On March 16, 2021 a series of mass shootings occurred in three spas in the Atlanta metropolitan area. Eight people were killed, six of whom were Asian women, and one other person was wounded. In the days that followed the tragedy, my news and social media feeds were full of posts that isolated the shooter Robert Long’s motivations exclusively to one of three separate issues: the toxicity of purity culture, unwanted sexual behavior, or racism.
One friend said, “This (shooting) is the result of purity culture. Purity culture sets people up to hate their sexuality and go to extremes to eliminate temptation.” Another friend shared, “The man literally said he was a sex addict. Why are we making this about race? Mainstream media is deceiving us about this being influenced by anti-Asian hate.” Others said, “This is all about racism. It has nothing to do with sex, lust or addiction.” As you can see, we are naturally bent to see these issues isolated from one another. I believe this separation is central to why we remain steeped in misguided theologies of sex, antiquated frameworks for addressing unwanted sexual behavior, and anesthetized to the prevalence of racism.
But what if purity culture, unwanted sexual behavior, and racism are not three separate issues, but one river, with three distinct tributaries? While it’s easy to see them as mutually exclusive entities, they encourage and intensify one another. For example, purity culture may have influenced you to judge your sexual desires, while racism in pornography simultaneously encouraged you to violently objectify Asian women, which together end up compounding the shame of your unwanted sexual behavior. Or you might feel self-contempt and powerlessness within your sexual life and end up projecting that hate (scapegoating) onto another race to reestablish an experience of power. Each tributary on its own is enough to create pervasive damage, but together their confluence is catastrophic. Let’s dig deeper to address the intimate connections between them.
A personal history
To show how purity culture, unwanted sexual behavior, and racism complement each other, I want to share a few stories from my personal experience. I went through puberty while attending a Southern Baptist high school in Virginia. It’s not an experience I’d recommend. I mention this because Robert Long could have easily been a classmate had he been a few years older and several states closer. During high school, I was initiated into the damage of each of the three issues, but only recently have I begun to see how they fuel and reinforce one another.
Purity Culture in a Southern Baptist High School
Purity culture is a set of beliefs and practices that instill an unhealthy fear of sexuality among its followers. Through purity rings, purity pledges, and a whole host of other tactics, purity culture pressures individuals to remain “pure” until marriage by entirely abstaining from sexuality. Some of my clients have even been offered large sums of money to refrain from kissing on their wedding day. Purity culture or the purity movement, as it is sometimes called, was alive and well at my high school.
I was the student body president my senior year and was involved with planning a homecoming dance along with other members of the student council. If you have been part of any Baptist circles, you know planning a dance is dangerous terrain. There is a joke among Baptists about the need to refrain from sex because it might lead to dancing. If dancing can’t be avoided, there was a joke for that too: always leave enough room for the Holy Spirit between you and your dance partner.
While the student council was planning the dance, the head of the school caught wind of the event and called me into his office. I sat down and he asked me to consider not attending the dance because I was the leader of the student body. I told him I had no theological reservations against dancing. As the son of a presbyterian minister, my issue was not with dancing, but getting my ‘frozen chosen’ body into motion. What he said next unsettled me, “I want you to imagine you are dancing with your homecoming date. Now when you think about your body close up against her body in a beautiful dress, are you able to stay pure?” I don’t remember what I said or how I got out of his office, but I knew the meeting had far more to do with his sexuality than mine. While I enjoyed and respected this man on most occasions, when it came to the topics of sex and sexuality, I wanted to run for the hills.
The Damage of Purity Culture
One of the damaging consequences I witnessed through my high school experience was that students saw their self-worth rise and fall according to their success in managing lust (during puberty, nonetheless). Inevitably, this set-up a sexual binge and purge cycle among students that, for many of us, would last for decades. The sexual binge and purge cycle is when one indulges (binge) in a sexual behavior or fantasy. Steeped in guilt, the individual looks for a way to eliminate (purge) it from their life. Common purge practices include listening to a worship song, spending an extended quiet time with Jesus focused on your thought life, or a competition at youth group to see who could go the longest without masturbating. I have little doubt that this blueprint of bingeing on sexual behavior followed by an aggressive purge to eliminate temptation was part of Aaron Long’s history too.
The longer a person remains in purity culture, the more they develop self-hatred and suspicion towards others. While some will become a scapegoat for their rebellion, most assimilate to some capacity. Here are some common characteristics of purity culture kids:
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- Significant self-hatred and sexual shame from their inability to succeed in purity.
- A marked distrust for their sexual desires.
- Surveillance on one another’s sexual behavior, masquerading as accountability.
- Increased suspicion for the gender they are attracted to because they are seen either as a stumbling block or potential perpetrator.
- A growing sense that God is ashamed of them.
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Purity culture is tragic, but make no mistake, it’s also a wicked system that causes great harm to everyone involved.
Unwanted Sexual Behavior
As an upperclassman, my understanding of unwanted sexual behavior in a Christian context was significantly shaped by a white chapel speaker who told an Inuit peoples’ story where they would dip a razor-sharp knife in seal’s blood and let it freeze. The knife and seal blood popsicle would then be placed outside the Inuit camp as a defense against wolves. When the wolves would smell the blood, they would begin licking the knife. The pleasure derived from tasting the seal’s blood would then distract the wolf from the awareness that its own blood was now in the mix. The wolf’s tongue had been sliced open licking the knife and it would eventually die from the loss of blood. The speaker used this as an allegory to masturbation, porn, and pre-marital sex. He summarized, “What you think is pleasurable is actually going to kill you.”
From my front pew, I turned behind me to see scores of horrified underclassmen and middle schoolers, no doubt fearing for their spiritual and sexual lives. It is no surprise so many chapel services ended with the opportunity to recommit our lives to the Lord. It was here that I learned that sexual shame could be a very valuable commodity to the church.
In the weeks that followed, there was a significant uptick in “unspoken” prayer requests in my homeroom class. An unspoken prayer was a prayer you didn’t want another human being to hear, but you still wanted to acknowledge before God. In my homeroom, we’d pray for grandparents with cancer, a sick dog, and submit endless unspokens. Looking back, I’d suspect that the vast majority of these requests had to do with sexual behavior or fantasies.
The solution to “every man’s battle” and sexual pleasure were different depending on your gender. Males were instructed to manage their lust through suppression and women were led to believe that they were a stumbling block to males and therefore would need to be exceedingly modest. Weapons in this war against sexual sin for males included, kissing dating goodbye, bouncing our eyes from temptation, laying a large towel over a computer or television computer set to eliminate temptation, and years later, installing internet monitoring. For females included purity pledges, no pants or shorts with logos across the buttocks, homecoming dresses with wide straps, no bare midriffs, no revealing low-cut tops, and awful similes comparing their sexual experiences before marriage to be like offering a lollipop to be licked and chewed on by multiple men before they gave it to their future husband. As you can see, unwanted sexual behavior was not understood to be part of the process of discipleship, it was something to eliminate.
Racism
I did not know it as a high schooler, but in May 1845, the Southern Baptist denomination was formed when it split from the broader American Baptist movement. The Southern Baptist denomination was formed for one primary purpose: to protect slavery in the Baptist church. There is no debate or exaggeration about this. It was not until 1995 that the Southern Baptist convention officially renounced its roots and apologized for defending slavery, segregation, and white supremacy.
When I entered my Southern Baptist high school in 1998, racist jokes were rampant, far more so than in the public schools I previously attended in Virginia. Sadly, I devoured these forms of dehumanization. I scoured the internet to find more, even adding them to a Word document. These inhumane jests among whites fueled amusement, in the truest sense of the word. Amusement is taken from Old French amuser “to fool, tease, hoax, entrap.” Humor was an attempt to fool ourselves about how much violence was embedded within our laughter.
As an upperclassman, I remember a person of color getting into one of the best universities in Virginia. Many white peers discredited her academic efforts. In our envy, we rehearsed lines we undoubtedly heard from our parents and churches about affirmative action, welfare, and blacks stealing so much more than our paychecks. We’d even ask why the black community couldn’t be more like Asians: their men, were hard-working, quiet, and earned what they received. Their women weren’t loud or lazy, but instead were submissive and eager to please. I became fluent in learning how idealize one BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) community in order to devalue another. Tragically, I dehumanized all of us.
Contempt Fuels More Contempt
My high school experience with purity culture, unwanted sexual behavior, and racism initiated me into a life of contempt against myself and others. This is their bond. Contempt, as psychologist and author Dan Allender notes, is like smoke and fire. Where you have one, you will always have the other. For example, if I hate myself or am deeply insecure, I might become volatile towards someone else when I feel exposed by them. Or if someone in authority mistreats me, I am more likely to feel a level of self-contempt for how weak or stupid I felt, which sets me up to mistreat someone else who has less power than me. The madness of unwanted sexual behaviors is that the contempt I feel for myself often pushes me to reestablish power through using someone else for sexual gain. Often times, the victim I choose for my fantasy or behavior can be culturally sanctioned as a subordinate race or gender, eager to please me in my pain.
As I will show in the remainder of the article, purity culture demands you eliminate sexual temptation with militant fervor, unwanted sexual behavior steeps you in tremendous judgment, and racism (along with gender-based violence) provides a scapegoat to release your pain and rage against. Dismantling the contempt embedded in purity culture, unwanted behaviors, and racism are not à la carte menu options that we get to pick or choose. To heal, we must address all three.
Purity Culture Became Lust-Management
The standard evangelical response to unwanted sexual behaviors like the use of porn, extra-marital affairs, buying sex, and hookups has been to address it through “lust management,” even declaring war against it. Efforts to eliminate sexual desires set up people to manage their sexual lives with a tourniquet. Those coming out of purity culture end up spending the best years of their life bouncing their eyes from beautiful people, slapping rubber bands around their wrists and asking accountability partners to keep track of what websites they’ve visited. The reality that more than half of our faith leaders and the great majority of Christians continue in unwanted sexual behaviors should indicate that our understanding of human sexuality and our strategies are inadequate.
Purity culture is not only harmful to men, it also degrades women. Sheila Gregoire, author of the book The Great Sex Rescue, notes that how some of the most popular Christian books on sex and marriage perpetuate violence against women. She notes, “Every Man’s Battle tells women: ‘Once he tells you he’s (quitting lust) cold turkey, be like a merciful vial of methadone for him.’ Proving the metaphor was deliberate, the authors repeat it: ‘Your wife can be a methadone-like fix when your temperature is rising.’ No talk of intimacy or dignity: she is simply a ‘methadone-like fix.’” Gregoire rightly concludes: “Nevertheless, throughout our evangelical bestsellers, the message to women comes through as loud as a bullhorn: His need for sex is bigger than your need for anything else. And when women don’t put out? Men apparently become predators.”
When men fail to succeed in lust management or women refrain from offering their bodies like methadone, it only compounds the pain for everyone. For pain, the Church prescribes the same ineffective and toxic treatment plans. Sadly, we never invite people to see that their unwanted sexual behaviors have a tremendous amount to teach them. The reality is that God is neither surprised nor ashamed of our unwanted behaviors, but understands them to be one of the primary places where we will come to know the kindness of the gospel. We are more likely to be ashamed of our sexual brokenness when we do not understand what stories have shaped it. Recognizing the meaning embedded within our sexual arousal invites us to exchange contempt for curiosity. Curiosity allows us to outgrow these unwanted behaviors rather than being at war against our sexual desire.
Unwanted Sexual Behavior – It’s About Judgment, Not (only) About Self-Medicating
World-renowned addiction expert Dr. Gabor Maté wrote, “Emotional isolation, powerlessness, and stress are exactly the conditions that promote the neurobiology of addiction. Research continues to suggest that addictive behaviors do not arise from the substance (like heroin or pornography) but from the needs of those who use those behaviors. What this means is if you want to know why you are bound to a particular behavior, you need to seek to understand the conditions that keep that behavior in place. In this way, our unwanted sexual behaviors can be a form of self-medicating in order to find relief from the pain of life. But as we will soon see, labeling these behaviors as legitimate needs contains a dangerous partial truth that prevents us from seeing our harm of others and the real aim of our compulsive behaviors: judgment.
In my view, our self-contempt for our unwanted sexual behaviors is not simply a by-product of our choices or even purity culture; it is the very aim of our compulsive behaviors. Through this lens, unwanted sexual behavior is not primarily an attempt to self-sooth a wounded inner child. It is an attempt to reenact the formative stories of trauma, abuse, and shame that convinced so many of us that we were unwanted to begin with. In other words, we are not primarily pursuing unwanted sexual behavior to find pleasure, but because we are bound to feelings of shame and judgment. The longer you stay in any compulsive behavior, the less pleasure and satisfaction you receive. That’s the point. We pursue behaviors that confirm our negative core beliefs about who we are.
Contrary to popular belief, unwanted sexual behaviors are not something to entirely condemn. Embedded within our behaviors and fantasies are clues to the freedom we have been waiting our entire life to find. My research on nearly 4,000 men and women who use porn and pursue extra-marital affairs showed that a person’s fantasies and porn preferences could be both shaped and predicted based on the parts of their story that remain unaddressed. Therefore, if you want to find freedom, start by being curious about the stories that influence your sexual choices. Embedded within your behaviors are keys to the freedom you seek.
Racism & Gender-Based Violence
Racism and gender-based violence will only be healed to the extent to which they are acknowledged. The reality is that the pornography industry and many sexual fantasies are full of racist themes. Websites often contain menus in which users can select specific categories of women’s ethnicities and body types. Given the history of racist stereotypes that portray Asian women as Geishas, Lotus blossoms, and China dolls, it should come as no surprise then that Asian women are some of the most popular searches in pornography. The pornography industry both reflects and perpetuates the racist belief that Asian women are eager to please men. Porn will shape what you find arousing and this will have immediate consequences to all Asian women.
(Trigger Warning) As Gail Dines explains in her book Pornland, “The introductory text on Hustler’s website, Asian Fever, sums up the way Asian women are caricatured in porn: ‘Asian Fever features scorching scenes of the sexual excesses these submissive Far East nymphos are famous for. No one knows how to please a man like an Asian slut can, and these exotic beauties prove it.’” Lust is not about being aroused; it’s the demand that someone’s face and body eagerly subordinate themselves to my compulsions, sexual or otherwise.
The prevalence of pornography, sex trafficking / “sex tourism,” and massage parlors containing Asian women shows us how clear and largely unobstructed this demand is in our world. The maddening notion that Asians are a “model minority” who are submissive and work hard to serve others naturally extends to the demand for their fetishization and sexual exploitation. While it may be easier to have sympathy for an Asian woman exploited through sex trafficking in a developing nation, racist stereotypes perpetuate violence for all Asian American women.
Yale University Sociology Department chair Grace Kao notes, “If you talk to the average Asian American woman, most of us have been subject of varying degrees of sexual harassment that targets our gender and racial identities. They do not exist separately in the lives of individuals.” Sexual harassment, gender, and race, as Kao explains, are one. Pornography is the marketing department for the sexual harm and dehumanization of Asian women. Racism reduces the humanity of others and once their face is diminished, the stage is set for unchecked lust and violation.
Additionally, the Internet creates a world of sexual illusion, one where we imagine that individuals (often women and children) are there to serve and enjoy our errant longings. Researchers analyzed the content of more than three hundred popular porn videos. Here is what they found:
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- 88.2 percent of top-rated porn scenes contain aggressive acts.
- In 70 percent of occurrences, a man is the perpetrator of the aggression; 94 percent of the time, the act is directed towards a woman
- Only 9.9 percent of the top-selling scenes analyzed contained kissing, laughing, caressing, or verbal compliments.
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Transform Your Pain
The research I conducted for Unwanted found that men who sought out fantasies of younger individuals, petite body types, and a particular race (which they viewed as subservient) tended to have three drivers for this arousal template. They had strict fathers as children, experienced a lack of purpose in their lives, and were steeped in shame. The implication is that feeling powerless as a man can easily translate into developing sexual fantasies where they find power over a particular type of woman. As Richard Rohr put well, “The pain we do not transform, we transmit. Always someone else has to suffer because I don’t know how to.”
When Robert Long penetrated the bodies of Asian women with a 9mm handgun, he showed the world the interconnectedness between the violence embedded within destructive theology, lust, and racist hate. While it’s easy to dismiss Long’s actions as extreme, his behaviors show us how contempt can compound. Capt. Jay Baker, a spokesperson for the Cherokee Country Sheriff’s office said of Robert Long, “(He) sees these locations as…a temptation that he wanted to eliminate.” I do not know what type of treatment Long received, but my assumption would be that he was never invited to explore the intersection of his theology, unwanted sexual behavior, and racism. Everyone loses and some will die when we keep these issues siloed. But when we exchange self-contempt for curiosity and our other-centered contempt for grief and responsibility, we begin the journey to healing.
Where do we go from here?
All of us live with some sense of the unfairness of life. When we’ve endured harm that’s never been vindicated, we can feel the undertow of entitlement; believing we have the right to avenge our disappointment. Psychologist Diane Langberg notes that a leader (or anyone) is most at risk of abusing their power the moment they feel powerless. Therefore, one of the greatest gifts we can offer to the world is to heal our pain and address our powerlessness without demanding someone else be used for our sexual gain. Many attempts to address sexual brokenness are far too narrow because they are so self-focused. Perhaps one of the reasons you have not been able to outgrow your unwanted sexual behavior is that you have not taken into account how much your behavior requires a scapegoat.
Additionally, we desperately need more people outside of human traffickers and pornographers to recognize the interplay of racism and unwanted sexual behavior. The Church has long sought to reduce unwanted sexual behavior, but in its focus on purity and sexual shame, it has allowed racism to fester in hiding. This must change. To create radical change, each of us needs to do our part to identify and dismantle destructive theologies, be curious about what unwanted sexual behaviors are trying to teach us, and be allies in anti-racism work. When we simultaneously address all three, everyone benefits.
Like me, you inherited a particular theological, sexual, and racial story as a child and adolescent. Do you know how your story is influencing you today? One of the great opportunities of this heartbreaking moment in history is to heal and transform what previous generations did not have the courage or capacity to name. This is a tender and holy moment. We can stem the tide of these three destructive issues through our integrity to address all of them. The quality and duration of all of our lives depend on it.
Three Suggestions For Growth
Understand & Heal Your Sexual Story – Be curious about what your sexual behaviors and fantasies may be trying to teach you. My research showed that our fantasies and sexual behaviors can be a roadmap to healing. A posture of kindness and curiosity towards your sexual struggles will take you further than a thousand nights of prayerful despair for your behavior. If you want to know what might be driving your unwanted behaviors, feel free to check out Unwanted take a sexual behavior and fantasy self-assessment here, or attend The Sexual Attachment Conference that I will co-teaching with trauma therapist Adam Young, host of The Place We Find Ourselves Podcast.
Learn from the BIPOC Community – If you are white, look at the books on your bookshelves, the podcast episodes you listen to, and your religious leaders you go to for wisdom. What percentage of them are written or led by a person of color? For a season (if not for a lifetime), consistently listen to the BIPOC community. Rooting out racist ideas and decentralizing your bias can’t be passively, only actively. As a kind reminder, do not seek out a BIPOC friend or acquaintance to help educate you. That is not their responsibility, it’s yours. Many resources exist that can equip you on your journey. Looking for a book to read? Start with Austin Channing Brown’s I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in A World Made for Whiteness or Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. For a psychology text, I’d recommend Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. For those who appreciate theology, read James Cone’s The Cross and The Lynching Tree. Affiliate links included to support this blog, but please support a local bookstore like Hearts & Minds (they also take online orders too!) when possible.
For Faith Leaders: Attend a free webinar on April 8th (or watch a recording afterwards) to help faith communities identify how power is abused and how it can be transformed. This event will invite leaders to recognize their power, understand their sexual story, and learn practical steps to protect their community. Register here: The Abuse of Power: How the Church Can Respond
About the author:
Jay Stringer is a licensed mental health counselor, ordained minister, and author of the award-winning book Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing. Jay runs intensives for men and women struggling with unwanted behaviors and leads a training program for leaders to go deeper into their story and sexual brokenness. Stringer holds an MDiv and master in counseling psychology from the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology and received post-graduate training under Dr. Dan Allender while serving as a Senior Fellow at the Allender Center. Jay lives in New York City with his wife Heather and their two children.
