[THS] The Nation: Max Blumenthal: The Nightmare of Christianity

[Peter Webster]

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090921/blumenthal/single

    * The Nation
    * Race, Ethnicity & Religion
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The Nightmare of Christianity
By Max Blumenthal

September 9, 2009

The following is an excerpt from Max Blumenthal's new book, Republican Gommorah:
Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party, published by Nation Books.


A few miles down the road from Colorado Springs [a home to James Dobson's Focus
on the Family], in the quiet bedroom community of Eldredge, a deeply disturbed
young man named Matthew Murray followed the unfolding debacle at New Life
Church [once under the stewardship of Pastor Ted Haggard] with an interest that
bordered on obsession. Murray, a sallow-faced, bespectacled 24-year-old, had been
indelibly scarred by a lifetime of psychological abuse at the hands of his charismatic
Pentecostal parents. Murray's mind became crowded with thoughts of death,
destruction, and the killings he would soon carry out in the name of avenging what
he called his "nightmare of Christianity."

On an online chat room for former Pentecostals, Murray heaped contempt on his
mother, Loretta, a physical therapist who homeschooled him to ensure that his
contact with the outside world was severely limited. "My 'mother,'" Murray wrote, "is
just a brainswashed [sic] church agent cun,t [sic]. The only reason she had me was
because she wanted a body/soul she could train into being the next Billy Graham..."

He went on:

    ...my mother was into all the charismatic "fanatical evangelical" insanity. Her and
her church believed that Satan and demons were everywhere in everything. The
rules were VERY strict all the time. We couldn't have ANY christian or non-christian
music at all except for a few charismatic worship CDs. There was physical abuse in
my home. My mother although used psychotropic drugs because she somehow
thought it would make it easier to control me (I've never been diagnosed with any
mental illness either). Pastors would always come and interrogate me over video
games or TV watching or other things. There were NO FRIENDS outside the church
and family and even then only family members who were in the church. You could
not trust anyone at all because anyone might be a spy.


An authoritarian Christian-right self-help guru named Bill Gothard created the home-
schooling regimen implemented by Murray's parents. Like his ally James Dobson,
Gothard first grew popular during the 1960s by marketing his program to worried
evangelical parents as anti-hippie insurance for adolescent children. Based on the
theocratic teachings of R. J. Rushdoony, who devised Christian schools and home-
schooling as the foundation of his Dominionist empire, Gothard's Basic Life Principles
outlined an all-consuming environment that followers could embrace for the whole of
their lives. According to Ron Henzel, a one-time Gothard follower who co-authored a
devastating exposé about his former guru called A Matter of Basic Principles, under
the rules, "large homeschooling families abstain from television, midwives are more
important than doctors, traditional dating is forbidden, unmarried adults are 'under
the authority of their parents' and live with them, divorced people can't remarry
under any circumstance, and music has hardly changed at all since the late
nineteenth century."

At the Charter School for Excellence, a school in South Florida inspired by Gothard's
draconian principles that receives $800,000 in state funds each year, children are
indoctrinated into a culture of absolute submission to authority almost as soon as they
learn to speak. A song that the school's first-graders are required to recite goes as
follows:

    Obedience is listening attentively,
    Obedience will take instructions joyfully,
    Obedience heeds wishes of authorities,
    Obedience will follow orders instantly.
    For when I am busy at my work or play,
    And someone calls my name, I'll answer right away!
    I'll be ready with a smile to go the extra mile
    As soon as I can say "Yes, sir!" "Yes ma am!"
    Hup, two, three!

Former Arkansas governor and Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is
among the 2.5 million Americans who have attended Gothard's Basic Seminar.
According to Huckabee, who once earmarked state funds to distribute Gothard's
literature in Arkansas prisons, Gothard was responsible for "some of the best
programs for instilling character into people." But to the deeply alienated Murray,
Gothard was the original source of his pathology. "I believe that the truth needs to
be exposed," Murray wrote in a September 2006 discussion forum of recovering
Gothard followers. "People need to see through errornious [sic] and destructive
doctrines and teachings including Bill Gothard's."

After graduating from Gothard's home-schooling seminars, which constituted the bulk
of his education (Colorado has no educational records for Murray after third grade),
he was presented by his parents with two options for higher education. The first
choice was Haggard's alma mater, Oral Roberts University. ORU at the time was
beginning to unravel under the weight of scandalous revelations that its new
president, Richard Roberts--the scion of its beloved founder--had allegedly looted
university coffers to pay for his daughter's junkets to the Bahamas and bankroll his
wife's shopping sprees. (Oral Roberts's other son, Ronnie, was a cocaine-addicted
closet homosexual who committed suicide in 1982). Murray's second option was the
"Discipleship Training School" of Youth with a Mission (YWAM), a Christian
Reconstructionist-inspired missionary group that trained bright-eyed youngsters to
spread the gospel of Colorado Springs to under-evangelized Third World nations.
Desperate to escape his parents' rigid order, Murray joined YWAM.

But as soon as Murray enrolled at YWAM's training center in nearby Arvada in 2002,
he found himself trapped in an authoritarian culture even more restrictive than
home. He realized that, as another student of YWAM bluntly put it, the school's
training methods resembled "cult mind-controlling techniques." Murray became
paranoid, speaking aloud to voices only he could hear, according to a former
roommate. He complained that six of his male peers had made a gay sex video and
that others routinely abused drugs. Hypocrisy seemed to be all around him, or at
least dark mirages of it. A week before Murray was scheduled to embark on his first
mission, YWAM dismissed him from the program for unspecified "health reasons."
"They admitted that I hadn't done anything wrong, just that they had prayed and
felt I wasn't popular/'connected' and talkative enough," he recalled.

Two years later, Murray raged at two YWAM administrators during a Pentecostal
conference his mother had dragged him to attend. The shocked staffers promptly
warned Loretta Murray that her son "wasn't walking with the Lord and could be
planning violence." Within days, an ornery local pastor was allowed to burst into the
young Murray's room, rifle through his belongings, and leave with a satchel full of
secular DVDs and CDs--apparent evidence of his depravity. Murray's mother
searched his room for satanic material every day afterward for three months,
stripping him of his privacy and whatever was left of his love for her. After the
trauma-inducing raids, in which Murray estimated his mother and her friends
destroyed $900 worth of his property, he concluded, "Christianity is one big lie."

Murray lurched to the polar opposite edge of his parents' fanatical faith, replacing
their Bible as his inspiration with the writings of Aleister Crowley, a flamboyant, self-
proclaimed Satanist. The fin de siècle British sensationalist declared himself the
"Great Beast of Revelation" and claimed his birth was foretold in the Apocalypse of
St. John. For two years Murray attended ceremonies of Crowley's mock-religious
order, Ordo Templi Orientis, following in the footsteps of famous Crowley followers
such as Scientology cult founder L. Ron Hubbard and Jack Parsons, the eccentric
rocket fuel inventor who prayed to the Greek god Pan after each successful launch.
"This man is like the antidote to what I was raised in," Murray wrote of his new hero
Crowley. Murray was especially compelled by the fact that Crowley, like him, was
raised by fundamentalist Christian parents he loathed.

Murray had been indoctrinated so thoroughly into charismatic Pentecostal culture,
however, that even while he railed against his religious upbringing, he could not
abandon his ingrained attraction to religiosity. So instead of fleeing hardcore Christian
culture for secular humanism, a natural position for jaded skeptics like him, he traded
his former faith for Crowley's occultism. Crowley's philosophy of sex "magick,"
narcotic hallucination and self-degradation (he allegedly ordered his followers to have
oral sex with goats and drink the blood of cats) was forged in reaction to his parents'
Puritanism and, in fact, was first practiced in English boarding schools, where
homosexual experimentation was practically de rigueur. Crowley became Murray's
new lodestar. Like Jesus, who was so impressed by the ardor of a pagan Roman
centurion whom he met that he remarked, "I have not found such great faith, even
in Israel," Murray yearned for spiritual practice in its purest form.

Now he practiced Crowley's faux faith as fervently as his parents wished he had
worshipped their neo-evangelical macho Christ. But the occult only led Murray into a
confusing new world of cheap thrills. By his own account, he engaged in "every sort
of sexual pervrsion [sic]...that's legal," from anonymous gay sex to bestiality. He
boasted of his proclivity for binge drinking, his love for death metal bands, and his
penchant for spewing "blasphemy." He envisioned his new experiences as positively
transcendent. "In a way it's like I'm just about completely rebelling against
christianity [sic] in any way that I can," the enragé mused, "but this is a little
different of a rebellion."

But as Murray's detachment from his family and community intensified, so did his
yearning for the interpersonal solidarity increasingly denied to him. In May 2007, Dr.
Marlene Winell, a leading expert on treating ex-fundamentalists traumatized by the
experience of leaving their faith, was notified about Murray's tortured online postings.
Winell immediately posted a response to Murray. "I can see that you are in a great
deal of pain and I'd like to invite you to contact me," she wrote on a website where
he frequently posted. "I'd like to be helpful if I can. People do care about you and
there is hope."

Murray recoiled. "It's so funny how many people want to help you and love you and
counsel you when there is money involved," he replied.

Having refused one of the last means of human contact available to him, Murray
plunged into a sinkhole of loneliness. His online postings now read like death wishes.
In one of his final screeds, dated July 7, 2007, Murray offered a garbled attempt at
death metal lyrics that captured his sense of complete despondency:

    ... I am crying here in a buried kennel
    I have never felt so final
    Someone help me please, losing all reserve
    I am f***ing gone, I think I am fu**ing dying
    HANDSONMYFACEOVERBEARINGICAN'TGETOUT!
    You all stare, but you ll never see
    There is something inside me ...
    Cut me! beat me! molest me! abuse me! @#%$ me! hate me!
    break me! Rape me! kill me! show me!
    Here is my purity ......
    Enter this nightmare....

Murray's desire to realize his emotional and intellectual aspirations had become
completely blocked. His self-esteem and sense of spontaneity evaporated into a heavy
cloud of hopelessness. At the same time, his destructive impulses grew. The self-
described "rejected sheltered Christian boy" openly contemplated suicide, cutting his
arms with sharp objects when his anxiety seemed unbearable. He burrowed himself
into the mass-marketed aesthetic of goth culture, from Satanist screeds to plastic
pagan chum to the calculated gloom of commercial death metal, still finding time to
download literally thousands of fetishistic porn images on his computer. Murray had
become what Erich Fromm called the "necrophilious character," a personality whose
fixation on death leads them to acts of malignant destructiveness.

As Murray nourished his death obsession, his behavior grew increasingly aggressive.
On July 22, he posted a diary entry boasting about haranguing his mother and
mocking her "favorite pastor," Ted Haggard, or, as he called him, "Ted Faggard."
"Hey, bit,ch [sic]," Murray said he barked in his mother's face, "using drugs, alcohol
and having gay sex, I'm just trying to do what any Christian pastor would do, at least
I'm not doing meth like Ted Haggard...but maybe I will try it and maybe I'll just OD
on stuff just so I don't have to deal with you anymore..."

The violent rage roiling inside Murray overwhelmed his sense of self-pity. He was
intent on suicide, but first Murray wanted to kill as many tongue-talking Pentecostal
zealots as he could. Those who constantly invoked the wiles of Satan to frighten him
into submission, or impelled him to wage "spiritual warfare" against the secular
Enemy were the true spawn of the Devil. "You Christians brought this on yourselves,"
Murray proclaimed. "All I want to do is kill and injure as many of you...as I can
especially Christians who are to blame for most of the problems in the world."

As winter approached, Murray acquired a fearsome arsenal of assault rifles, including
a Bushmaster XM-15 ("Beltway Sniper" John Lee Malvo's weapon of choice) and an
AK-47. At a local UPS store where Murray maintained a mailbox, employees observed
that he was ordering "boxes and boxes" of ammunition. Murray's bogus tales of
preparing to deploy with the Marines quelled whatever suspicions burned-out UPS
employees might have had. Meanwhile, Murray's parents, who were adept at
ferreting secular media material from his desk drawers, had no idea his stockpile
even existed.

Late in the evening on December 8 (the same day that a psychotic young man
named Mark David Chapman killed John Lennon in 1980), Murray suited up in black
military fatigues, gathered two automatic rifles, three semiautomatic pistols and 1,000
rounds of ammo, then jumped in his car. Besides his weapons, Murray carried in his
pants pocket Aleister Crowley's The Book of the Law, a tract the author claimed to
have transcribed from messages dictated to him by ancient Egyptian gods, and
which he summarized in one phrase: "Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."

In the back seat of Murray's car was another of his favorite books. It was I Had to
Say Something, by Mike Jones [a former escort who had an affair with Haggard].

Murray sped toward Arvada, where the Youth with a Mission complex stood. The time
for spiritual warfare had come. Upon arriving at the complex, he stomped to the front
desk and demanded to stay overnight. A receptionist calmly refused his demand.
Without hesitation, Murray whipped out a .40 caliber semiautomatic Berretta pistol
and opened fire on a group of staffers chatting away as they wandered out of a
Christmas banquet.

Tiffany Johnson was caught in Murray's fusillade. An affable 24-year-old who said she
spent one night every week ministering to adolescent skateboarders involved in
"drugs, cutting, branding, and hurting others," Johnson fell and died instantly. A
studious 26-year-old named Philip Crouse, who spent part of a summer vacation
constructing a house for impoverished residents of the Crow Indian reservation in
Montana, was also hit while rushing to stop Murray. Crouse crumpled to the floor and
died beside Johnson. Murray fled the blood-soaked complex, fired up his car, and
sped away to complete his mission. Days earlier he seethed, "God, I can't wait till I
can kill you people. Feel no remorse, no sense of shame, I don't care if I live or die in
the shoot-out."

Murray's next stop was the New Life Church.

While police fanned out through Arvada in a frantic search for the still-unidentified
YWAM shooter, Murray pulled into the New Life parking lot. At 1 pm, as worshippers
filed out of afternoon services, Murray sprayed a hail of bullets at the crowd with his
Bushmaster rifle. He struck two teenaged sisters, Stephanie and Rachel Works, who
had recently returned from missionary trips to Brazil and China, killing them instantly.
He then charged into the church's main foyer, unaware that Haggard's replacement,
Brady Boyd, had authorized as many as thirty parishioners to carry concealed
weapons into his spiritual sanctuary, presumably to guard against hell-bent invaders
like him. One of Boyd's volunteer guards, Jeanne Assam, an ex-cop who became
born again after the Minneapolis police department fired her for lying, sprinted
toward Murray, shouting, "Surrender!" again and again. Murray refused to comply.
Assam leapt forward, directly in the line of Murray's fire, and peeled off a clip from
her pistol, lightly wounding the black-clad shooter in the leg. He retreated. Moments
later, he shot himself in the head and died.

All four of Murray's victims were youthful, mostly home-schooled and extremely
idealistic. They could have been his roommates at YWAM or could have joined him in
a Christian youth fellowship. They seemed so much like him, at least on the surface.
So did he single them out? Although there is no conclusive answer, Murray's
acknowledged grievances hint at his motives. Each of his victims represented to him
the obedient, unquestioning religious automaton he was required to be but never
could become. They had embarked on the exotic foreign missions he had been
rejected for, discovering friendship and even (nonsexual) wholesome romance while
he languished in his room--his "buried kennel." The blithe everyday existence of
these shiny, happy Jesus people was Murray's "Christian nightmare."

Like the sadistic antagonists of William Golding's Lord of the Flies Murray's violent
impulses had been constrained only by what Golding called the "invisible yet
strong...taboo of the old life...the protection of parents and school and policemen
and the law." When he mowed down his peers, Murray hoped to demonstrate his
complete contempt for the civilization of adults, along with all its corruption, cruelty
and internal contradictions. His victims, then, were no more than "littluns" he
sacrificed to exact his revenge, to make Colorado Springs weep for the end of
innocence long after order returned. Murray's real targets were his rigid parents,
their draconian childrearing gurus and the prying pastor who raided his room--the
architects of his "Christian nightmare."

The evangelical hierarchy's handling of the Haggard scandal had hardened Murray's
murderous intentions. Both Murray and Haggard were unable to fulfill their essential
selves within the strict confines of Pentecostal culture, so each of them sought an
escape through drugs and illicit sex. But whereas Murray openly embraced his turn
to decadence, Haggard concealed his secret life behind bombastic expressions of
religious fervor. After Haggard was unmasked as a fraud, however, he was
pronounced "completely heterosexual" by the movement's elders in only three weeks.
Murray, who had been irrevocably rejected for abandoning his faith, was stung by
this spectacle of cheap grace. "I want to know where was all the love, mercy and
compassion for my supposed imperfections?" he wrote despairingly.

The mainstream media made little effort to analyze the trauma-wracked mentality
that drove Murray to violence, opting instead for a tight focus on the more
sensational aspects of his killings. When cable news arrived on the scene of the
crime, it sketched a haphazard portrait of Murray hardly distinguishable from that of
Eric Harris [one of the two Columbine High School shooters], Cho Seung-Hui [the
Virginia Tech gunman], or John Lee Malvo. He was just another young male nutcase
with a gun, or, according to CNN anchor Rick Sanchez, a killer motivated exclusively
by "his hate for certain Christians." When Sanchez interviewed Marlene Winell, the
psychiatrist who attempted to counsel Murray, her attempts to assess the impact that
Murray's religious indoctrination had had in shaping his destructive behavior were
brushed aside.

During the brief moments in which Sanchez allowed Winell to speak, she attempted
to explain the obvious, that Murray's destructive actions were influenced at least in
part by what she called "a crazy-making system that has all sorts of circular
reasoning. It's got bottom line rules like, 'Don't think, don't respect your own feelings
in any way.' Small children are told they're going to burn in Hell. And if it doesn't
work for you...[you are told that] it's your fault."

Sanchez crinkled his brow in deep indignation. Finally, he cut in on his guest. "While
I disagree with much of what you said as a Christian," he snapped at Winell, "I
certainly respect your right to say it." Sanchez suddenly became exasperated. "You're
not blaming the faith for this, are you?" he wanted to know. "I mean a man has free
will!" Before Winell could respond, Sanchez terminated the interview.

By failing to explore the roots of Murray's violence, the mainstream media allowed the
far right to seize the narrative. Relying on the insights of pastor Joe Schimmel, a
sixties rock burnout who resolved after becoming born again "to show how Satanism
can influence youth through music," the far-right web magazine WorldNetDaily
reported that Murray "had sold his soul" to the occult and "another devil: rock and
roll." An earlier WorldNetDaily report on Murray's killing spree buttressed its analysis
with the conclusion of an anonymous commenter on a Rocky Mountain News forum:
"Two words: DEMONIC POSSESSION."

The Rocky Mountain News channeled the movement's version, turning to none other
than the evangelical anti-porn crusader Steve Arterburn as the arbiter on the impact
of pornography on Murray. The newspaper reported, "Arterburn said Thursday he
wasn't surprised to hear that pornography played a role in Murray's life. Not only
does pornography dehumanize, but like any addiction, increasing amounts are
needed to be satisfied--a deadly recipe for those prone to violence." But if porn
breeds violence, then why had Ted Haggard, an avid porn consumer, never engaged
in any act of physical brutality beyond lightly spanking the buttocks of a gay
bodybuilder?

While the national press clamored for an exclusive interview with Murray's parents,
the couple quietly arranged to meet with a psychologist who could help them
prepare a satisfactory explanation for their son's acts--and one devoid of the hard
truths Winell attempted to tell. On February 27, 2008, the Murrays were escorted
onto Focus on the Family's compound, led into its lower recesses, and seated, in an
elegantly appointed radio studio, at a table across from James Dobson. Now they
poured forth their version of their son's descent into madness. "The lesson is that
unforgiveness leads to this bitterness and then opens you up to the spirit of Satan, to
the spirit of whatever, and when that occurs, it becomes a power that people cannot
control," said Murray's father Ronald, a neurologist. Dobson was careful not to press
the Murrays further for insights into their son's pathology. Blaming Satan was always
safer than excessive reflection. "We can't explain it, we can't understand," Dobson
declared. "We say, 'Lord, someday we will understand, but today we don't.'?"

There was really little else Dobson could say. Murray's parents were not neglectful of
their son, nor were they intentionally abusive. By all accounts, they raised him in
faithful accordance with the teachings of the Christian right's leading self-help gurus.
In their cloistered world, where home-schooling is viewed as an ideal alternative to
"government schools," and where the rod is rarely spared, they were model parents.
Murray's killing spree thus reflected less on his parents than on the all-encompassing
authoritarian culture that Dobson had helped to shape. When practiced in the real
world, the movement's "family values" sometimes produced some unusually
dysfunctional families. Only by blaming Satan and his minions for Murray's acts could
the Christian right avoid acknowledging this absolutely damning indictment of its
ideology.

This sort of reasoning had been seen before, from figures ranging from Ted Bundy
to Tom DeLay to Ted Haggard. When confronted with their own crimes and sins,
these movement icons found that faulting the prince of darkness was far easier than
accepting personal responsibility.

By the time Colorado Springs completed its mourning period, the Republican primary
had begun in earnest. The primary field was a cast of deeply flawed figures, each
one less attractive to the conservative movement than the last. Almost none of them
boasted culture war bonafides, yet all campaigned as though their ambitions
depended on "value voters." Ironically, the Republican politician most despised by
the Christian right, Senator John McCain, a sworn enemy of conservative icons from
Tom DeLay to Jerry Falwell, secured the nomination. McCain immediately lurched to
the right, embarking on a doomed strategy that would ratify the self-destruction of
his party.

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About Max Blumenthal
Max Blumenthal is a Puffin Foundation writing fellow at the Nation Institute based in
New York City. His work has appeared in The Nation, Salon, The American Prospect
and the Washington Monthly. He is a research fellow for Media Matters for America.
Click here to read his blog.