Evangelical Christian scream-preacher Jim Bakker is nothing short of a living legend in his field. After all, who other than Jesus could be effectively destroyed, then revive? Bakker’s bounce back from imprisonment on fraud and conspiracy charges has been nothing short of… dare I say, miraculous?
But despite Bakker’s re-entry as a force in the evangelical Christian ideological faction, he’s still batshit crazy. He’s spent quite a bit of time telling his viewers that he is in danger of being shut down, imprisoned even, for preaching his messages in an America on the verge of collapse. But, apparently, those are merely best-case scenarios for the 76-year-old evangelical Christian leader. Now he’s concerned that his message could ultimately get him killed.
“If you disagree today with somebody who disagrees with the Bible and you speak, but they have an agenda and if you won’t stop, they are going to kill you. Do you understand this? We have never lived in a day of our time, in our history of America, where you couldn’t have an opposite opinion. Now they’re determined to wipe out all of those who disagree with them. That to me is hideous. Protesting is one thing if you do it quietly and hold up a sign and say I don’t agree with you; killing you — that’s what they’re calling for now, they’re calling for death.”
Bakker never specifies who these homicidal dissidents are, but the program on which he gave this speech (embedded below) decided it was appropriate to embed news articles about the tensions between the public and the police, notably in the form of a Breitbart article about random Twitter users advocating for the deaths of police officers.
If that isn’t sending a message, I don’t know what is.
Jim Bakker, like many in his sect of Christocentric religiosity, is paranoid and concerned that his beliefs, that his way of life, is quickly being underrepresented in the court of public opinion. People are becoming decidedly less Christian, that is true, but that still doesn’t mean people are out to imprison, or even kill, someone for something so trivial and culturally oversaturated as spiritual beliefs.
h/t Right Wing Watch