The Trump administration claims that it hasn’t a clue how two Christian supremacist preachers, Robert Jeffress, left, and John Hagee, became involved in the US’s new embassy in Jerusalem.
In the wake of the bloodshed sparked by the opening – at more than 60 Palestinian protesters died when Israeli security forces opened fire on them – White House Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah claimed he “honestly” did not know how the two pastors came to be at the opening.
According to this report, Jeffress, an evangelical pastor at Dallas’s First Baptist Church and one of President Trump’s key faith advisers, once said that Jews, Muslims, Mormons, and Hindus would go to hell, and Hagee once suggested that Adolf Hitler was part of God’s plan. The former gave the opening prayer at the ceremony and the latter delivered the benediction.
During a lecture series in 2010, Jeffress — a pastor with a history of making hateful comments about non-evangelical faith groups — said:
Not only do religions like Mormonism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism— not only do they lead people away from God, they lead people to an eternity of separation from God in hell.
On his church’s website, he called Islam a “false religion” based on a “false book” that would lead its followers to hell. He also suggested it was not anti-Semitic:
To tell a devout follower of Judaism that unless he trusts in Christ as his Savior he is destined for Hell.
He has referred to both Islam and Mormonism as religions that were “a heresy from the pit of hell” and has referred to non-Christian religions as “cults”.
Mitt Romney, a former Gorvernor of Massachusetts and a prominent Mormon, slammed the decision to let a “religious bigot” give the prayer at the opening of the embassy in Jerusalem. He tweeted:
Robert Jeffress says ‘you can’t be saved by being a Jew’, and ‘Mormonism is a heresy from the pit of hell’. He’s said the same about Islam. Such a religious bigot should not be giving the prayer that opens the United States Embassy in Jerusalem.
Jeffress hit back, tweeting:
Historic Christianity has taught for 2,000 years that salvation is through faith in Christ alone. The fact that I, along with tens of millions of evangelical Christians around the world, continue to espouse that belief, is neither bigoted nor newsworthy.
When asked how Jeffress was chosen to deliver the opening prayer despite his past remarks, Shah said, “I honestly don’t know how that came to be” and added that Jeffress had a “strong relationship” with people in the Trump administration as well as with Democrats.
Pastor Jeffress has had a strong relationship with many people in the faith community, as well as folks in the administration, and Republicans on the Hill, and others. I believe Democrats as well. I think he has a long-standing involvement with public officials.
He said that he was not aware of comments Jeffress made about Jews going to hell.
Shah, above, told a reporter during the White House briefing on Jeffress and Hagee:
I don’t have any readout on how they became involved with these events.
He said that if their views — as outlined by the reporter — were “an accurate reflection” of what the pastors said, then they wouldn’t be:
Embraced by this White House.
Shah also did not directly address why Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner chose to receive a blessing from Sephardic Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, who referred to black people as monkeys during a sermon this year.
In a sermon delivered in the 1990s that resurfaced in 2008, Hagee said:
Then God sent a hunter. A hunter is someone with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter. And the Bible says – Jeremiah writing – ‘They shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and from the holes of the rocks’, meaning there’s no place to hide.
And that might be offensive to some people but don’t let your heart be offended. I didn’t write it. Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.