Make America Straight Again Conference 2019

SACRAMENTO —

Pastor Roger Jimenez implored his congregation at Verity Baptist Church to separate themselves from the ways of a modern, wicked world.

Burn your Harry Potter books. Trash your rock 'north' gyre CDs. Don't vaccinate your babies. Stay away from gay people.

"The United states of america is on a rainbow-colored gunkhole, and we've gotta shake that boat up," Jimenez said.

Speaking to some 400 people in an overflow oversupply that included dozens of young children staring intently at Bibles and giggling when pastors yelled, Jimenez was met with shouts of "Amen!" and "Let 'er rip!"

"If I go down in history as the hardest preacher against homos, praise the Lord," he added.

Pastor Roger Jimenez delivers the sermon during a Lord's day morning time service at Verity Baptist Church.

(Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times)

Hither in the uppercase of the state that is the vanguard for the and so-called liberal resistance, parishioners gathered terminal calendar month for the Carmine Hot Preaching Conference, featuring some of the almost virulently anti-gay pastors in the state. Jimenez started the conference in 2016 after gaining national notoriety for praising the mass shooting of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla.

The conference'southward vii preachers are part of a network of about 30 churches called the New Independent Fundamental Baptist Movement, which, experts on hate and extremism say, is growing and spreading violent rhetoric over the internet in an era when hate crimes against LGBTQ people are increasing.

The briefing took place in Jimenez's storefront church building vi miles from the state Capitol. Several pastors, including Jimenez, had called for the U.S. authorities to start executing LGBTQ people.

"It's certainly not the instance that they're in some out-of-the-way place similar minor-boondocks Alabama," said Heidi Beirich, manager of the Intelligence Projection at the Southern Poverty Police force Center, which has labeled several New Independent Fundamental Baptist churches hate groups. "They're in major cities like Houston, Sacramento, Los Angeles. They accept found inroads in places where yous might non expect this kind of extremism."

Although California is famously left-leaning, there are large swaths of social and political conservatism, including in parts of Sacramento County. Some 4.5 meg people in the Gold Land backed President Trump in 2016, and there are movements to create a "sanctuary city" for guns and to carve a separate Country of Jefferson out of California's rural, conservative northern counties.

When information technology comes to gay rights, the state spent years in courtroom contesting the voter-approved Proffer viii, the 2008 mensurate that banned aforementioned-sexual practice union until information technology was overturned in 2013.

A New IFB church recently opened in El Monte. Some other will open in Fresno in Baronial.

The New IFB Movement was started by Steven L. Anderson, a Sacramento native and the pastor of Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Ariz., who garnered headlines in 2009 for telling congregants he prayed for the death of President Obama. A day later, a congregant went to an Obama appearance in Phoenix carrying an AR-15 assault rifle.

Steven Anderson of Faithful Give-and-take Baptist Church of Tempe, Ariz., correct, confronts protesters in front of Revival Baptist Church of Orlando in Clermont, Fla. The church was holding a "Make America Straight Again" event and the protesters gathered in front of the church.

(Stephen M. Dowell / Orlando Sentinel)

Among the pastors associated with Anderson'southward network is Grayson Fritts, a Knoxville, Tenn., pastor and detective with the Knox County Sheriff'due south Office who, in June, called for the arrest and execution of LGBTQ people. Fritts took a buyout from the sheriff'south office in July and continues to preach.

In Sacramento, near of the pastors were fresh off some other result held in June just outside Orlando: the Make America Straight Over again Conference.

Jimenez, 33, opened it by saying that although the media depict gay people as "a niggling flamboyant" and "kind of funny," he believed they were a danger to children. (That belief — also cited by Catholic bishops seeking a scapegoat for sexual corruption by priests — has long been discredited by studies showing no connection between homosexuality and pedophilia.)

"Nosotros're not advocating taking the law into your hands, but here's what we're saying: If the government would put them to death, it would make America safe once more," Jimenez said. "Here'southward all we're maxim is that when they die, nosotros don't feel bad about it."

On the commencement night of the Sacramento conference, a stocky man in the crowd wore a T-shirt reading: "To Finish AIDS --> Leviticus 20:xiii: If a man besides lie with mankind, every bit he lieth with a woman … they shall surely be put to death."

The women wore long hair and long skirts. Many were visibly meaning or tending to multiple young children. Well-nigh families who attend Verity Baptist homeschool their kids, and women are discouraged from working outside the home.

The start preacher was Jonathan Shelley. In Jan, he replaced Donnie Romero, the founder of Stedfast Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, who resigned after having sex with prostitutes, co-ordinate to Anderson.

Shelley said the Bible tells women to continue silent in church and called J.D Greear, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, a "wicked simulated prophet" because Greear once apologized to LGBTQ people, maxim Christians have not washed enough to stop discrimination against them.

"Here's my apology: Go to hell!" Shelley shouted.

A small blond boy in a apparel shirt and tie yelled, "Amen!" in a high-pitched voice, leaning into his father. He clutched a rubber dinosaur toy, walking it along the side of his chair. In the row behind him, a male child with skinned knees and elbows watched the pulpit with his easily clasped behind his head.

Up adjacent was Anderson, a Holocaust denier who gave a rambling sermon confronting Calvinist theology, which includes predestination, the conventionalities that God has chosen certain people to go to sky before they're born. He thanked God for the power to "reach the masses" through the cyberspace.

Ii young men told a Times reporter they moved from out of state to be near a New IFB church after rampage-watching Anderson's sermons on YouTube. Anderson and his acolytes oft complain about being "censored" from YouTube. The New IFB Movement uses Gab, a Twitter-like platform favored by far-correct users including white nationalists, and several other social media sites.

Anderson's rhetoric has gotten him banned from 33 countries. In May, he became the start person ever banned from Republic of ireland under the country's exclusion powers. In 2016, he was deported from Botswana, which decriminalized gay sex activity in June, after saying on the radio that gay people should be stoned to death.

The New IFB Movement is a 21st century offshoot of the Contained Primal Baptist move, which emerged in the 1940s equally a response to growing liberalism in big American denominations, said John Fea, a professor of American history at Messiah College in Pennsylvania who has studied fundamentalism.

"They're tiny, simply they're loud," Fea said. "They like to yell; they call it hard preaching. They're not afraid of hell. It'southward fear mongering, simply they don't encounter it that style. They meet it as, they're the simply true believers and anybody else has compromised their faith."

Pastor Roger Jimenz placed a DVD and church materials on a gate, since he was unable to go through and knock on the door, as he walks the Willis Acres neighborhood of Sacramento while out "soul-winning."

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times )

Homosexuality remains divisive amidst people of faith. The United Methodist Church this year tightened its ban on gay clergy and same-sex marriage, a conclusion that could separate the denomination. In June, the Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution discouraging the phrase "gay Christian" because it considers same-sex activity allure a "sinful desire."

On Day 2 of the Crimson Hot Preaching Conference, Pastor Manly Perry, a balding man with a thick Texas accent and ill-plumbing fixtures suit, fantasized well-nigh a future "millennial reign of Christ," in which Jesus rules the earth for one,000 years. He said he will "never have to worry about Rex Jesus tweeting that he stands in solidarity" with LGBTQ people. Perry said he did not vote in 2016 and was disgusted by President Trump once posing with a rainbow flag.

He joked that he keeps a rifle called his "Southward.A.D. Weapon" — Sodomite Apocalypse Defense — and envisions a day when gay people surround his house like zombies, trying to become in to avert God's wrath. His children, he said, recently laughed at a transgender person in Walmart, and he hopes they hate LGBTQ people as much as he does.

"I feel and so sorry for the LGBTQ kids in those congregations because y'all know they're there," said Lorri Fifty. Jean, principal executive of the Los Angeles LGBT Center. Many homeless LGBTQ youth who seek help at the center come from religious families who shunned them and suffer from deep-rooted low, she said.

She said that if she could speak to LGBTQ children in New IFB churches, she would say: "Just hang on until you're erstwhile enough to not have to become anymore, and then, if you want to go to a church building that will accept you and love you, in that location are enough of them."

On Twenty-four hour period iv of the briefing, hundreds of attendees went "soul-winning," knocking on people's doors to talk about salvation.

Jimenez's married woman, Joann, 33, walked along Acacia and Alamos avenues with her well-worn King James Bible, slipping past driveway gates and ignoring a No Soliciting sign. A teenage girl with pink headphones in her ears talked to Joann Jimenez through a screen door considering she was babysitting. "Uh, I'grand Catholic," she said.

A human in a hat reading "Jesus Is My Dominate" was cleaning his truck in his driveway when Joann Jimenez approached and challenged his Cosmic organized religion. Polite merely flustered, he kept proverb, "We have Bible study."

Jimenez prayed on the porch for salvation with Veronica Vaez, an 18-yr-old in a pinkish T-shirt that said "Angel Infant." Jimenez handed her a DVD called "Psychopath Reprobates" featuring her husband's preaching.

"If I never run across you again, I'll run into you in heaven," she said.

Joann Jimenez described reprobates as people who have been rejected past God. All people sin and can be saved, she said — except those who commit certain "unnatural" sins like homosexuality, pedophilia and animality. (That conventionalities is not shared past mainline Christian denominations.)

Oliver Gonzalez, center, says a prayer with his wife, Melody, left, and pastor Roger Jimenez later walking the Willis Acres neighborhood of Sacramento equally part of a "soul winning" endeavour.

(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

The Jimenezes started Verity Baptist from their living room in 2010. Their six children, like all kids at the church, sit through service with the adults. Joann Jimenez said churches that send their kids to Dominicus school are "dumbing down the message."

Her kids saw hundreds of protesters exterior their church in 2016 after Jimenez praised the Orlando shooter. She told them, "The world is non supposed to like u.s.a.. The globe hated Jesus."

Spenser Fritz, a gay human, sued Jimenez, the church and a parishioner, saying Jimenez's anti-gay sermons inspired the parishioner to shove him during the protest.

In the ongoing lawsuit, Fritz said he saw "a small child, no older than 5," peering through the door at protesters. Fritz smiled and waved, hoping to show the child that gay people are non dangerous. A congregant, he alleged, saw Fritz and whispered in the kid's ear. The child so started pretending to shoot Fritz.

On the final day of the conference, a choir sang: "When America was founded, she was strong and pure and proficient, and her leaders on their knees were non aback to telephone call on God. But our nation, in her pride, has turned her back upon the right."

Roger Jimenez said his congregation will knock on every door in Sacramento. They program to stand exterior public schools this autumn to evangelize to young people. They keep getting kicked off YouTube, he said, simply they'll keep starting new channels, putting "hard preaching" out into the globe.

"We tin can't win them all," he preached. "But we can warn them all."

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Source: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-08-01/radical-baptist-pastor-lgbtq-hate

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