When Religion, Sex, and Race Breed Violence
On Wednesday, America was reeling yet again from the news of another mass shooting by a white man, this time in Atlanta, GA. The majority of these victims were Asian American. The pain that many Asian Americans are feeling is exacerbated by the knowledge that this is hardly an isolated instance. It is one of the many attacks directed against Asian Americans, particularly in the past year. Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. has seen a significant increase in anti-Asian violence. Donald Trump’s political rhetoric calling the Coronavirus a “China virus” or “Kung Flu virus” further fanned the anti-Asian fire in America. What we saw in the Trump era is the normalization of anti-Asian racism. The ambivalent attitude of white Americans toward Asian Americans appears in the way they see Asian Americans as both a “model minority” and simultaneously a “threat” to the American life.
One thing that is worth noticing is that the shooter is a pastor’s kid who loves God and guns. According to someone who knows him, he is “big into religion.” How in the world could a man who is so religious — which in America often means he goes to Church and reads the Bible — be capable of such a heinous crime against fellow humans? What kind of God is this? What kind of church is this? What has gone wrong? It is at once appalling and puzzling.
This massacre reveals to us an often unrecognized reality: that many American churches have become the breeding ground of racial hatred, of white supremacy, of white terrorism. As Jim Wallis poignantly observes: “Racism is a religious issue.”
But what kind of Christianity is this? While I was reading and watching the news about this act of terrorism in Georgia, the words of Frederick Douglass kept ringing in my ears: “I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity.” In other words, Douglass does not even want to use the word Christianity to call what he understands as “the slaveholding religion.”
Even if we still call it “Christianity,” it is important to remember that whiteness lies at its very core. Here, it is not understood simply as Christianity, but as white Christianity. Whiteness has become its primary expression and content.
This white Christianity is the engine of settler colonialism, native American displacement and massacre, black enslavement, exploitation, and segregation. In this white Christianity, the lynching of black bodies becomes a ritual. White Christianity is one that continually refuses to talk about, let alone speak out against, the racial injustice, inequality, and prejudices.
This white Christianity sees itself as being the savior of the world. It sends hundreds of thousands of missionaries around the world to preach and establish white ways of life and culture as the world’s universal standard of civilization. Frantz Fanon points out that this white Christianity in the colonies “does not call the native to God's ways but to the ways of the white man, of the master, of the oppressor.”
This white Christianity burns incense at the altar of God and guns. Both guns and God are its symbol of power. As the rock band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, declares: “God and guns keep us strong, that's what this country was founded on. Well we might as well give up and run If we let 'em take our God and guns.”
And on Wednesday March 17, Americans witnessed this familiar and violent fruit of white Christianity once again, vividly, violently, and with deadly consequences.
The shooter thought that he could overcome his sex addiction by committing these murders. “It’s a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate,” reported the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office spokesman, Captain Jay Baker.
It is simply not true that because his alleged reason was sexual, his murderous act was not racially motivated. Why? White Christianity deeply invests in sexual purity. It glorifies virginity. It considers interracial sex or marriage to be an impure, unholy, act. White churches become a frontline fighter of sexual purity because racial purity comes only through sexual and blood purity. In this sense, Christian purity is both racial and sexual.
This man — this murderer — apparently is fighting with his own white demons. The gun is his penis, his phallic symbol. He is fighting against the “impure” desire of his fleshly penis by employing his metal penis, the gun.
A white man with a metal phallus is a disastrous combination.
This man’s obsession with sexual purity, an obsession profoundly rooted in a white Christian culture, has resulted in a deadly massacre against Asian Americans, particularly Asian American women. The hypersexualization of Asian American women has a long history in this country. In 1875, the U.S. Congress enacted an anti-prostitution law called the Page Act that prohibited Asian women from “China, Japan, or any Oriental country” from entering the U.S. Why? Their presence was perceived as a source of sexual impurity in this land. Seven years later, unsurprisingly, the Chinese Exclusion Act came into existence. The racial fear is interconnected with the sexual fear. So what happened in Atlanta was not only an act of racial violence, but also a sexual assault.
What can we do? While Asian American communities are grieving at this moment, real action is absolutely necessary. At a structural level, the New York Representative, Grace Meng, has (re)introduced a bill that addresses anti-Asian hate crimes. President Biden’s presidential memorandum was issued last January addressing anti-Asian discrimination and intolerance. More work still needs to be done.
In the ecclesial context, this Sunday many preachers and pastors are going to stand behind their pulpits to preach. What will they preach? Will they address the anti-Asian racism happening all around them?
Any work — any sermon — that addresses and tries to combat such anti-Asian hatred simply must take on the intersectionality of race, sex, and religion. Will you?
Ekaputra Tupamahu
Ekaputra Tupamahu is an assistant professor of New Testament at Portland Seminary in Oregon. He received his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in 2019. He earned a master's degree and an MDiv from Asia Pacific Theological Seminary, and master's degrees from the Claremont School of Theology and Vanderbilt University. Tupamahu has a broad range of academic interests, including the politics of language, race/ethnic theory, postcolonial studies, immigration studies, critical study of religion, and global Christianity (particularly Pentecostal/Charismatic movement). All these interests inform and influence the way he approaches the texts of the New Testament and the history of the early Christian movement(s). His current book project, entitled Contesting Languages: Heteroglossia and the Politics of Language in the Early Church, is under contract with Oxford University Press.
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