Facing the Uncomfortable Truth About the Atlanta Shooter

There are some uncomfortable facts that came out this past week about the Atlanta shooter, Aaron Long. He was an active member of a Southern Baptist church. He had a sex problem that included pornography and visiting massage parlors. He had been treated in an in-patient program for sex addiction.  And yet, he was a kid that might have seemed a model young person in any of our youth groups (here)

Long’s former classmate at Sequoyah High School in Canton recalled that he brought a Bible to school every day and would walk around holding it in his hands. He was “super nice, super Christian, very quiet,” Nico Straughan, 21, told The Associated Press. “He went from one of the nicest kids I ever knew in high school to being on the news yesterday.”

His church has disavowed his behavior and the primary reason that he was identified and arrested is that his own parents saw him in news and called the authorities. Even though Long said that his motivation was not racial, it is continuing to be reported that it was.

In a bizarre twist, Time Magazine has run an article identifying evangelical moral teaching as the real cause for his problem (here). The assumption is that his sexual proclivities are normal and it is only evangelical moral restrictions that drove Long to such behavior. That is ridiculous.

De-humanizing people is not a biblical perspective.

Taking another slant, the New Yorker ran an article today entitled The Atlanta Shooter and the De-humanization of Asian Women (here).

The de-humanization of Asian women is at the heart of the crime committed this week—but not in the same way that the New Yorker describes it.

Please let me explain.

The disregard for life, rooted deeply in the heart of Aaron Long, did not spring up suddenly. He was not taught it at church either. There is no other place where Asian women, and women in general, are de-humanized more than the sex industry and specifically the pornography industry.

God’s Rules Have Reasons.

Let’s start by asking a basic question—the one that the Time Magazine article does not ask, and therefore fails to answer. Why is sexual sin considered a sin at all?

God’s laws are not arbitrary.  He is not the great cosmic spoilsport who wants to take away all our fun.  After all, God created sex, even commanded it (Genesis 1:28), and made it something beautiful and enjoyable as long as it occurs within biblical marriage (Genesis 2:24, Hebrews 13:4). When God establishes boundaries, He does so for a purpose, and specifically for our good.

Sex outside of God’s boundaries pushes against the way that we were created. God created every human being in His image, in His likeness.  Eventually, such sin fantasizes about treating others as objects to be used and abused, rather than valuable people created in the image of God. Among other reasons, the Bible’s sexual boundaries are intended to protect women from abuse! Anyone who does not think the porn and sex industry is abusive has their head in the sand. It is an industry that de-humanizes people and then throws them out when it is finished, and every click on every website contributes to that process. Even observers in the secular world see this (here and here).

The Bible presents sexual sin as destructive to self and to others. It is irresponsible and dishonest to blame Aaron Young’s behavior on his evangelical roots. His problem was deep in his thinking and either that thinking flowed out of or found a place to prosper in pornography and his sexual habits.

The heart motivation for all actions for all believers is found in the two great commandments–love. Love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself. Pornography and sexual sin defies God’s perfect plan for us (no love for God), destroys the lives of others (no love for others) as it destroys our own lives (self-destructive pattern for self).

The mind of Christ is essential for true Christian thinking.

One of the ways we overcome sin is to view the world through the eyes of Christ. Jesus did not come to the world to condemn the world, the entire world was already under condemnation and judgment (John 3:18). He came to save the world. Jesus saw people, even people with sexual problems–like the woman at the well (John 4), or the woman taken in adultery (John 8:1-11)—as people–people who Christ treated with compassion. He did not condone or excuse their behavior but led them to forgiveness. He then frowned in divine judgment at the hypocrisy of the men standing around with stones in their hands who were themselves guilty of the same sin (John 8:7). Aaron Long was just like one of those men standing in the crowd—guilty of sexual sin and yet willing to execute a woman because of it. Every human being working in the sex industry is a person for whom Christ died and will spend eternity somewhere forever.

So, was this a hate crime? In a very real spiritual sense, it was.

Aaron Long poisoned his mind with images and practices that treated women—in his specific case Asian women—as objects for his personal abuse. It is not surprising then that when he decided to discard the practice, he also thought it reasonable to discard the objects of that abuse. His thinking was (and is) warped.  He told authorities that he saw these women as “temptations to be eliminated.”  If he had seen them as Jesus does–as individual souls who will spend eternity somewhere forever (2 Peter 3:9)–he would have acted differently.

May God open the eyes of us all to truly see people as Jesus Christ sees them.