On the Atlanta sex worker killings, or How good Christian men can extinguish temptation to mortal sin

-The Atlanta killings are our version of France's Charlie Hebdo massacre. We should be as suspicious and cautious of people of this form of religious extremism as the French are of theirs. It is a wake up call, and the question is what it means.

-They must be recognized as a call for liberal Americans to re-evaluate the role of white evangelical Protestant "Christianity" in American social and political life. It long ago commandeered most discussion about religion and its relationship to politics in American life.

-The common theme is always authority, and the secondary one is often sexuality.

-This has particularly badly affected at least two classes of people: women and the poor.

-Its relationship to the legacy of slavery needs to be examined.

-The two biggest problems in American society culturally are (1) the inability to work out in a non-extremist manner the relationship between liberty and authority (we have extremes of both), (2) the outsized influence of forms of authoritarian moralism that historically date from the 17th English protestant colonists.

-Moralism is the opposite of ethical behavior. Moralism is not morality but only pretends to be. It allows people to blame other people for their own anxieties.

-Women are not responsible to behave properly so that men will not hate them for causing them to feel sexual desires they are anxious about.

-Some "progressives" want to ban pornography and prostitution. It would make much more sense to ban guns.

-Racism in this context is nothing new. Blacks, poor whites, and immigrants from countries that did not share the English protestants' moralities, were often accused of being lax and not disciplined, acting on their desires instead of just working hard and being obedient good citizens. Now we know that Asians in the former Confederacy can be victims of this too.

-The defense attorney for this man should consider arguing an insanity defense based on the idea that the man's religion promotes insanity. Insanity legally is inability to recognize the difference between right and wrong. If you think that masturbation is a sin and crimes of violence meant to put a stop to it can make sense, you are insane. There are people in the evangelical religion who believe this, and their religious beliefs are a form of insanity.

-These are the American equivalent of honor killings and requirements that women be veiled in some Muslim countries.

-The interpretation in American law and politics of the separation between church and state needs to be re-examined. Religion has far too much sway in this country over public life, where it does not belong. But since all religious opinions are political ones, when they are expressed publicly, they can and should be countered in secular public discourse.

-Carceral/punitive feminists who oppose pornography and prostitution: I am waiting to hear that their thinking is essentially the same as this man's church.

-The Progressive movement in this country gave us Prohibition, and helped make possible the war on drugs, that has put so many black men in prisons, and exorbitant taxes on cigarettes, which are a "sin" tax on the poor. They also gave us social welfare institutions and practices that basically are about social control of the poor. That doesn't mean there should be no financial assistance to poor people; it does mean that our very conservative society is heavily organized to control poor people. It is infantilizing, punitive, and expresses class hatred.

-The mental health industry often enforces these ultra-conservative values, and has promoted religious cults like 12 Step groups. The state must get out of the business of teaching people conservative Protestant morals.

-All that amounts to anyway is demanding that people obey the authorities. "God" for evangelical Protestants is just the big Boss of it All. When they have crises of faith in college, they wonder if there is such a big boss. There probably is, but not in the heaven: you will find him or her as your boss, doctor or therapist, cop or jailer, or neighbor who believes in government by punishments.

-Such people are easily spotted: They are the ones who, as soon as they encounter you, even before you have said or done anything, are ready to accuse you of some crime. By that they mean disobedience.

-Liberal Christians and others who are "religious" in any way should go on the attack. Roll back the power of the white evangelical churches! What good have they done this country?

-What is "Christian" about those who care not about social justice and poverty or unjust wars, but only about controlling one's own desires? Answer: almost nothing.

-The protestant idea of God all too often is only that he is a boss, so then obedience becomes the essential virtue, as you are commanded to be commanded. This is a complete departure from Judeo-Christian monotheism, whose essence lay in its moral and ethical concerns. But conservative evangelicals often have at best warped ideas as to what that can mean.

-The concern seems to be with temptation to desire and pleasure that is fundamentally and as such prohibited by the authority. Thus, self-control becomes the keynote of ethics. Being good or just to others apparently becomes secondary.

-The question of "mental illness" and its relationship to single-person terrorist acts, which in recent years in this country have almost all been an affair of straight white men, will be raised again. Unfortunately, the mental health system and its discourses, far from being some alternative to our systems of policing, is part of it.

-This man already felt guilty. His church calls him depraved, but it seems he thought he was already. This is an interesting matter to ponder.

-We have more social problems because of prohibitions of desires and pleasures than we would if there were not so much anxiety about them.

-American Christianity is remarkably authoritarian. It is precisely in the political public sphere than views of the role of authority in people's lives and the objects it addresses itself to prohibiting or limiting and controlling must be addressed.

-Unquestionably, the man's religious faith is part of the problem here.

-A feminism that is against sex is not feminism. It is patriarchal traditional values and gender distinctions and norms in a new outfit.

-This man will go to prison, and may receive some psychological treatment. He will be judged, and it will be important to judge also what explains his crime, not justifying it but allowing him to think it was justified. What we need to do as a society is change the culture, a toxic one in many ways that destroys people and their lives.

-There will surely be more massacres and victims of acts of insanity like this until we find a way to stop them. Most of them have involved single straight white men, often young, who, explicitly or effectively, are rather right-wing. But all of them have involved weapons of violence, too easily accessible, and almost always they were guns.

-If not now, when? How many dead bodies, grieving families, and ruined lives does it take before we find a way to make our society a civil one where people can live without fear of such madness?