Jimmy Swaggart would kill gays

SojoMail

The link above is to an article in the latest Sojourners email newsletter. Here’s an excerpt:

Swaggart’s sermon is so outrageous that I want to give you his exact words:

“I’ve never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry.”

(shouts, applause)

“And I’m gonna be blunt and plain, if one ever looks at me like that I’m going to kill him and tell God he died.”

I can’t believe it. Well, actually, I can but I don’t want to. I’ve seen such hatred among Christians. Yet, how can this be? How can a follower of Christ exude such hatred for one of God’s creation?

It makes me sick and ashamed to the point where I want to disown Christianity in general.

One Response to “Jimmy Swaggart would kill gays”

  1. Andy Says:

    OK man, I’ve got to admit, I really know very little (if indeed anything) about Jimmy S. but, if he said what you said he did, then I find it pretty dam offensive – not to mention a tad scary.

    Anyway, that’s not really why I’m emailing you, it was more for the “It makes me sick and ashamed to the point where I want to disown Christianity in general” bit.

    That’s pretty much the problem with religion I guess, our interpretation of it. It’s like MacDonald’s. You can have a MacDonald’s restaurant, the first ever say, and it’s GREAT. Mr Mac is there being nice to all his staff, serving good food, the whole shebang. But then, hey, he uses his name for other restaurants, all over the world, and before ya know it, your seeing Mr. MacDonald being blamed for some reprobate in Nowhere Land gobbing in little Benny’s happy meal. Did Mr. Mac do it? Did he want it to happen? No, but its name that gets tarred anyway.

    So yeah…did I really just use a MacDonald’s analogy to talk about God? I guess I did, but really what I’m trying to say is lets not want to disown Christianity as a religion, its done nothing wrong (it really can’t help it if some misguided clergy start causing trouble). Instead lets disown disturbing homophobic ideas and stop trying to use religion to stir up prejudice – something which has being going on for quite a while.

    The analogy that’s stood the test of time in terms of Christianity is family ie. God as the parental figure, us as his children. Your (I think I read somewhere else on this site) in your early twenties, so I dunno whether you’ve got any children; you might have. If you have, or if you do some day, then I suspect you might find out that, although biologically you created them, they’re still pretty much gonna do what they wanna do. Does that mean it’s gonna be what you want them to do? Are they still gonna go ahead and do it anyway?

    Well, I think I’d better leave it there before I get onto Burger King. Good sight man, thanks for reading

    Andy