Jenna Ellis, the former legal adviser to Donald Trump, said on her eponymous radio show Tuesday that her main concern with the mass shooting at Club Q was that the five victims weren’t openly Christian… which means, in her mind, they’re burning in Hell.
The five people who were killed in the nightclub that night, there is no evidence at all that they were Christians.
And so assuming that… they have not accepted the truth of the gospel of Christ and affirmed Jesus Christ as the Lord of their life, they are now reaping the consequences of having eternal damnation. And that is far, far greater… and we should be having that conversation.
Instead of just the tragedy of what happened to the body, we need to be talking about what happened to the soul, and the fact that they are now in eternal separation from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Nothing says “Christian love” like hearing about the murder of five innocent people and immediately thinking, “But what church did they attend?” It’s not even an honest statement, since Jenna Ellis would undoubtedly downplay the horror even if any of the Club Q victims shared her faith. She would probably just pivot to the “sin” of being gay or trans and how God was simply punishing them for defying His wishes.
This is what always happens when evangelical bigots chime in after a tragedy where their hateful rhetoric likely played a role. Even evangelist Franklin Graham, himself a firehose of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, couldn’t bring himself to mention the name of the club or anything LGBTQ-related in a short Facebook post. Instead, he used the opportunity to trash Joe Biden for denouncing gun violence. Rep. Lauren Boebert, who regularly trashes LGBTQ people while celebrating assault weapons, had only prayers to offer. Substance is always off the table.
There are plenty of other similar responses from the conservative Christian side. You just can’t expect prominent white evangelical Christians to be decent human beings when their entire careers are spent trading compassion for cruelty. Even a mass murder isn’t enough to inspire some self-reflection on their end. How many white evangelical pastors, especially ones with large congregations, will use their pulpits this weekend to denounce this sort of bigotry and call on their churches to accept and understand LGBTQ people better? It’s a laughable question because we all know the answer. It’s not in their DNA to accept that their intolerance has contributed to hate crimes against LGBTQ people.
At least others have the courage to call this out for what it is:
If Jenna Ellis is what you become after you’ve accepted Jesus, we can only hope more people reject her faith immediately. We need more empathy and kindness, not whatever hate her religion is selling.