RWNJ Pastor Thinks Ariana Grande Is As Bad As Terrorists (VIDEO)


It was only a matter of time before a religious right pastor got a case of diarrhea of the mouth over the horrific bomb attack at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester. It initially appeared that Jim Bakker was the first to oblige earlier this week, when he suggested that the bombing victims brought their ordeal on themselves.


But believe it or not, another fundie pastor beat him to it the previous day. And he actually took a line that was at least as degrading as Bakker’s line–which takes a lot of effort. He actually suggested that Grande may actually be as bad or worse than those who carried out the attack.

On Sunday, David Whitney told his congregation at Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church in Pasadena, Maryland–near Annapolis–that he’d done some digging on Grande after the bombing. What he heard made him wonder if she was as bad as the suicide bomber who killed 22 innocent people. Watch the whole thing here, if you can stand it. However, People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch got a clip of some of the worst moments.

Grande, for those who don’t know, was raised as a Catholic, but walked out on Catholicism primarily because her half-brother, Frankie Grande, is openly gay. To Whitney’s mind, this made her “an open advocate for sodomy.” Whitney also harped on the fact that Grande practices Kabbala, a form of Jewish mysticism that he branded “a satanic cult religion.”

Supposedly, Kabbala preaches that sin is a virtue, and one must embrace the dark in order to become fully human. Whitney called this a pathway to embracing Satan. To his mind, Grande was like the Pied Piper, as she was leading “a whole generation of young people” down a very dark path. He believed that Grande’s fame and wealth came as a result of making a “pact with the devil.” He believed that Grande and other “pop tarts” who “sell themselves to Satan” are taking young people with them down a “road of destruction.”

Whitney noted the young people who died–an eight-year-old girl, three 14-year-olds, a 15-year-old, and a 17-year-old. All of them, he said, had died seeing a woman who was “promoting every form of immorality,” as well as outright Satanism, “by her music and by her lyrics and by her gyrations.”


This sermon sounded like anything you would hear from a fundie pastor in the 1980s, with much hand-wringing about the evils of secular music. If there was any doubt that this was where Whitney was going, he erased it by suggesting that Grande could potentially be doing far more damage than the bomber.

“So while we can measure accurately the damage that the suicide bomber accomplished—we can count the body bags, we can read the list of those in the hospital recovering from their injuries that the suicide bomber caused—it is far more difficult to measure the damage done by this dangerous woman. Exactly how many souls has she led down the path of destruction? How many has she impacted? What thoughts has she put into their minds?”

I had to listen to this twice in order to believe what I was hearing. Whitney was suggesting–with a straight face–that Grande was as or more dangerous than a man who got the bright idea to blow himself up along with 22 innocent people–including children. I’ve heard a lot of degrading pigweed from pastors over the years, but this has to stand as one of the worst.

Whitney seemed to be saying that Grande was leading people away from Jesus, which was a tragedy in and of itself, much like the bombing. I saw this mentality first-hand during my collegiate days at the University of North Carolina. As many of my longtime readers both here and at Daily Kos know, I was tricked into joining a borderline cultish charismatic campus ministry in my freshman year. I briefly pretended to have “seen the light” and become one of them for a brief time in my sophomore year. A number of my “brothers” and “sisters” in that bunch likened me to the Apostle Paul, in that I’d gone from speaking out against them at every turn to joining them and helping them bring “the good news of Jesus” to Chapel Hill.

Even now, this has me dumbfounded. Paul, for those who don’t know, actually had Christians executed before his conversion. So speaking out against a Christian group is the same thing as having Christians killed? The lack of proportion here was staggering.

But this goes far, far beyond a typical fundie lack of proportion. To even suggest that a singer who walked away from Christianity is in any way as dangerous as a suicide bomber is callous and uncaring. Indeed, it comes very close to blaming the victims’ parents for letting Grande attend that concert.

Whitney had already established himself as a loathsome character long before this sermon. He is the chaplain of the Maryland chapter of the League of the South, a neo-Confederate outfit that calls for the former Confederacy to secede and form a separate, white-dominated nation. It openly describes white supremacy as a Biblical concept. In the past, he has openly called for our government to be replaced by a theocracy, suggested Obama’s father is the devil, and blamed a racially-motivated shooting at the University of Maryland on the teaching of evolution.


But this latest screed should leave no doubt. A pastor who even suggests a singer is anywhere near as dangerous as a terrorist just because he or she isn’t a Christian is missing the switch in his mind that gives him humanity and compassion.

(featured image courtesy Emma Sheehan, available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license)

Darrell is a 30-something graduate of the University of North Carolina who considers himself a journalist of the old school. An attempt to turn him into a member of the religious right in college only succeeded in turning him into the religious right's worst nightmare--a charismatic Christian who is an unapologetic liberal. His desire to stand up for those who have been scared into silence only increased when he survived an abusive three-year marriage. You may know him on Daily Kos as Christian Dem in NC. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook. Click here to buy Darrell a Mello Yello.