Mega-church pastor, televangelist and “Bible prophecy” peddler John Hagee really needs to update his stock sermon about how America is turning into Sodom and Gomorrah due to the secular humanism threatening the safety of our good, godly children.
Seriously, John Hagee’s “Faith Under Fire” sermon rallying the persecuted majority reads like he wrote it during the Clinton administration and hasn’t bothered to change any of it since then. He gave this sermon last month, but is there a single reference here that couldn’t have been made in 1999?
Secular humanism is a pagan god and America is bowing at the shrine. It has filled our drug rehab centers, it has filled the divorce courts, it has filled the shelter for battered wives, it has filled the rape crisis centers, it has filled the mental hospitals and single bars, it has filled the penitentiaries and the roster guests for the brain-dead television shows you see from New York. Think about that, we’re in a moral free fall where your children can be taught witchcraft by Harry Potter; that Heather has two mommies; you can substitute Christmas for a midwinter holiday, call it anything you want to but don’t call it Christmas, kick God out of the Christmas event; you can let your daughter go to school and she can get an abortion without your permission or without your knowledge but she cannot get an aspirin without your knowledge. Something is dreadfully wrong when you as the parent cannot control the destiny of your own child. America has turned its back from the God of the Bible and it is time for the church of Jesus Christ to stand up and speak up and say we have a right to the destiny of our own children!
Heather Has Two Mommies was first published in 1989. The 10th anniversary edition is more than 10 years old. The little kindergartener in that story would be 27 years old by now. I think it’s long past time for Hagee to find a new shorthand symbol of the Big Gay Menace and the general moral decay of American Babylon.
How hard would it be for Hagee to keep his shtick a bit more current by tossing in a Lady Gaga or a Jersey Shore reference? Is that too much to ask? Just look at the video for Lady Gaga’s single “Judas” — she’s doing everything she can to get her name into sermons like this one from Hagee, and yet he utterly fails to pick up on that.
It’s just laziness, really. Say what you will about the late Jerry Falwell, but at least he always worked to keep his lamentations up-to-date. When Teletubbies were a thing, he preached against the gay menace of Teletubbies, but he wasn’t still going on about Tinky Winky five years later. The standards for right-wing jeremiads are really slipping.
Hagee is pastor — sorry, senior pastor — of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas. The church has 20,000 members. You would think at some point at least one of them would have asked their senior pastor to explain how something can be both “secular” and “pagan.” But, alas, no. All 20,000 of them are apparently comfortable railing against this oxymoronic bogeyman.
I suppose this comes from viewing the world in binary terms: Us and Not-Us. Everyone who is Not-Us is therefore regarded as interchangeable and identical — secular humanists, Pagans, feminists, Islamists, Muslims, Mormons, Muggles, Gryffindors, Slytherins, lesbians, Epsicopalians and mid-tribulationist premillennial dispensationalists (splitters!). That view makes sense, I suppose, as long as you take great care to never, ever learn anything at all about anyone who isn’t you. And, just to be safe, you should probably do your best not to learn too much about yourself either.
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