The Elliot Rodger Tragedy; A Christian Perspective

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29 May 2014 by Rev Dr Steven Kau –

Each morning as I buy the Star papers and have my breakfast, it is relatively uneventful. But this [last Monday] morning, it was different. The headlines on the papers read, “Much-loved boy turns killer.” As I read what it was all about, it talks about a young men who had tremendous problem finding a girl and sex from any of the multitude of girls that surrounds him. Didn’t tell why but he just couldn’t get a single girl to take an interest in him. In his anger and frustration, he vowed to take revenge on the girls, especially blondes, for this rejection. He subsequently when out knifed three girls to death and shot another three before turning the gun on himself. Many who read the Star and other newspapers this morning would obviously say all kinds of things about Elliot Rodger. Most of it probably negative things and that’s to be expected. But what really saddened me and made me mad as a hornet, was how did this handsome and well to do young man become like this? The tragedy is that if we (as a society) are really honest, we made him what he is.

Elliot Rodger is a horrifying example of how badly we have failed young men in America and may I say in Malaysia too. You see, the truth is that his obsession with sex and losing his virginity did not come out of nowhere. Rather, it was the result of being constantly immersed in a sex-obsessed culture for the past 22 years. In America today, their young men are constantly being bombarded with sexual messages in advertising, in television shows, in video games, in movies and on the Internet. They are literally been trained to believe that scoring with women is the ultimate goal in life. So we should not be surprised when their behavior reflects this underlying philosophy. Of course very few of our young men become mass murderers like Elliot Rodger but the crisis that we are facing is much broader than that. The obsession with illicit sex that our young men have is destroying millions upon millions of lives, it is spreading sexually transmitted diseases like wildfire, not to mention the murder of millions of babies in abortion for convenience sake and the decline of the American family, where marriage often comes with a 90 day option. What a deal?

22 year old Elliot Roger is the son of Hunger Games unit director Peter Roger and Malaysian Ong Li Chin. I understand they are now divorced. He was deeply immersed in the culture of Hollywood but he was incredibly frustrated that he was not able to have the kind of lifestyle that Hollywood had always promised him.
He greatly lamented the fact that he was “still a virgin” and he was incredibly frustrated that he had never kissed a girl. He couldn’t understand why “girls gave their affection and sex and love to other men but never to me.” He especially seemed to hate the “spoiled blondes” who rejected him and he stated that he believed that “the ultimate evil behind sexuality is the human female.”

Thanks to the YouTube videos and his 140 pages “manifesto” (“My Twisted World – The Story of Elliot Rodger”) that have been revealed, we know quite a bit about what Rodger was thinking. Obviously this was a very sick and twisted individual who viewed the young women around him as sex object. Read some of the things he said:

“I feel so invisible as I walk through my college because none of the girls there pay any attention to me. I see so many beautiful blonde hair, just so many beautiful blonde hair girls walk around everywhere. In your revealing shorts, your cascading blonde hair, your pretty faces. And I want one for a girl friend.”
“I do everything that I can to appear attractive to you. I dress nice. I am sophisticated and magnificent. I have a nice car, a BMW. Well, nicer than 90 percent of people in my college.”
“I’m 22 years old and I’ve never had a girl friend. I’m still a virgin. I’ve never had the pleasure of having sex with a girl, kissing a girl – I’ve never even held a girl’s hand. Hell, I don’t even have a young girl’s phone number in my cell phone.”
“College is the time when everyone experiences those things such as sex and fun and pleasure. But in those years I’ve had to rot in loneliness. It’s not fair. You girls have never been attracted to me. I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me. But I will punish you all for it.”
“I’m going to enter the hottest sorority house of UCSB and I will slaughter every single spoil, stuck up, blonde that I see inside there. All those girls that I’ve desired so much, they would’ve all rejected me and looked down on me as an inferior man if I ever made a sexual advance towards them.”

Did you notice a certain word missing in all those quotes? The word “love” is nowhere to be found. He did not understand what love is and had none to give. To Rodger, the goal was simply to have a girl and sex. The thought of getting married to one woman for a lifetime does not even seem to be on his radar.

Sadly, we have trained an entire generation of young men to think this way. In this day and age, most young men consider young women to be objects of sexual desire to be enjoyed for a while and then discarded when they grow tiresome. The Star reported a family friend of Ong Li Chin (Elliot’s mother), one Ms Yap as saying, “Roger would have been a hit with the girls had he grown up in Malaysia.” Given Rodgers frame of mind with regards to girls and sex, what is she implying about Malaysian girls?
One of the things greatly fueling this kind of thinking is their national obsession with pornography. If you don’t think that this is a problem, just consider the following statistics from a recent Daily Mail article. Porn sites get more visitors per month than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined. A third of all download contains porn and the Internet now hosts 4.2 million porn websites, said Dines, who is also president of the national feminist group Stop Porn Culture.

“Porn is without doubt the most powerful form of sex education today, with studies showing that the average age of first viewing is between 11 and 14 and let me tell you, this is not your father’s Playboy,” she said. “These degrading misogynist images have become the wall paper of our lives and they are robbing young people of an authentic sexuality that is a basic right of every human being.”
When young men spend hundreds upon hundreds of hours looking at such images, it permanently altars they way they view women and romantic relationship. And as I mentioned above, this is causing a tremendous amount of damage in our society.

map_sti — Estimated new cases of sexually transmitted infections (gonorrhoea, chlamydia, syphilis and trichomoniasis) by WHO region, 2008 (http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs110/en/)

For example, according to the Centers of Disease and Prevention in America, approximately one-third of the entire population of the United States (110 million people) currently have sexually transmitted disease. Every single year, another 20 million cases are added, and American in the 15 to 24 year old age range accounts for 50% of those new cases. They have successfully reproduced Sodom and Gomorrah, so what do you expect? Meanwhile, the marriage rate among young people is at an all time record low and the American family is in the worse shape ever.

The fact that Elliot Rodger is now off the streets, does not mean that anything has been solved. This problem is much, much larger than one twisted college student. We have an entire society that is absolutely obsessed with illicit sex and we have millions upon millions of young men and that believe scoring with women is the ultimate goal in life. Until that changes, which seems unlikely presently, we are going to suffer the consequences.

He was shaped and trained in a world we built, in this case the American culture in which he was brought up. Typically, we deny all responsibility. After all we live in a no-fault society. What is also absent in all the reports I have read was that there was not a single Christian friend or student who tried to help him by sharing the gospel or the love of Christ. He was really “lost” in every sense of the word, and the tragedy was, he was surrounded by Christians who has since lost faith in the gospel, the Word of God and Christ. The message of hope and redemption which might have saved him, just never reached him. His blood will be on their hands. I felt so burden about this tragedy that I just have to say my peace. When the world do away with the Bible and Christ, we are a tragedy waiting to happen. God have mercy on us.

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