The first thing the public wanted to know was: why? Why did 48-year old George Sodini, a gainfully employed middle-aged man with no apparent history of violence, stroll into a gym earlier this week armed to the teeth and shoot thirteen women, killing four of them, before killing himself?

Sodini himself told us, for months or even years leading up to the incident, in an online blog and video diary. His print diary was just as insightful. Yet even with a plethora of detail on their side, the experts quickly whittled away the complexity behind this man to the singular convenient trope of the modern serial killer: George Sodini hated women.

This was the media’s story, and that was all they would say about it. Sodini was a loner, Sodini was frequently rejected by women, Sodini felt hurt by all the women in his life who declined his advances, and so they had to die because of his rejection issues. In the fast-paced world of 24-hour news reporting it was important to reduce the complex psychology of a deranged loner down to an easily-digestable theme, regardless of extemporaneous details like Sodini’s deep religious convictions.

And yet the only play that Sodini’s religious convictions received in the whole discussion following his death was in online secular freethought media. Every mainstream source was so hooked up on the convenient excuse of Sodini’s hatred of women that they never bothered to ask the hard questions about Sodini’s motivations. This is doubly perplexing because Sodini himself was quite clear on this point:

Maybe soon, I will see God and Jesus. At least that is what I was told. Eternal life does NOT depend on works. If it did, we will all be in hell. Christ paid for EVERY sin, so how can I or you be judged BY GOD for a sin when the penalty was ALREADY paid. People judge but that does not matter. I was reading the Bible and The Integrity of God beginning yesterday, because soon I will see them.

But of course, such truths would be confusing to the average consumer of mass media today. It simply does not comport with the current accepted social narrative that ‘religion = morality’ to think that a Christian could be both motivated to violence by religion and also be theologically correct in his understanding of doctrine.

‘Magic Words’ theology

Sodini comes from an Evangelical tradition that explicitly states that morality is irrelevant. Its apologists go out of their way to attack and ridicule those Christians who dare suggest that goodness matters. To the Evangelical, what is important is submission to doctrine, and nothing else. A man who is ’saved’ through the born again experience is in heaven guaranteed, not because they have earned it, but because they have recognized that they can’t earn it. The core principle here comes from Paul: humans are inherently filthy, perverted creatures (Paul’s word is ‘worthless’) who always fall short of God’s moral demands, so why bother trying to be good? We are so evil, in fact, that God himself had to come down from heaven and let himself be murdered on a tree just to give us the chance of some day receiving divine forgiveness.

Equipped with a “get out of hell free” card in the cheap excuse of a ‘born-again’ experience, Sodini felt empowered to do whatever he liked, whenever he liked, because he believed that his actions wouldn’t count in the long run. This ‘magic words’ theology teaches that, once you say the magic words admitting your inherent moral worthlessness and accept the human sacrifice necessitated by our worthlessness, you’re in the clear. Everything else is secondary to God, including your moral choices.

The average American is bombarded with propaganda linking irreligiosity to immorality, social deviance, and crime, so it makes sense that mainstream media wouldn’t burden them with the thought that religion could encourage immorality in this fashion. Yet this is exactly what the Evangelical mindset seeks to do: to cheapen goodness. They do this by equating value on goodness with heresy.

Sodini was indeed correct in his realization that, once he had met the minimum criteria of salvation, he was all set. Any expression of Evangelical born-again doctrine would have to agree with him, and indeed they have been agreeing with him for centuries. In his monstrous rampage Sodini has laid bare the central contradition of the American right: they preach and lecture and moralize endlessly as to how we should and shouldn’t behave, yet they are doctrinally committed to the notion that behavior is irrelevant except where it concerns submission to doctrine.

Not only that, but why has no one in the mainstream media asked if the Evangelical perspective on women poisoned his behavior as well? Theologians call the most popular conservative Christian perspective on gender roles ‘complementarianism.’ It holds that men and women have innate functions, and of course the innate function of women is submission to men. Sodini’s deeply unsatisfying relationships with women must have been truly perplexing to a Christian like him. What else to do with any element that persistently confounds your worldview except eliminate it? And so he did. Again, Christian doctrine gave him all the excuses that he needed, and yet popular media is stuck on square one, content to say that Sodini hated women without saying why his hatred would lead him to violence. For most people, being rejected by women does not lead to murder, but Sodini had religious passion on his side.

This question should have led to a sobering internal discussion among Christians as to how they can reconcile their doctrine with the social narrative that religion makes people better. The Christians should have been forced to review their scriptures and talk to their leaders and explain Sodini’s behavior to their congregations as some kind of error. But they can’t. The belief is too deeply-ingrained in centuries of Protestant dogma and apologetics. And the media prevented even a prelude to conversation by stopping everything at Sodini’s chauvanism.

If the media had the courage, and the public had the honesty, to confront this question, then we would really have something productive to talk about. Does religion cause morality? No, because they say that it shouldn’t. The Evangelical doctrines, plainly visible to the initiated but completely hidden from the public who are meant to believe that religion is about goodness rather than against it, have to be brought to light and seriously discussed. How can you be good without God?, they ask us. It’s very simple. How can you be good with God? According to the Evangelicals, you aren’t supposed to be. Sodini understood this, and it’s high time that the public realized this doctrinal monstrosity for what it is: an excuse to be evil.