Brad was featured in a NYT article about purity culture and its affect on the Atlanta shooter along with other academics and advocates including Sam Perry, Joshua Grubbs, and Rachael Denhollander. Soon thereafter Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, derided the article and our comments on his podcast. This is Brad's response. He touches on the selective literalism of Evangelical readings of the Bible, queer theologies and lives from the Bible to the present, and how Mohler's approach is incoherent to say the least.
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I'm Brad Onishi, faculty in religion at Skidmore College.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
I wanted to take today to respond to Al Mohler over at the Southern Baptist Convention.
Some of you have probably seen this week that myself and a bunch of other scholars of religion, including Sam Perry, Josh Grubbs, Jeff Chu, Heath Lambert, And Rachel Denhollander were quoted in a piece by Ruth Graham on what happened in Atlanta last week with the mass shootings and the killing of eight people, including six Asian or Asian American women.
The piece highlighted aspects that all of us talked about in terms of purity culture, in terms of what purity culture teaches young people, how it shapes men and women to think of their bodies and their minds.
And this led to Al Mohler responding on his podcast this morning.
So it's time for me to respond to his response.
Here's what he said about the article and about me.
Here's how the article begins.
When Brad Onishi heard that the man accused of a rampage at three Atlanta area spas told detectives that he had carried out the attacks as a way to eliminate his own temptations, the claim sounded painfully familiar.
Dr. Onishi, who grew up in a strict evangelical community in Southern California that emphasized sexual purity, has spent his teenage years tearing out any advertisements in surfing magazines that featured women in bikinis.
He had traded his online passwords with friends to hold himself accountable.
We had a militant vigilance, I'm quoted as saying.
Don't let anything in the house that will tempt you sexually.
Mueller goes on to say, uh, that was said by me, Dr. Onishi.
Here's my final quote from the piece on this subject of purity.
The evangelical culture he was raised in teaches women to hate their bodies as a source of temptation.
This is me talking about the shooter in the Atlantic massacre, uh, Atlanta massacre.
And it teaches men to hate their minds, which lead them to lust and sexual immorality.
So after reciting that quote, Mueller goes on to say this in his podcast.
Well, just observing this interesting way for the article to begin, but even as we're introduced to Dr. Brad Onishi, he is very clearly someone who has left that evangelical heritage and is now turning back to critique it.
Fair enough, but let's understand what's going on here.
Rather than just summarizing the biblical teaching on sexuality that is held by evangelicals, or even summarizing the most prevalent devotional literature that is common to evangelicals, he goes on and describes it in very negative terms, as teaching women to hate their bodies as a source of temptation, and teaching men to hate their minds, which lead them into lust and morality.
So far, that's pretty accurate, that he is correct.
There is more than summarizing going on.
There is more than description.
There is prescription.
There is more than an explanation.
There is a diagnostic and a evaluation.
So, so far, so good.
Well, here's the problem, Moeller says.
If you're going to look at that, you can recognize that, number one, evangelicals can state these matters wrongly.
So he goes into how some of these messages about purity can be conveyed in ways that are misguided or misleading, but that nonetheless Christians must stick by the biblical message of fleeing immorality and battling against lust and other types of sexual sin.
He talks about how the Bible is very explicit, very clear, flee immorality.
And it's not just passages that are as brief as the exhortation or command to flee mortality, Mohler says.
It is also comprehensive biblical teaching that includes Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount about the fact that one does not have to commit adultery with the body to be guilty of the sin.
Later in his podcast, Mueller goes on to talk about the church where the shooter attended and one of the sermons that he heard there, one of the sermons that the shooter heard from one of the pastors.
And it was a sermon on 1 Timothy 6.11 to 6.11 to verse 21.
And it's an expository sermon.
It's one that goes verse by verse.
And it's a problem about, it's a passage about sexual immorality.
Here's what Muller says about it.
So I want to stop here and just say two things.
against sin.
Mueller says that the sermon is about the warfare to which Christians are called, a warfare against the world, the flesh, and the devil, as often has been summarized.
So I want to stop here and just say two things.
One, again, this is analysis and this is evaluation and this is my commentary, so my My response, though, is you just framed this as warfare.
You just framed the idea that there's a foundational component to evangelical theology surrounding sex, that you are called to warfare against your body.
That's my point.
That's my point.
My point in the piece, my point in other comments I've made about purity culture before, is that it sets up a war against your body.
Women are taught that they are stumbling blocks and that they have to be careful not to tempt men.
There's a war for women to be gatekeepers of sexual purity.
And if they give in to sexual desire in ways that fall outside heterosexual marriage, then they're thought to be licentious, immoral women.
There's a war for men against their minds and their thoughts.
Their bodies are not taught.
They're not taught that their bodies are a source of shame or a source of temptation like women are.
There's this idea in evangelical circles that men's bodies are in fact sort of not desirable in ways that women's are and that women don't have sexual thoughts about the flesh in ways that men do.
So what's, how does it work for men?
Well, men are constantly tempted, right?
They're constantly at war with their mind.
Constantly at war with any image of something that might be sexually desirous.
So you've made my point for me.
If you have a theology where your body is a war, where you're a war zone, where if you have a theology where you're taught that you have to wage war against your body, then shame and guilt, repression, they're all going to be part of that theology.
That is an effect of it.
I'm sorry.
Now the other thing that is interesting here is that Muller talks about comprehensive biblical teaching.
That includes Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount about the fact that one does not have to commit adultery with the body to be guilty of the sin.
So this is the infamous passage in Matthew 5:27, 5:28, where Jesus says, "Even if you look at a woman who is not your wife with lust in your heart, then you have committed adultery." Right?
So this is a foundational text for evangelical circles.
Those of you who grew up in the subculture know that, right?
I talked about this verse thousands of times as an evangelical, as a teenage boy battling lust, battling sexual desire.
This verse is the one we came back to all the time.
That if you even look at another person and lust after them, you've committed adultery.
It's like you've cheated on your spouse even before you've met or married your spouse.
That's a lot of pressure.
That's a lot of pressure to try to deal with at any age, much less 16, 17, 18, 19, 20.
What's fascinating about Moeller here and evangelical teaching as a whole is what Randall Ballmer calls the selective literalism.
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