Gospel Singer Kim Burrell to Church Members: Gay People Are Perverts Who Will Die

In a sermon she streamed on Facebook Live, gospel singer Kim Burrell went on a homophobic rant in which she said people with the “homosexual spirit” would die from it.

As far as I can tell, this is what she’s saying:

… Everybody in this room who’s filled with the homosexual spirit, pray to God to free you. You play with it. What does that mean? You’ll die from it. You play with it in God’s house in 2017, you’ll die from it.

… I came to tell you about sin.

That sin nature… That perverted homosexual spirit, and the spirit of delusion and confusion. It has deceived many men and women. It has caused a strain on the body of Christ…

You cannot get instruction from God’s holiness with that much perversion. You as a man, you open your mouth and take a man’s penis in your face, you are perverted…

You are a woman and will shake your face in another woman’s breast, you are perverted.

It has come into our church and it has vanquished the kingdom of God. Mr. “I am delivered“… went all the way to Jimmy Kimmel…

… Because nobody would be thinking you had AIDS if a homosexual man didn’t come out and reveal what you did behind closed doors.

This sort of rhetoric is mainstream within large Christian denominations. Not that gay people will die — we usually only hear that sort of thing from independent fundamental Baptists like Steven Anderson — but that LGBT people who act on their desires are committing a sin, and God punishes sinners. See? It’s indirect that way. Much easier to pretend you’re not just covering up your own bigotry.

This is what “love the sinner, hate the sin” looks like in practice. As critics rightly point out, it’s hypocrisy, pure and simple. Homosexuality isn’t a sin, and pretending it is – and that God will punish people for it, and that they need to be “cured” of it — is a big reason so many people have abandoned religion over the past decade.

So, being generous here, Burrell told her congregation that gay people who acted on their homosexuality were sinners who deserved whatever punishment God had in store for them. That’s hardly an improvement from saying gay people deserve to die.

(It’s also the sort of sermon you’d never see a pastor deliver about gluttons, cheaters, or people who work on the Sabbath.)

Burrell went on Facebook Live late last night to say we’re all misinterpreting her.

See? She wasn’t talking about L-G-B-T. She was talking about S-I-N! Even though, to her, those are the same thing… Anyone daring to quote her directly must be acting on Satan’s orders.

Maybe she realized that no one was buying her spin, because an hour later, she made another “apology” video.

This time, she claimed she never said gays were going to Hell. (Even though that’s totally what she said.) She tried to dismiss it by saying she was only speaking to her congregation, as if that makes a difference. But she also reiterated that “people who operate with that spirit in the church, with deception, and attack themselves are going to have to face the Master.”

Spoiler: When she says “that spirit,” she’s referring to homosexuality.

Burrell is slated to appear on The Ellen Degeneres Show later this week alongside Pharrell Williams to perform a song appearing on the Hidden Figures soundtrack. So… that’ll be awkward.

The backlash on Twitter is already beginning: