On Sunday, in one of the most vile sermons he’s ever delivered—and that’s saying a lot—Christian hate-preacher Jonathan Shelley told his congregation at Stedfast Baptist Church in Texas that we’d be “lucky” if the Holocaust really took the lives of six million Jews, that being Jesus-like meant spreading antisemitic hate, and that the biggest problem with the phrase “Judeo-Christian” was the “Judeo” part.
He also added that he wouldn’t shed a single tear if a terrorist murdered everyone in a gay bar, echoing what his colleague said after the Pulse nightclub massacre several years ago.
In other words, it was everything we’ve come to expect from the religious extremists who lead the New Independent Fundamentalist Baptist movement.
… We need to be warned of this… serpent seed of… the seed of the devil. These Jews that are out there. Because they want to destroy everything that’s holy, and everything that’s righteous, and, in our culture, it is not acceptable to say anything negative about them…
[Imitating a critic] Haven’t you heard about the Holocaust, Pastor Shelley?
Yeah. Why do I care?
I mean… if someone walks into a homo bar and shoots them all… shoots a bunch of homos and kills all of them… you know how many tears I shed for that? Zero.
And you know what? People that worship the devil, I don’t care how many of them die. I don’t care. You say, “Well, Adolf Hitler was evil!” Absolutely! That guy was full of the devil, okay? That guy was an antichrist figure. Absolutely. You know what? If an Antichrist kills another Antichrist, I don’t cry even one second.
Well, did they kill six million?
I doubt it. Only if we were lucky.
This sermon is not nice!
It’s not. How many lawsuits can I get? I don’t know.
…
But let me tell you something: If you’re gonna be like Jesus, you have to do something. You have to preach against the Jews. And it’s not popular. No one likes it. You’re gonna get a lot of heat for it. But you know what? I’d rather preach the truth on this issue and get all the heat for it, than to be a coward and try to worship the Jew, like most Baptists.
We will not worship that… that Jew.
…
And we need to be the loudest voice out here, explaining how the Jews are wicked, evil, Satanic people that hate the Lord Jesus Christ.
I am not Judeo-Christian. Our country should not be Judeo-Christian. Texas should not support these wicked people.
None of this is especially surprising from Shelley, who has made all these points (albeit separately) in older sermons. Last year, he celebrated the death of a gay man at a Pride parade. He has repeatedly wished for or called for the death of gay people and abortion providers. He’s burned non-KJV bibles. He’s perpetuated the Alex Jones lie about the Sandy Hook massacre.
He doesn’t limit his hate speech to the walls of his church, either. Back in May, he appeared at an Arlington City Council meeting to push back against their acknowledgment of Pride Month by repeating the same calls for violence.
Even though Shelley’s church was evicted from its strip mall in the city of Hurst earlier this year, it found a new home about 15 minutes away in the city of Watauga, where they are today.
Perhaps more concerning is the fact that his latest sermons remain on YouTube even though his original channel was terminated a while back. YouTube doesn’t allow terminated accounts to create new channels under different names, yet Shelley and his colleagues rely on a variety of dummy accounts to spread their hate to the widest possible audience. When one is shut down, new ones get created all the time, allowing the New IFB churches to livestream their bigotry to newer audiences.
The channel where this particular sermon was streamed was created in July and currently has over 1,000 subscribers.