I got an email from Larry Bourbonnais  the other day. He was shot by Matthew Murray at New Life Church in 2007. Murray killed four people at two locations before committing suicide.
Larry’s email starts: ”New Life lied about everything. No one has asked for my statement…”
As I re-read his email again tonight I read anger, discouragement, hurt, hope, resilience, a honest struggle to forgive and hold to hope. I hope he’s gotten solid sensible help and healthy respect for the trauma and public rejection he experienced in the trauma days after Murray’s shooting spree.
I realize Larry is a man who was dismissed as a kook for the greater good and careful script of New Life Church. He has moved to another state and hasn’t lost his faith in the Son of God. Go under the mercy and in peace, Larry.
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.
[snip]
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.
[snip]
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.
You can read the rest of the except here. The reviews at Amazon are also interesting. Blumenthal draws on Eric Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, much like I have gained understanding from retired Winnipeg professor Bob Altemeyer’s – The Authoritarians available online for free.
I can’t help but feel very sorry for that Matthew Murray, who was himself a victim of misunderstood and mishandled Christianity before he turned his anger on others. The rejection of his personhood by his parents through the way they misinterpreted their Christian faith, must have been so great that he came to despise himself – people who despise themselves behave very badly and their behaviour is a way that they continue downtrodding themselves by their actions and way of living, I think that’s pretty much Psychology 101 now. Our prisons are full of people who despise themselves, however that came to be. The verse of scripture that says “Woe to him who quarrels with his maker…Woe to him who says to his father ‘What have you begotten?’ or to his mother, ‘What have you brought to birth?’” (Is. 45:9-10) is so true. They tragically bring woe upon themselves (as well as others). Ultimately he is responsible for his actions, but I have to think that responsibility is a shared one – his parents and the church he attended whether well-meaning or not, failed that unfortunate young man, and I hope they will examine their faith and seek the Lord to sort themselves out.
That church exposes their unChristian heart by the way they treated Larry Bourbonnais. And those who condemn him for “contaminating a crime scene” need to understand that the last thing a person is thinking of in a traumatic situation like that is worrying about anything but living to see another day for themselves and/or others – in fact they are usually not thinking too well at all, only reacting the best they can, and I consider it bizarre that anyone would expect otherwise – real life does not happen the way the entertainment industry portrays it.
i was home schooled and it is quite satisfactory when providing basic education,”,