If you haven’t watched the Netflix series Monster: the Jeffrey Dahmer Story, then my honest advice is, don’t. I’m not saying that lightly. My tolerance threshold for disturbing viewing is high, and there is little in the way of guts and gore that upsets me. Yet this series did affect me, in a way I haven’t experienced since I was a kid. It was a ‘playing on the mind’ feeling, not so much thinking about it directly, but having all one’s moods coloured by it. A dark sense of something sinister lurked in the background to my consciousness for a couple of days.

In some ways I was an ideal viewer. I had never heard of Dahmer, and knew nothing about the case, so I was like the residents of Dahmer’s Milwaukee who had to try and understand the whole horrid business in one sitting. Yes, of course it was obvious the programme was about a serial killer, but I was unprepared for the details of Dahmer’s killing spree – necrophilia, attempts at making ‘living sex zombies’ with an electric drill and corrosive acid, cannibalism, and the discovery in his apartment of various body parts being prepared to construct an altar of skeletons in his living room.

I had absent-mindedly started watching episode 1, but regretted bringing this stuff into my life. I still had to watch the series to the end, though. I even strayed a little into the Dahmer rabbit-hole along the way. Not a nice place to be. He was arrested in 1991, so the footage from the court case is on YouTube for all to see. Unlike, say, common or garden British psychopaths like Ian Brady and Peter Sutcliffe, there are lengthy interviews with Dahmer himself being quizzed about the motivation for his crimes, as he settled in to his nine-hundred year jail sentence. His dad, Lionel Dahmer, sits next to him one interview. Lionel had himself agonised at length about how he’d raised his son, even writing a book called A Father’s Story in which he analyses their relationship and all the red flags he’d missed before it was too late.

During the interview in question, Dahmer is asked whether Lionel should bear any responsibility for his crimes. I was shocked when things took a religious turn. Dahmer refuses to blame his dad, “there has to come a point where a person has to become accountable for what he’s done. You can’t go around making excuses, blaming other people”. He goes on, “I’ve since come to believe that the Lord Jesus Christ is the true creator of the heavens and the earth…and I have accepted him as my Lord and Saviour, and I believe that I as well as everyone else will be accountable to him”.

The interviewer tries to turn the conversation back to more manageable territory, asking if Lionel hadn’t installed any sense of accountability in him during childhood. Lionel mentions that he had himself suffered a years long crisis of faith, and his lack of faith meant accountability wasn’t effectively instilled in his son. Dahmer agrees, “if a person doesn’t think there’s a God to be accountable to, what’s the point in trying to modify your behaviour to keep it within acceptable ranges?” Then he returns to his point, “I’ve since come to believe the Lord Jesus Christ is truly God”.

The interview then cuts abruptly to an advert break. Presumably the prior descriptions of sex with corpses and dismembered body parts were easier on the viewer than trying to understand the fact that the monster cannibal of Milwaukee had converted to Christianity in prison.

There had been much outcry about the baptism

We can sympathise with the decision to edit out as much as possible about Dahmer’s conversion. The pastor who baptised him and offered him ongoing spiritual companionship, Roy Ratcliff, also wrote a book detailing his experiences of Dahmer. There had been much outcry about the baptism, and Ratcliff had to defend his actions against people who were appalled at the thought.

Some of the criticisms followed from a misunderstanding of the Christian doctrine of baptism. The total and complete forgiveness of sins promised by Christian baptism was mistaken as meaning Dahmer would not be accountable for his previous crimes, and could even be released from prison. The proper understanding is of course that God accepts the baptised person as if he had never sinned, while a baptised person remains entirely personally responsible to make amends for his sins to humanity at large. Ratcliff clarifies this point with a restatement of the church-state separation traditionally adhered to in American evangelical protestantism: “God is not the state, and the state is not God; the two govern different realms”, he writes, “baptism doesn’t concern justice in the society. It concerns the forgiveness of God”.

The most common criticisms were more theological – people asked if there were any limits on God’s mercy, given the incomprehensible barbarity of Dahmer’s crimes, and how Dahmer’s declaration of repentance could possibly be sincere, given how far he had fell. Ratcliff is clear in his responses: “I don’t know of any sins too evil for Christ’s blood to wash away” he told Dahmer during a prison visit in which the killer shared his fear that Ratcliff would tell him he couldn’t be baptised because his sins are too evil. He’s equally clear on the question of sincerity: “How unfair that question is! Will God judge the sincerity of our baptism on our pre-Christian lives?”

I still felt uneasy about the whole thing. Ratcliff’s story of the account did help, a bit. Following baptism Dahmer had a list of questions for Ratcliff, and he followed a pattern I’m familiar with among converts. People swiftly get embedded in intra-ecclesial discussions around doctrinal purity after baptism, keen to maintain their new found sense of renewal. For the Church of Christ of which Ratcliff was a minister, the debates surrounded whether the King James Bible is indeed the only properly authorised translation of the Scriptures, how Dahmer might partake of the Lord’s Supper weekly while in prison, and debate specific to that denomination about whether instrumental music transgresses against Ephesians 5:19.

My discomfort didn’t disappear, however. It was rooted in something only briefly touched upon by Ratcliff. He says that Dahmer’s baptism “suggests something frightening”, which is that “any of us could become monsters”. When society is throwing the word “monster” around, there often is something going on about that society’s refusal to examine itself. To call someone a monster is to say there is a difference of kind between yourself and him, not a difference of degree. Could it be possible that Dahmer’s crimes are appallingly intensified variants of human behaviours which are actually increasingly common in society in large?

Dahmer describes his motivation for trying to turn people into zombies by saying, “I wanted to have a person under my complete control. Not having to consider their wishes, being able to keep them there for as long as I wanted”. He says this was “my way of feeling complete control, creating my own little world where I had the final say”. In another interview he states, “when you depersonalize another persona and view them as just an object, an object for pleasure and not a living, breathing human being, it seems to make it easier to do things you shouldn’t do”.

If the conversion of Jeffrey Dahmer isn’t just dismissed out of hand, then difficult questions about how contemporary society depersonalises people, objectifies people, tries to control people, and reduce people as means to satisfy the desires of others, will need to be faced.

For we now live in a world of AI sexbots, where pornography interacts with our neural hardware to turn viewers into masturbatory sex zombies, where the Metaverse promises everyone a chance to create their own little world where they have the final say, where grooming kids is thought to offer liberation from the demands life makes upon them. This is a world where personal accountability is increasingly filed away somewhere under narratives of affliction and oppression, further reducing people feeing like cogs in an impersonal machine. Algorithms hack specific elements of brain chemistry as if we were automatons. The body is seen as less and less as an integral whole bound-up with our mysterious ensoulment as persons, but as something increasingly estranged from our identity, and capable of being reordered at will by the removal or addition of body parts.

The Netflix series made little of the conversion of Jeffrey Dahmer in its final episode. Perhaps the questions it raises are even more difficult today than they were back then. Then Ratcliff’s response to the misunderstanding of baptism is more fruitful for reflection than it first seems. The complete separation between the state and religion seems more unsustainable in a world featuring the complex forms of objectification and depersonalisation listed above. We might well ask if society has slipped so much further into the abyss that separating the worldly and the divine order is far less sustainable now, thirty years later. As a member of the Christian resistance against Nazism quipped against those who sought to convert Hitler to Christianity in the 1930s: “We are the ones to be converted, not Hitler”. When encountering genuine evil, the first response should always be a turn to one’s own world to ask how things have gone so awry.