Far-right pastor Kent Christmas used the sermon he delivered at his Regeneration Nashville church last week to urge the members of his congregation to show the same sort of “passion” that drives radical Islamic terrorists to be willing to “die for their beliefs."
“I am at war with evil!” Christmas ranted during that sermon. “This is one preacher that is not backing down. I can tell you this: I will give my life for the Gospel. You want to know why the Muslim faith has had its advancements? It’s because the Muslims were willing to die for their beliefs. They were willing to strap bombs to their chest. They believed in the afterlife."
“God, give us some men and women that will get a hold of some passion in their spirit and say, ‘I will lay down my life for the Gospel!'” Christmas thundered. “This thing was born in blood.”
Understandably, Christmas' statement generated some controversy, which he addressed during his most recent Sunday sermon by predictably claiming that he had been "taken out of context."
"I do not condone violence," Christmas said. "I don't know how many of you saw the posts that we are advocating that you would put on chest bombs and to blow up things. It created quite a firestorm, so I want to say we're peaceful, we're loving, and that we believe in the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ as our greatest weapon."
"It's a shame that I even have to address this, but evil people don't play by the rules," he continued. "This is why we never do interviews with secular entities, because last week was a perfect example. They take things out of context and then they run a 30 second bit that sounds like that you're endorsing [something]."
"Perhaps I need to be a little more careful on how I present some of our principles," Christmas conceded. "When I mentioned that we need to have the passion to lay down our lives for Christ, we are declaring that from the standpoint that we must be willing for evil people to kill us, to lay down our lives for the Gospel, as the early church did."
Given that we at Right Wing Watch are the "evil people" who first posted Christmas' controversial statement, we refute his assertion that his remarks were taken "out of context." We explicitly provided the context in which he made his original remarks and posted video of him making those remarks.
Furthermore, contrary to Christmas' current revisionism, never in his original statement did he declare that Christians "must be willing for evil people to kill us." Rather, he explicitly credited radical Islamic terrorists with making "advancements" on behalf of Islam by being "willing to strap bombs to their chest" and "die for their beliefs."
We'll take Christmas' word that he did not intend to create the impression that he was advocating for Christians to start engaging in terrorism in order to advance their faith, but we do want to say that nothing about the original video and post published by Right Wing Watch took anything "out of context."
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