A great deal of attention has been focused on the eight people killed in Atlanta by an individual that a sheriff’s deputy described as experiencing “a really bad day.”
Why did this individual, only 21 years of age, ended up having such “a really bad day?”
Here’s a suggestion. This young man had such a day because he had been taught for years to reject himself as a sexual individual. His “really bad day” reflected how he felt about himself as an individual.
Despite entering two sexual addiction centers, the perpetrator of these crimes continued to hate his sexuality to the point that he projected this hatred onto the eight individuals he ended up murdering.
Let’s be quite clear that when people commit horrific acts, they show outwardly the hatred they feel deep within themselves concerning their own self.
Robert Aaron Long has been called by one who knew him a “deeply religious person” who “would often go on tangents about his interpretation of the Bible.” CNN was also told that Long felt “tortured” by his addiction to sex and had gone to massage parlors in the past to satisfy his sexual cravings.
Long is not the first person whose religious convictions and his sexual appetite have clashed in a manner that resulted in horrendous crimes. Much of the witch hunts of the past rested on just such a clash.
Now charged with eight counts of murder, Long was “distraught about his addiction to sex.” He is said to have confessed to a friend that he “needed to return to prayer and to return to God.”
The tragedy of this is that religious institutions, thinking they are doing just the opposite, are unwittingly guilty of promoting the behavior they vociferously condemn. They of course get off scot free, as if they promoted only virtue.
I am speaking of the kind of churches that this young man attended. Acts such as this individual committed emerge from a background in which, instead of being supported as sexual beings, males are castigated.
The message of so many churches is, To feel the way you do about women is SIN.
The evening before Long went on this rampage, he had been kicked out of his parents’ house because of his addiction to porn. Thus the day he committed these crimes, he was in a highly emotional state. A hatred of himself had developed over the years, aided and abetted by those closest to him, including his church.
To understand Long’s tragic state, we need to connect him to his biblical beliefs. It appears that, in seventh grade, he brought a Bible to school every day and was described as a “super nice, super Christian, very quiet.” He was also described as “deeply religious,” a person who, when he visited massage parlors specifically for sex, became “very emotionally distraught that he frequented these places.”
If, instead of being reprimanded for his sexual urges, from a young age this man had experienced affirmation of himself as a sexual being, these murders would never have occurred. We live under the mistaken notion that disapproval successfully curtails what we commonly call “sin.”
On the contrary, disapproval encourages what people refer to as “sin.” How many times have we seen television evangelists, together with countless leaders of large congregations, caught up in the very evils they have long deplored?
If you are at all in touch with the news, you know that being a church, temple, or other form of religious leader doesn’t save a person from becoming notorious for their sexual impulses. The desire for sex, when combined with prohibition in a particular form of biblical interpretation, can at times lead to devastating consequences of the sort we saw in Atlanta.
Look at the witness of the Hebrew Scriptures, known to Christians as the Old Testament. From the Genesis story onward, the writers sought to control deviant behavior with the prohibition “Thou shalt NOT.”
It never worked. The whole of the Old Testament testifies to people’s inability to function well under a system of moral laws. As the prophets themselves testified, if moral behavior doesn’t come from the heart, it will fail to produce a society in which individuals value one another.
Sadly, the words of Jesus have also been interpreted in such a distorted way. “Everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart,” Jesus said. “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.” The right hand is the one most used to masturbate, right? Jesus knew he had caught most of his audience red-handed.
Jesus was not endorsing the Ten Commandments. He was giving an example of how our righteousness has to far surpass mere law-keeping. He was showing how, if we want to live according to moral laws, we can’t even think in a manner that contravenes these laws. Trying to confirm to such laws led Long to murder those whose very appearance, instead of being appreciated, became a temptation to him. This is why it’s being reported that Long saw the spas as “a temptation…that he wanted to eliminate.” How wrong this thinking is. To live a virtuous life, Long needed to discover how he could honor his sexual desires.
But if laws don’t cut it, what does?
“We often withhold approval,” writes Nicole Daedone, “believing that to approve is to endorse poor behavior, when in fact it is the exact opposite. When we approve, we have control, like turning into a skid. Only then can change occur.”
The Sunday before Long committed his crimes, the pastor spoke of coming judgment. The news reports, “When Christ returns, Dockery said, he will wage war against those who have rejected his name.”
This pastor continued, “There is one word devoted to their demise. Swept away! Banished! Judged. They have no power before God. Satan himself is bound and released and then bound again and banished. That great dragon deceiver — just that quickly—God throws him into an eternal torment. And then we read where everyone—everyone that rejects Christ—will join Satan, the Beast and the false prophet in hell.”
Does anyone see how hateful this language is? These are the words of a God of love, who taught us to “love our enemies?”
At a time when Long needs to be assured that, despite this horrendous act, he is loved by God, his church has rejected him. More disapproval on a lifetime of disapproval.
When I was about twelve years old, my Sunday School teacher took a group of boys from Yorkshire to London for the first time. We of course were thrilled to ride the “tube.” Opposite us on the underground one evening sat a very sexy, gorgeous young woman. I was struck by how the Sunday School teacher’s eyes kept going to the woman, even though he fought the temptation. You could tell how disturbed he was. This rejection of their desires is the model young boys are taught by many spiritual institutions. Resist temptation at all costs!
What Jesus was saying was the direct opposite. If you want to live by moral laws, you doom yourself. As Nicole Daedone goes on to say, “Approval opens us in such a way that we are able to accurately receive information about the world. Approval is a living affirmation of our interior wealth. It affirms that we can afford to say yes. Approval is the key of a resilient mind. It becomes a primary tool of growth, whereby we commit ourselves to the entirety of our experience. We embrace the totality of our lives. We do not acquiesce, but receive and approve. No brilliance has ever come from disapproval. With approval, we will see how we can come to learn to love what’s happening right here, right now.”
Young men need to be taught how to value themselves. To the degree that they value who they are, they will treat women with respect—not by denying their sexual appetites, but by valuing the fact that they are sexual beings.
To again quote Daedone, “Our desire is a sensory organ that travels with us through the world, feeling for the deeper things that we want, such as the pleasures of connection and love, together with a feeling of belonging that brings us into the fullness of who we are. The desire for these experiences is often squeezed out of our lives based on our ideas about what’s right or proper, or what we should be doing in any given moment, or who we aspire to be. We can feel when that happens. Our bodies contract, get tight. Our relationship with desire can be gauged by how fluid and flowing our bodies feel.”
There was nothing flowing in this young man who committed these atrocious killings. The churches he grew up in did everything they could to squeeze his sexuality into a formula for what’s “right and proper”—a formula that has led countless millions to hate who they are across the world and throughout the ages.
Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount was showing us the outcome of living a suppressed life in which we assume moral laws can somehow bequeath to us control of our desires. He illustrated the impossibility of living according to moral law. If you want to live that way, he said, you can’t even speak a wrong word. If you do, you will be judged. Law is the path to hell, he warned—and yet almost the entirety of the religious world of the West has bought into this idea. By so doing, religion often teaches us to hate who we find ourselves to be.
Sometimes this results in such a deep hatred of ourselves that we project it out on those individuals who remind us of how deeply we desire legitimate sexual expression. In the depths of our being, we love sex so passionately that we can end up killing those who remind us of this suppressed desire.