Patrick Preacher is the “pastor for queer ministry” at Trinity Lutheran Church (ELCA) — and what he preaches is as bad as his title sounds.
“This particular pastor says that hell doesn’t really exist as a physical place except for the manifestation of anti-LGBTQ discrimination here in America. That that is actually what makes hell,” BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey says, before playing a clip of the pastor.
“Who had the nerve to tell you, or any of us, or this world for that matter, that being queer makes for an awful person?” Preacher asked during a sermon.
“[What] was he thinking when he told you this?” he asked again. “And I assume that it was a man because in most cases it always is. Why has Christianity — the religion of a humble, brown-skinned immigrant from Nazareth — become the religion of bigotry? Who had the nerve to tell any of us that we would be going to hell for the way God created us to be?”
“Here’s the answer,” Stuckey comments.
“Jesus did.”
“And it’s not just people who are gay. As Romans 3:23 tells us, ‘All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,’” she says, before honing in on his claim that Christianity is “the religion of bigotry.”
“He says, ‘Why has Christianity — the religion of a humble, brown-skinned immigrant from Nazareth — become the religion of bigotry?’ So here we see the intersectionality. If someone is brown-skinned, if someone is an immigrant, that they must also be accepting of homosexuality and transgenderism and all of these things,” Stuckey says.
“This is critical theory, queer theory being projected onto the Bible. This is not Christianity. This is not someone who loves God and His authority and wants to read the Bible asking, ‘How can I glorify God?’ This is someone who wants to use a religious text to justify sin, to justify and to downplay what God calls an abomination,” she continues, adding, “That is blasphemy.”
The pastor also claimed that “queer is God’s design.”
He said, “Who had the nerve to tell any of you that you’re too queer, that you’re too masculine, too gay, too feminine, or simply too much? Don’t they know? Look at your bulletin cover. Queer is God’s design.”
“God’s design from the beginning was marriage as a union between a man and a woman,” Stuckey comments.
“Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female and said, ‘Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh,’” she reads from Matthew 19:4-6.
Stuckey explains that like this preacher, “Satan tries to twist God’s word the way that this pastor does.”
But that doesn’t change the true word of God.
“Homosexuality is by definition against God’s design. Scripture describes it as an abomination, unnatural, explains the penalty for persisting in this sin just as persisting in other sins in rebellion to God is hell,” she says, adding, “That is the result.”
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