What do you know? It turns out that the alleged killer in the Georgia spa shootings was raised as a devout Southern Baptist.
Long, 21, was arrested Tuesday in connection with the three shootings.
As a teenager, Long would stack chairs and clean floors at Crabapple First Baptist Church in Milton, Ga., said Brett Cottrell, who led the youth ministry at Crabapple from 2008 to 2017. Long’s father was considered an important lay leader in the church, Cottrell said, and they would attend morning and evening activities on Sundays, as well as meetings on Wednesday evenings and mission trips.
“There’s nothing that I’m aware of at Crabapple that would give approval to this” …
Yes, and No, on that last. I’ve discussed often through the years the degradation that inheres in Christian thought, and it was the Southern Baptists who brought it to my attention with their inexhaustible attention to it. And sexual desire is one of the most conspicuous expressions of our utter unfitness to exist. Sex is for procreation and growing the club, not pleasure; just ask Albert the Pious, the Mightiest Theologian of Them All.
If you start out with a kid who isn’t real clear-headed, and subject him to an endless drumbeat about his worthlessness, and there is no responsible adult nearby telling him to pay no attention to some of the crazy stuff that is said in church … oh, yeah, you can definitely end up with a seething nutjob who has an unwholesome attitude toward sex and women.
It’s w-a-a-a-y too soon to know what was going on in this kid’s head when he carried-out the killings, but there is nothing misguided about suspecting loopy, heavy-handed theology rather than, or in addition to, anti-Asian animus. I’ve said often through the years — and I am not wrong — that there are proportionately more screwed-up people inside church than outside church.