Focus on Your Own Family: Response to Focus on the Family's Jim Daly
Brad’s response to Focus on the Family head Jim Daly, who mentioned him in a recent article. In the article Daly tried to deflect the analyses that connect the Atlanta shooter with Evangelicalism and purity culture.
Brad dissects Daly’s argument that:
The Atlanta shooter’s actions were born from insanity, and thus warrant no further investigation
This is unfair to Christianity
Purity culture = healthy
Marriage is for procreation = biblical
He concludes by extolling Daly to focus on his own family so that the rest of us don’t have to continue living with its violent and abusive effects.
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- Axis Mundi. - Hello, welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty in religion, Skidmore College.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
Last week was kind of a momentous week for me.
I was put on blast by both Al Mohler, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and then at the end of the week by none other than Focus on the Family.
And so two badges of honor I will wear proudly, having been called out by both of those institutions and certain individuals who work at those places.
So I want to spend today just responding to what Jim Daley, who is the head of Focus on the Family, had to say on March 23 in a post that mentions me and some others.
So here's what he says at the start of the piece.
Details continue to emerge regarding last week's murder of eight people at three different massage parlors in suburban Georgia.
The alleged gunman, Robert Aaron Long, reportedly told police his actions stemmed from a sex addiction he's battling.
Angry with himself, he apparently targeted women who enabled his desires.
It's impossible to fathom how someone in that position would carry out such evil and horror, but that hasn't stopped both the Washington Post and the New York Times from trying to pin the blame, not just on Long, but on his supposed belief system.
In short, reports in both papers have alluded to the 21-year-old's self-described evangelicalism as the root of his actions.
Specifically, a biblical sexual ethic that calls sexual sex outside of marriage sinful.
Sunday's New York Times cited Dr. Brad Onishi, a former, and former's in scare quotes for some reason, a former evangelical and now professor of religious studies.
Describing the religious environment he was raised in, Dr. Onishi noted, we had a militant vigilance.
Don't let anything in the house that will tempt you sexually.
He went on to say that his evangelicalism teaches women to hate their bodies as the source of temptation, and it teaches men to hate their minds, which leads them into lust and sexual immorality.
Daly then goes on to talk about a piece in the Washington Post that talked about purity culture explicitly and labeled sex outside of marriage as sinful, basically.
Here's how he reflects on both pieces.
Implied and insinuated in both instances is that the expectation to refrain from sexual intimacy until marriage somehow imposed a damaging and dangerous burden on Mr. Long.
In other words, if he had not been so restrained and guilt-ridden, he wouldn't have killed eight people in a deranged act of revenge.
Alright, there's more to read and more to talk about, but let me stop because there's just things we have to put a pin on, okay?
Daily says at the top, just a couple lines into the piece, it's impossible to fathom how someone in that position would carry out such evil and horror.
He says later that no sane person would do something like this.
He says later, to be clear, no sane person would do what Mr. Long did.
So trying to draw any correlation or motivation between his violent actions and his supposed faith is reckless and irresponsible.
So twice early on in the piece, Daley puts up essentially the insanity defense.
He says, look, Mr. Long is not a well person.
He is not a sane person.
And so to explain what happened here is Impossible.
It is impossible to fathom how someone in that position would carry out such evil and horror.
That's what he says.
So we can't understand it.
And Mr. Long is not a sane person because no sane person would do this.
So hands up.
I guess we just have to chalk it up to insanity and leave it alone.
I mean, he should definitely be in jail and definitely be punished.
But hey, who can understand something like this, right?
Well, I mean, that's not even something we can do.
So we'll just, yeah, let's put him in jail and then we'll just go back to our lives, right?
Wrong.
It's our job to try to understand.
It's our job to try to understand the cultural influences, the political influences, the leaders, the mentors, any way that we can understand who shaped this young man, we need to understand.
We want to know why he was radicalized in this way.
We want to know why he carried out, yes, what is just a seemingly unthinkable set of actions.
But in response to those kinds of actions, we have to understand as best as possible.
Okay?
So what Robert Aaron Long said about himself as a young person in high school is that he thought he was going to be a leader.
He was going to be a pastor.
That he was called to ministry.
Other people reported that he wouldn't even cuss.
He was that religious.
So we know with pretty good reporting that this was a very religious person who grew up in an evangelical setting, okay?
He then, and this is from the New York Times, right?
He checked himself into a rehab clinic for a self-described sex addiction.
He was so intent on avoiding pornography that he blocked websites from his computer and only used a flip phone.
So, this is a person who was incredibly dedicated to purity culture's strain on sexual lust.
I talked about this last week in response to Al Mohler.
I talked about it in response to Atlanta.
If you haven't listened to those episodes, go back.
I've been talking about this for two weeks now, right?
Purity culture is not just an ethic that says don't have sex before marriage.
What comes along with that very simple teaching is a whole culture of modesty, of shame, of repression, that any sexual thought you have outside of marriage is sinful.
So any desire, any impulse, any sense of lust is considered to be adultery.
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