added, is “a heart problem, not just an eye problem.”
The church, which declined a request for an interview with its leaders, issued a statement on Friday condemning the violence in the Atlanta area spas, as well as “the suspect’s stated reasons for carrying out this perverse plan”.
The church also emphasized that only the sniper was to blame for his actions.
“The women he requested for sexual acts are not responsible for his perverse sexual desires nor are they to blame for these murders,” the church said. “These actions are the result of a sinful heart and a depraved mind.”
This article was originally published in The New York Times.
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