Two Churches Grapple With the Atlanta Shootings

By Charles Bethea, The New Yorker

28 March 21

Members of a Korean Baptist congregation reflected on the persistence of racism. The church where the gunman belonged insisted that he alone was responsible.

arly this past Sunday, Sugarloaf Korean Baptist Church held its regular English-language services, over Zoom. Sugarloaf, which has nearly a thousand congregants, is based in Suwanee, a small city in Gwinnett County, a suburban area northeast of Atlanta. Many members of the church had spent the previous week talking with one another about the horrific shootings in Acworth and Atlanta, in which a twenty-one-year-old white man had killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent. Two of the women, both Korean, lived in nearby Duluth. The shooter, Robert Aaron Long, belonged to Crabapple First Baptist Church, in Milton, about thirty-five minutes away. Long told the police that the locations he had targeted, spas owned or operated by Asian-Americans, represented “a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate,” according to Captain Jay Baker, a spokesman for the Cherokee County police department. (Baker, who said that Long had been having a “bad day,” and who, it was later discovered, had posted an image of a racist T-shirt on Facebook, was subsequently removed from the case.)

Heading into Sunday services, the word among the Sugarloaf congregation was “unity,” David Shin, a thirty-three-year-old engineer and member of the church, told me. But there was also a shared desire, Shin said, particularly among many of the church’s younger members, to make sure this wasn’t categorized as “just another shooting.” His mother, who came to the U.S. from Korea in 1994 with her husband and two sons, had seemed to regard it that way when he first spoke to her, the day after, he told me. “I don’t know why she hadn’t heard more than that yet,” he said. “Maybe she just wasn’t paying attention. Maybe it’s because the Cherokee County police department said that it wasn’t racially motivated. Maybe, without English, she’s more insulated and siloed.” He sighed. “I’m not exactly sure what the reason was, but I actually ended up not being able to tell her that, because it was too heartbreaking. I didn’t want her to walk around wondering, looking over her shoulders every minute to see if there’s anyone suspicious around her, like I wanted. But I don’t know if I made the right decision. I don’t know if I should call her now.”

Lois Choi, who is twenty-eight and works at a marketing agency, has a leadership position at Sugarloaf; her father is an elder at the church. She told me that she was looking to Sunday’s sermon to find some confirmation of the complicated grief that she and other congregants were feeling. “The anger, the confusion, the fear, the hurt—I would love to hear that everything I’m feeling is valid,” she said. “That, yes, other minorities all across America have been dealing with their own versions of tragedy in very deep ways. But rather than putting a Band-Aid statement that ‘God is sovereign,’—which I one hundred and twenty per cent believe—I want to affirm the validity of the complex emotions that I’m constantly feeling every minute of the day.” Her voice quivered. “There’s hope, too, because I’ve never seen so many people rally around us like this and give us support.”

The service began with a prayer, delivered by a young church member who wore a backward baseball cap and glasses and who looked resolutely into the computer. “We pray for our community, that this moment would be a moment of unity for us, a time or an opportunity for us to speak up and be heard across the nation, God,” he said. “That a group that for a majority of the time is always told to kind of stay silent . . . that we could be more vocal and open.”

Another member played a few hymns on a guitar, and then John Kim, a thirty-five-year-old associate pastor at the church, began his sermon. Earlier in the week, he had said that he was thinking about the generational divide in the church. The church also holds Korean-language services, conducted by a senior pastor, Bong Choi, and attended mostly by older, first-generation congregants. “They might understand that there’s something going on,” Kim said, “but the next step, or the next level—of a national outcry about the lack of real protection against Asian hate—I don’t think they understand that.” At the Korean-language service, Pastor Choi talked about the shared experience of racism toward Asians—and also about the racism among Asians toward other people. He said that racism contradicted the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself, and quoted Joshua 1:9—“Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.”

At the English-language service, Kim began, “For our community and the victims in our community, first and foremost, I want to call us to a higher place.” Light poured in from two windows behind him. He had been speaking with members about repentance and confession. “What kind of hatred and bitterness do we harbor in our own hearts?” he asked. “Even as Asian-Americans, do we ever harbor prejudices and discriminatory feelings towards others? The obvious answer is yes. You know why? Because we’re broken and sinful people.”

Kim talked about the glory of creation and the challenge of being “worthy vessels capable of things such as love and trust and courage and strength and peace.” Eventually, he returned to the shooting. “We mourn the lives that were lost,” he said. “We mourn even the life that was twisted in a way to think that he could take it into his hands. So, Lord, we need to know right now, again, the fullness of your love for us. The depth to which you give us your grace.” Then it was on to Easter picnics and upcoming softball scrimmages. “It’ll be nice to have all of us out there,” a congregant said.

About forty minutes west, five police cars sat outside Crabapple First Baptist Church, which would be holding in-person services later that morning. Earlier in the week, the church had briefly taken down its Web site before replacing it with a statement condemning the “unthinkable and egregious murders,” which it described as “the result of a sinful heart and depraved mind for which Aaron is completely responsible.”

Crabapple is a predominantly white church. It is listed as “friendly” to Founders Ministries, a conservative group within the Southern Baptist Convention that is known, in part, for condemning critical race theory. (One article published on the Founders Web site describes anti-racism as an “anti-Christ ideology that uses racism as a means to fight supposed racism.”) As other Southern Baptist groups have wrestled with the convention’s historical ties to slavery, Founders Ministries has pushed back on criticism of the founders of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary—the oldest of six seminaries affiliated with the convention—all of whom were slaveowners. (Tom Ascol, the president of Founders Ministries, told the Washington Post that he was not familiar with Crabapple and that it had listed itself on the group’s Web site voluntarily.) On Wednesday, Chul Yoo, an Asian-American pastor who was on the staff of Crabapple First Baptist from 2012 to 2015, wrote a piece for Christianity Today, expressing his frustration with the way the church had been characterized. “As they grieve,” Yoo writes, “Crabapple will be able to carefully consider any blind spots brought to light by this incident, and the rest of us too will have a chance to take a closer look at our own churches, institutions, and hearts.”

I asked John Kim if he thought there was an underlying problem with racism in the Southern Baptist Convention. “Maybe there are in segments,” he said. “It’s not monolithic. But publicly, what I do see is an effort to try to bring that out and expose it and make positive movements in reconciliation.” He told me a story about meeting a young woman from a white congregation in South Carolina who approached him with the look of an anthropologist discovering a new tribe. “ ‘Seriously,’ she said, ‘I’ve never met an Asian person before. Can I shake your hand?’ ” Kim recalled telling her, “O.K., that’s fine.” He went on, “It wasn’t anything rude or discriminatory. She’s just never run into an Asian in her neck of the woods where she lives.”

Later, Kim talked about the tension he and many of his friends feel between the impulse to “speak up or cause a ruckus in the workplace,” or to keep one’s head down, and how this is often understood as a tension between one’s Asianness and one’s Americanness. “Part of the narrative we need to have as Asian people ourselves is, can we be Asian, and still be American,” he said, “or do we have to be American, and then Asian? Which way do we go? Or do we do both?”

Kim told me that he e-mails occasionally with a network of local youth pastors at other Southern Baptist churches with mostly white congregations. “It’s an e-mail chain that goes out once a week,” he said. “I’ll e-mail a few times here and there.” None of the other youth pastors on the list had reached out to him since the shootings, nor had he expected them to, he said, though he hastened to add, “I can’t speak for my senior pastor.”

Outside Crabapple, shortly before its Sunday service began, a church elder named Gary explained that the message of the day would be that “God’s in control” and “that we’re mourning with those who mourn.” Another church elder, Don, said that it would be a “prayer-service kind of approach.” Gary added, “A little different than our normal.” Journalists who wished to come inside were asked to sign a contract stipulating, among other things, that they would not conduct interviews on-site.

A member of the church began the service by saying that all present were “heartbroken for the victims and the families” and that the church had been “grieving over this tragic loss of life all week.” Gary then stepped to the dais with his wife, Linda, who is Asian-American, and who read aloud the names of the victims. Gary asked the congregation to join him in a prayer. His voice cracked. “Lord, we are broken-hearted,” he said. “We mourn for them. The evil of one man has produced these senseless deaths. We pray for justice—both divine justice and earthly justice.”

A pastor named Jerry Dockery then delivered a sermon that leaned heavily on scripture. “Our hearts, indeed, are broken by the hatred and violence perpetrated against any—against any—and all of our fellow human beings,” Dockery said. “We unequivocally condemn violent acts, like the ones that we witnessed unfolding this week.” He did not refer specifically to Asian-Americans, or mention racism. After the service, the church held a disciplinary meeting, then issued a single-sentence statement: “In accordance with the Biblical pattern and our church bylaws, Crabapple First Baptist Church has completed the process of church discipline to remove Robert Aaron Long from membership since we can no longer affirm that he is truly a regenerate believer in Jesus Christ.”

That evening, David Shin told me that he was still struggling with Pastor Kim’s call for introspection and forgiveness. “I don’t know if I’m in a place where I can forgive him yet,” he said of Long. “But I think I am in a place where I can mourn with his family, grieve with his congregation members.” Later, he said, “I think we all know about the emotional response.” He added, “As Christians, we’re always called to be forgiving. I think it can seem weird, to the outsider. But we have a baseline of the same understanding, as Asian-Americans.”

Shin was also thinking about how to tell the kinds of stories that would get people to pay attention to what was happening to his community, he said. Shin hosts a weekly podcast called “I Hope They Hear This,” which focusses on Asian-American stories in the region. The “They” in the title, he told me, “can be thought of as anyone who still sees Asian-Americans as foreign or unfamiliar.” Shortly before the shootings, he recorded an episode of the podcast, titled “I Hope We Stop Asian Hate.” “We anticipated that something would come,” he told me. “And we were, like, ‘Hey, we’ve got to do something about it before something bigger happens.’ Something bigger could still happen.”

The past year, Shin said, had been a kind of awakening for him. In May, he had recorded an episode of the podcast about the murders of George Floyd, in Minnesota, and Ahmaud Arbery, in Georgia. His guest was Pastor Kim. Among the questions they wanted to address was whether the Asian-American church had been adequate in its response to the racist violence perpetrated against Black Americans. Both men were shocked by the racism and police brutality that they had seen on video; they also had misgivings about much of the protesting that had followed. Shin ended up recording several more episodes about racism, including one addressing criticism that he had received about previous episodes. Looking back now, Shin said, “my emotional response has shifted to a much more empathetic mode.” Toward the end of his episode about the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes, he talked about confronting racism directly. Korean culture, he said, is “about the collective, not the individual, so we tend to suppress a lot of ourselves because of that. But, if ever there was a moment we needed to ignore that instinct, it’s now. All of you Asian-Americans out there, let’s make some noise.” He added, “We need to be bold and not afraid to say those things. Because if we can do that in those moments, you never know what other evolved, snowballed form of racism you’re stopping at its roots.”

Lois Choi had told me that a part of her appreciated Pastor Kim’s approach, “the encouragement to look inward at my own prejudices and hateful thoughts,” and noted that he would “always bring it back to the individual: what do you believe and how are you living that out in your daily life.” But she was also thinking beyond herself, she said, more than she had a year earlier. “Our fellow Black brothers and sisters have been suffering with this fear for so much longer,” she told me. “I’m very peace-making,” she said. “I put my head down. I do my work. I let that speak for who I am. But I don’t want to keep my head down anymore.”

Choi had heard about the message at Crabapple and was disheartened. “It’s shocking if the church that the shooter was from didn’t mention prejudice,” she said. “We’re grieving. They should be ones that bring out the hard questions on these issues.” She added, “Let’s be real: we’re Asian-Americans in a predominantly white church.” She became emotional, then apologized. “Sorry, this is triggering something,” she said. “It’s bringing to light some frustrations. It feels like a double standard, the lack of responsibility the shooter’s church is taking with these shootings.” Her husband, she noted, is the son of a senior pastor at a church in Marietta. If a similar crime had been perpetrated by a member of their community, she said, “We would’ve taken full responsibility.” They would have felt shame, she said.

Choi told me that she is the only Asian-American at her company. The company had said that it was concerned about diversity-and-inclusion issues, but didn’t initially make any public statements after the shooting. “My directors reached out to me personally, but, as a company there was no acknowledgment of what happened,” she told me. She contacted her manager to ask why. “I was, like, ‘This is not right.’ Even if you have no inkling or knowledge of anything Asian-American, the fact that it happened in our neighborhood, in Atlanta, shouldn’t you bring that awareness to everyone in the company?” Afterward, the company issued a statement. Choi told me, “I’ve never been one to speak about equality. But after everything that’s just happened so close to home . . . I could easily replace any one of those women with people that I’ve interacted with, that I love, that I cherish so dearly. I think that’s when something clicked. I can’t just be the model minority that people want me to be.”