No images? Click here Hello fellow wayfarers, Another week of sadness and blood...The warning we should all take from the Atlanta murders…What I learned about culture wars from Gospel quartets…How Vietnamese shrimpers taught me about the sin of racism..…This is this week’s Moore to the Point. The Atlanta Shootings and the Projection of Evil Last week, I had planned to devote this week’s newsletter entirely to reader questions and comments. And then, as seems to happen tragically often these days, an unpredicted hell burst forth. As you know, a murderer shot and killed eight people in Atlanta, including six women of Asian descent. As the nation grieves these lives lost, Asian-Americans—including Asian-American Christians—describe the sort of escalating bigotry many of them are facing. And, at the same time, a conversation was sparked about the killer’s purported “excuse” that he—a member of a Southern Baptist church—was sex addicted and was lashing out at “temptations” he saw at the spas he frequented. In the New York Times, Ruth Graham analyzed the back-and-forth on what evangelical Christian sexual morality teachings might—or might not—have to do with this sort of violence—especially since the alleged killer reportedly had received treatment for “sex addiction.” I was especially drawn to the comments of sociologist Samuel Perry who drew on the research found in his book Addicted to Lust: Pornography in the Lives of Conservative Protestants. In the Times, Perry reiterated his finding that, while conservative evangelical men do not view pornography more than other men, they are more morally anguished when they do and are more likely to describe themselves as “addicted” to pornography. Indeed, in his book, Perry asserts that these conservative Protestants “both morally reject and regularly view pornography.” The result, he argues, is a kind of “moral incongruence” in which one’s supposed “values” and one’s actual life are in direct conflict. From what we know, this killer allegedly blamed the women at the spas he frequented for his “addiction.” And then he killed. There are many questions at work here—all of which are in need of reflection. Asian-American Christians remind us of the way that people of Asian descent have long been both the victims of sexual objectification and racial bigotry—sometimes to the point of physical violence. And this was my first thought and last thought about this wicked taking of human life. But my second thought was about Ravi Zacharias. No connection exists, except coincidentally, between these killings and the scandal that rocked the evangelical world about the famed apologist’s now-revealed history of sexual predation. But the coincidences stood out to me. The setting for both was centered in Atlanta. Both had to do with “spas” in which those giving massages were sexualized and victimized. Both situations had horrific consequences for people, including women of Asian descent. And in both cases there was someone who professed not just faith in Jesus Christ, but also fidelity to the Bible’s teachings on sexual morality. At some level, we can never plumb the depths of why these atrocities happen. The Bible describes the human heart as “deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?” (Jer. 17:9) and also speaks of evil as “the mystery of iniquity” (2 Thess. 2:7). But what stands out to me in all these cases is something I’ve seen repeatedly in a quarter-century of ministry, though usually with much lower stakes, and that’s what modern psychology would call “projection.” Projection, in short, is the idea that something a person loathes within himself or herself is then projected out onto something or someone else, and then attacked ruthlessly. The philosopher Rene Girard devoted much attention to what he called a “scapegoat mechanism.” According to Girard (with whom I have some serious disagreements about much), groups form rivalries, because of common and imitated desires, and those rivalries seek an escape valve in the identifying of an agreed-upon object of hatred, the scapegoat, temporarily alleviating the conflict. This is not the same thing as “projection,” but both result in internal problems made external—with innocent people facing the brunt of the violence (whether physical, emotional, or spiritual). Now, some will say that projection is a secular idea that is part of a “postmodern therapeutic culture,” but we see this everywhere in Scripture. In Genesis, Cain’s sacrifice is rejected and Abel’s received, culminating in Cain’s rage at Abel (Gen. 4:1-10). As Jewish philosopher Leon Kass pointed out in his monumental work, The Beginning of Wisdom, Cain’s anger wasn’t really at Abel, but at God. Cain perceived an injustice that he felt as an insult, but directed his rage not at the invisible and invulnerable God but at his innocent brother in front of him. Thus, the apostle John equates the spirit of murder at work in Cain with those who say they love God but hate their brothers and sisters (1 Jn. 3:11-18). And when found in murder, Cain’s immediate thought goes to potential murderers out there who might seek to do to him what he did to his brother (Gen. 4:14). The Apostle Paul points out what some might today call “projection” in his letter to the church at Rome. After detailing the sins of the pagan world outside of the people of God (Rom. 1:18-2:16), noting that God’s revelation in creation and conscience render everyone “without excuse,” Paul turns what he expects to be nodding heads of judgment around on the readers themselves. “..you then who teach others, do you not teach yourself?” Paul writes. “While you preach against stealing, do you steal? You who say that one must not commit adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples?” (Rom. 2:21-22). The point here is not only that the religious people—those entrusted to teach the Law—were hypocrites (although that’s certainly true), but that they were accusing others of doing the very things they were guilty of doing. Indeed, we see that at work even among Jesus’ original disciples—with Judas accusing a woman of wasting money that should go to the poor (Jn. 12:4-5). Interestingly, John writes: “He said this, not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief, and having charge of the moneybag he used to help himself to what was put into it” (Jn. 12:6). Note that John did not write that Judas said this even though he was a thief but because he was a thief. The problem was not just that he was a hypocrite, but that he was accusing an innocent third-party of the very thing he was doing at the time. Indeed, in Mark’s account of the story, the disciples who accused this woman (leaving Judas unnamed here) “said to themselves indignantly, ‘Why was the ointment wasted like that?’” (Mk. 14:4). The Bible says they said to themselves, and they said this not with the appearance of being indignant but with the reality of it. The problem was not just the deception of others, but the deception of self. Thus, some people who devote their lives purportedly to the objectivity of truth, turn to the subjectivity of truth when telling vulnerable women that they are “helping the ministry” by their being abused. And some who loathe themselves for their immorality turn their rage against those innocent people they deem “temptations” rather than seeing where the guilt and shame really resides—within themselves. When I was a child, I knew some kids whose family was much stricter than ours. They thought we were labeled “liberals” because we were allowed to watch television (This turned out to be key training for me personally later on). That was especially true because we watched “occult” shows (like reruns of Bewitched or cartoon versions of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.) What I noticed was that these kids were completely captivated by the television when they were at our house. And they were the ones who would use sexual innuendos that I could not understand at all for, literally, a decade after I heard them—and later were involved with all sorts of stuff that I didn’t even know existed (even with all my pagan listening to such edgy music as Amy Grant). What I see now is that, at least there, the little culture war was not just incongruent with the “family values,” but was instead the price paid to feel Christian. The problem was dancing. The problem was “secular music.” The problem was television. The problem was “the culture.” The problem was out there, not in here. Not only is that not the gospel; it doesn’t even work (Col. 2:23). Every community and every idea system, of course, has those who are deranged and violent. There is no way for any group to eliminate entirely the vulnerability to such people. In those cases, what must happen is accountability—of the perpetrator to every relevant public authority with the full cooperation of the people of God. But, even apart from such extreme and violent cases, the principle at work affects us all. The Bible tells us that even truths—sometimes even the most glorious truths in the universe—can be twisted out of context to seem to mean the opposite of what they mean (Rom. 3:5-8). And Jesus warns his disciples: “Indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God. And they will do these things because they have not known the Father, nor me” (Jn. 16:2-3). This is not an excuse for their behavior, but the opposite. The self-deception is so deep, Jesus says, that those committing such things will think they are doing God’s will. That’s not a step short of hypocrisy, but a leap beyond it. As I’ve written here before, I’ve seen over and over again people who cover their own internal shame and guilt with a seeming mission to shame others for the very things to which they are secretly in bondage. This is not irony or coincidence; it is a key aspect of how depravity works. That’s why the Bible speaks of “the mind of the flesh” (Rom. 8:6-7) both in terms of sexual anarchy and envy and violence and quarrelsomeness and religious zeal apart from the gospel (Gal. 5:13-21; Phil. 3:3-11). Doing spiritual warfare the way the Bible teaches it is difficult: submission to God, confession of sin, life in community, the hard process of discipleship. But one can have the illusory feeling of spiritual warfare by make-believing that fellow human beings—or the “culture” they inhabit—are the problem. The very act of denunciation can feel like discipleship—at least for a moment. But it destroys the person doing this—and often innocent others too. Back to Rene Girard, I’m reminded of reading an interview in which he said that what most alarmed him about some of the academic settings in which he had worked was “the combination of ferocity and nihilism” he so often saw there. He said it was “a most peculiar form of fanaticism: fanatics who don’t believe in anything.” That’s not limited to faculty lounges. Indeed, some of the most ferocious denouncers of sexual immorality “in the culture” are sexual nihilists inside. Some of the most virulent defenders of orthodoxy have psyches devoid of prayer. But, like the priests of Baal shrieking and cutting themselves, they do so not because they believe so much but because they really believe in nothing. That’s too terrifying a reality to face so they find other dragons to fight. We don’t yet know all the details of all that is behind this awful string of murders, but we know enough already to remind us something of how evil works. We’ve seen abusers and those who empower them label the abused as “Jezebels” or “temptresses” or “Potiphar’s wife.” I have heard chilling testimony from innocent survivors who heard abusers blame them “for what you are making me do.” For most people that won’t result in anything approaching those extremes, but the tendency is there for all of us to take what is internal twistedness or shame and—instead of taking it to the light of Christ—to project it onto another, and to count that person or people or structures or cultures as an enemy to be destroyed. This is not the gospel. In fact, it is another gospel than the gospel of Jesus Christ. Sometimes it ends in murder, but it always ends in death. What a Gospel Quartet Taught Me About Sin Many years ago I was talking to a Christian who had spent much of his early life traveling around in a gospel quartet. He said, “I had to leave it; I just couldn’t deal with the hedonism of that lifestyle.” I nodded my head, and sat silently for a second, before saying, “Wait, I thought you said you were in a gospel quartet, but you were describing what sounds to me what I would imagine for a death metal band.” He said, “A death metal band is far less of a hedonistic environment than the one I lived through in Christian music.” He could see my incredulity, and he said, “I don’t know about everybody else; I just know about my own experience…but, man, it was wild.” He talked about the cutthroat competitiveness he experienced. The drugs that people were taking. And the constant swirl of sexual intrigue that came along with a whirl of adulterous relationships, one-night stands, and rancorous marriage split-ups. He quickly followed that up by saying that he knew many other people in the gospel quartet world who had a completely opposite experience—with genuine spirituality and artistic excellence too—but he happened onto a part of that world that was like this. What stayed with me was not that he had seen all that. I had by that time lived long enough to see hypocrisy. What lingers to this day is how he said it happened. He said that, in his circle of musicians, the Christian nature of the business was not a restraint of immorality but an accelerant. He said that because people were singing biblical lyrics—and giving their testimonies in between—night after night after night, that such things started to feel like just part of the business. He found that “getting away from work” (as we all have to do) meant for many of them “taking a break” from everything that reminded them of “work.” In time, the Bible and the gospel started to become just part of the act. Moreover, he said that the particular form of emotionalism that was part of his “brand” meant the ability to turn emotions (or at least a good impersonation of them) on and off at will. After all, the “show must go on.” One must look like one is in awe of God, even when one is bored and ready to get back to the bus. One must tear up at the thought of the power in the blood, even when one is thinking about what’s next to eat. Over time, he said, some of them started to “dis-integrate,” to have their feelings and their wills and their minds out of touch with one another. As the early church’s encounter with Gnosticism showed us, a disconnection of the spirit from flesh and blood—even when under the guise of asceticism—doesn’t lead to discipline but to debauchery. Hyper-spirituality always leads not to “walking the line” but to a “ring of fire.” And, more than that, he said, the people with whom he was doing ministry weren’t really “frauds.” By that he meant that they weren’t really atheists pretending to be Christians, hawking prayer cloths while reading Richard Dawkins’ tracts back on the bus. They believed they were doing ministry. And, over time, they started to believe that they were kind of owed some moral slack because of all they were doing for the kingdom. They weren’t consciously making these reasoned arguments, he said, counting the balance of souls saved at concerts over against cheating on spouses in the green rooms. If asked, anyone there would have been able to argue that only grace counts us righteous before God. But at the more unconscious level, he said, they started to see their “ministry” as a kind of system of indulgences balancing out their sins. Now, again, I’ve since talked to many people in the gospel quartet world who have had nothing like that experience—and I’ve talked to people in almost every arena of life who have had exactly that sort of experience. This is not about quartet culture or music culture or about culture really at all—but about the ways we can talk ourselves into almost anything. And the more that one is able to call what one does “ministry” sometimes the more dangerous that possibility can be. You can’t escape that—even singing every night in a gospel quartet. And you can’t escape it by leaving the tour bus. You can only know it for what it is—and seek a kingdom that embraces not as employees or entertainers in debt but as sons and daughters by grace. What I Learned from Vietnamese Immigrants This week I have spent a great deal of time hearing from, and praying with, Asian-American Christians who have, after the murder of these six Asian women, sought to remind the rest of us of escalating hostility many of them have faced, especially over the past year. This has been true for people of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Malaysian, and Vietnamese descent, and various other Asian people groups. As one person said to me, “The ‘ordinary racism’ many of us have experienced is amped up by people blaming Asian people for COVID-19—along with language of the ‘China virus’ or ‘Kung flu’ meant to stir up that kind of ‘us versus them’ mentality.” Normally I do not ever read Facebook comments on my organization’s page, but I just happened to open the page this week, to an article by an Asian-American colleague, on just this topic, and my eye landed on one comment. A woman said something like, “Well, then they should go back to Asia, and then they won’t have to worry about it.” For whatever reason, I clicked on her avatar to see her describe herself in her bio as a Christian who is committed “to treating others better than they treat me.” Anyone reading that comment, who has ever heard, much less experienced, the taunt of “why don’t you go back to…” would immediately recognize it for how awful it is. For a second or two, I was transported back to life growing up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where a major struggle for me was trying to recognize the “moral incongruence” of Bible Belt Christianity and racism. When most people think of Mississippi, they immediately—and rightly—think of racism in terms of black and white. After all, Mississippi was the bloodiest state of racial violence—from people enslaved on plantations in the Delta to the lynching of African-Americans such as Emmett Till to the beating and imprisonment of Fannie Lou Hamer to the murders of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney in Neshoba County in 1964 and on and on. The aftermath of all of this affected me deeply, at the level of moral perplexity—How can you believe that and sing this? But what really, I think, showed me some of the ways bigotry actually works at the psychological level was not the racism directed toward African-Americans but toward Asian-Americans. The part of Mississippi where I’m from—along the coastline, just down the way from New Orleans—is quite different from what most people think of when they think of Mississippi. This is a majority Catholic area—made up of immigrants from what they called “Slavic” countries (like Croatia). I loved it—right down to the Pusharatas that were everywhere at Christmastime (look it up; delicious). Our primary industry was seafood (and my mother’s fried shrimp is the best in the world; I will fight you on that). After the fall of south Vietnam in the mid-1970s, Biloxi became a hub for relocated Vietnamese fishermen and their families fleeing Communism and seeking to start a new life. Many of them started working in shrimping or in shucking oysters and other such jobs. Most of the Vietnamese kids I knew had parents who didn’t speak English. A lot of those kids were teased horrifically—with other children making fun of their accents or pretending to narrow their eyes or mocking stereotypical, supposedly “Asian sounding” voices or making racist jokes about making sure their dogs or cats weren’t eaten by the Vietnamese. A lot of kids also showed kindness and immediate friendship to the newcomers, but the bullying was horrifying and, I am sure, traumatizing. What I couldn’t discern, at first, is why the people who resented these Vietnamese refugees did so. Sometimes it was because, it was said, they were “Communists” often employing a racial slur employed against Vietnamese people. But that didn’t make sense—these were people fleeing Communism. They were literally more anti-Communist than any of us (and that was saying something). Some would say it was because they were “pagan.” That didn’t make sense either. Weren’t we taking up missions offerings to share the good news of Christ with people all over the world? Why do that if we hate them? And, what’s more, I soon came to see that many, if not most, of these Vietnamese communities were intensely Christian. Some of the most vibrant churches around were in those first- and second-generation Vietnamese communities. I also heard that the Vietnamese were lazy and were coming here “for welfare.” But then I would hear the same people complaining that the Vietnamese were “taking all of our jobs” because they would work harder for less pay. Now one of these could be true, I thought, but both of them can’t. These people are either too lazy to work or they are people who work so much harder than anyone else that they will put everyone else out of work—but both couldn’t be true. Over time, I started to see—for the people who had bigotry against our new neighbors—it wasn’t that they saw reasons and then hated them. It was that they hated them, and then found reasons to do so. That’s how it works. The Croatians and the Italians had faced the same thing when they arrived: they will take our jobs, they will destroy our work ethic, they will be loyal to the Pope not to the flag, and so on. Now the Vietnamese community is an essential part of my hometown. They didn’t put everyone out of work. They didn’t want to be dependent on anyone. Their kids and grandkids not only learned English, but are as thoroughly Americanized (in both the good and the bad that comes with that) as anyone. For all the talk about God and country that goes on these days, the Vietnamese refugee community came here, for the most part, because they wanted to worship God and because they loved this country. For all the talk of “America First,” these were people who so desperately wanted to be Americans that they were willing to leave their jobs and families behind, to trek out onto dangerous waters, to start a life where they couldn’t even read the street signs, to work two and three jobs so their children would have a future. It’s hard to get more American than that. Desert Island Bookshelf This week’s submission is by my friend Mark Meynell. He didn’t give any commentary, but there’s quite a rich variety on this shelf. What do you think? If you could have one bookshelf with you to last you the rest of your life, what volumes would you choose? Send a picture to me with as much or as little explanation of your choices as you would like. Quote of the Moment “You can’t fight the Enemy with his own Ring without turning into an Enemy; but unfortunately Gandalf’s wisdom seems long ago to have passed with him into the True West.” — J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter to Christopher Tolkien, in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1995), 94. Currently Reading (or Re-Reading) John Archibald, Shaking the Gates of Hell: A Search for Family and Truth in the Wake of the Civil Rights Revolution (Knopf) Adam Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know (Viking) Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (Harvard University Press) I’m also reading several galleys of books I’ve been asked to blurb, including a magnificent book by my friend Russ Ramsey. Since y’all know about my ongoing battles with autocorrect, I was trying to text him “Your book is SO GOOD,” and realized right before I hit send that it had autocorrected to “Your book is SO GOOFY.” The book’s not goofy at all. The Courage to Stand You can order a copy of my newest book, The Courage to Stand: Facing Your Fear Without Losing Your Soul (B&H) here (or wherever you buy books). Questions and Ethics I have re-launched the “Questions and Ethics” part of my podcast. You can subscribe here. Please send me your moral dilemmas—about life, school, work, spirituality, family, whatever—and I’ll do my best to answer (and I’ll never, of course, use your name, unless you ask me to do so). You can send your questions to questions@russellmoore.com. Say Hello And, of course, I would love to hear from you. Send me an email if you have any questions or comments about this newsletter, other things you would like to see discussed here, or if you would just like to say hello! If you have a friend who might like this, please forward it along, and if you’ve gotten this from a friend, please subscribe! Onward, Russell Moore |