Damned Christians

[Fake Messiah]

Evangelical Legal Group Asks Supreme Court to Overturn Same-Sex Marriage Ruling

A conservative Christian legal group asked the United States Supreme Court to review a decade-old case involving a former Kentucky county clerk who cited her faith when she refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples — a long-shot effort activists hope will result in justices ending nationwide legalization of same-sex marriage.

Liberty Counsel, a legal nonprofit that also describes itself as a Christian ministry, has long been involved in the case of Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who in 2015 gained international attention after she wouldn’t issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples despite the Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court decision, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide that same year.

Davis’ refusal — which she said was rooted in her evangelical Christian faith — led to a series of legal battles she lost, resulting in a brief prison sentence as well as being ordered to pay $100,000 in damages as well as additional legal fees.

The nonprofit filed a petition with the court on Thursday (July 24), requesting an appeal to Davis’ case and asking the court to overturn Obergefell.

Liberty Counsel founder Mathew Staver said multiple justices have voiced frustration with the Obergefell decision over the years. When the court passed over Davis’ case in 2020, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a statement joined by Justice Samuel Alito that blasted the same-sex marriage ruling, saying, “Davis may have been one of the first victims of this court’s cavalier treatment of religion in its Obergefell decision.”

“We think that it’s not a matter of if, but just a matter of when, the Supreme Court will overrule Obergefell,” Staver said.

The court has grown more conservative since the 2020 ruling, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett — who has voiced criticism of Obergefell in the past — filling the slot on the bench left open after the death of liberal jurist Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And Thomas explicitly called for Obergefell to be reconsidered in his concurring opinion for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the 2022 ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide.

https://wordandway.org/2025/07/31/evange...ge-ruling/

[zebo-the-fat]

America seems to be moving back into the 1950's or even earlier, I would not be surprised if they tried to bring back prohibition and slavery (but only for black people of course!)

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

America seems to be moving back into the 1950's or even earlier, I would not be surprised if they tried to bring back prohibition and slavery (but only for black people of course!)

Slavery is more likely. Far too many boozy Christians to bring back Prohibition.

Boru

[Fake Messiah]

Wow, there are so many ways to make a shitload of money through religion.

Miami pastor, associate accused of $21K fraud scheme targeting immigrants

A Miami pastor and an associate are behind bars after authorities said they orchestrated a months-long fraud scheme that targeted immigrants seeking legal assistance, using a church as the front.

According to arrest reports, between April 2024 and January 2025, Ochoa Vasquez introduced at least 16 victims to Gonzalez through his church, falsely claiming Gonzalez was an immigration attorney who could help them obtain work permits and driver’s licenses.

Victims paid more than $21,000 through Zelle payments made to a company registered to Gonzalez, Brothers Multiservicio LLC, or in cash directly to Pastor Ochoa Vasquez, according to the reports.

Detectives said neither man provided the promised services or issued refunds. Subpoenaed financial records show the funds were spent on luxury items from brands like Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and Fendi, as well as travel to South America and Europe.

https://wsvn.com/news/local/miami-dade/m...mmigrants/

Former pastor sentenced to 12 years for theft of charitable funds, patronizing prostitution

Criminal Court Judge sentenced 83-year-old James Neil Gill to 12 years in the Tennessee Department of Correction following his guilty pleas to Theft of Property over $60,000 (Class B felony) and Patronizing Prostitution (Class A misdemeanor).

Gill, the former Executive Director of the Sumner County Food Bank (SCFB) and senior pastor of Liberty Baptist Church in Gallatin, misused charitable donations meant to serve vulnerable residents. In May 2022, the Sumner County District Attorney’s Office requested assistance from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) regarding suspected financial misconduct involving Gill and SCFB’s operations account.

The TBI investigation revealed that Gill:

●Issued checks to himself and others

●Redirected food bank funds to personal and unrelated nonprofit accounts he controlled

●Used food bank resources to pay a female volunteer in exchange for sexual services

●Made extensive personal purchases using the SCFB debit card

●Funded improvements to his private residence with SCFB funds

Between February 2020 and May 2022, records show Gill authorized the misappropriation of substantial charitable assets, including:

●Over $200,000 in payments to himself

●$130,000 to the Director of Operations

●$40,000 to the SCFB Treasurer

●Nearly 100 checks made out to “cash,” all endorsed by Gill

●Purchase of a 2018 Chevy Silverado for personal use, directly from the SCFB account

https://www.wbbjtv.com/2025/08/01/former...stitution/

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Former Frisco pastor indicted on child pornography charges

Jim Mustain, 64, was indicted last Tuesday on four counts of possession of child pornography, a first-degree felony. His bond was set at $100,000 and he was in custody as of Tuesday.

Mustain served as a community pastor at Preston Trail Community Church between 2019 and 2023.

Mustain has served in pastoral positions at other churches outside the state and in North Texas, including a stint as pastor for community and life transformation at Valley Ranch Baptist Church in Coppell from 2005 to 2014, according to The Roys Report religious watchdog blog.

He was active in several community groups as well, working with Christian-based organizations including Christian Community Action and Forge Dallas. He also previously held Place No. 7 on the City of Lewisville’s Community Development Block Grant Advisory Committee, served on the Board of Directors of the Lewisville Area Chamber of Commerce, founded the public charity Loving Community in Denton County and volunteered in the Lewisville school district.

https://www.keranews.org/criminal-justic...lewisville

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Tucson pastor Isaac Noriega faces court amid abuse allegations

A Tucson pastor, Isaac Noriega of the Golden Dawn Tabernacle Church, faced court proceedings over allegations of neglecting to address abuse within his congregation. More than a dozen former church members attended the hearing to voice their concerns.

As Noriega walked the courthouse hallway, he was followed by former members, including Levi Duenas. Duenas expressed worry about Noriega's influence over the congregation. "We are no longer afraid of you. We are not afraid to stand up to you," said Duenas.

The charges against Noriega stem from allegations connected to Jose Mora, who faces five counts of child molestation. Mora's alleged offenses date back to 2012 and 2004, involving victims between the ages of 12 and 14.

https://www.kvoa.com/news/local/tucson-p...b47be.html

[Fake Messiah]

Oh well, I'm sure he won't do it again because he learned his lesson in prison and prisons are the best moral schools for pastors.

Houston Pastor convicted in $3.6M fraud case returns to megachurch after prison release

Houston pastor KirbyJon Caldwell has returned to the megachurch he helped build in southwest Houston.

His return to Windsor Village Church on Sunday comes nearly a year after his early release from prison last year, after pleading guilty to wire fraud.

Caldwell, who once served as a spiritual adviser to Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, served time behind bars in Beaumont for defrauding investors out of nearly $3.6 million. Federal court documents show Caldwell's co-conspirator was "responsible for finding investors." Caldwell says no one from his church was defrauded.

Court documents show Caldwell paid full restitution.

His congregation and friends welcomed him with open arms.

"It's such a blessing to have our visionary pastor back at church. We are so excited," a member of the church said.

Cleaver and others in the community said they believe Caldwell has repented and is touched by God to continue his work.

https://abc13.com/post/houston-pastor-ki.../17418701/

[HappySkeptic]

Evangelical Legal Group Asks Supreme Court to Overturn Same-Sex Marriage Ruling

A conservative Christian legal group asked the United States Supreme Court to review a decade-old case involving a former Kentucky county clerk who cited her faith when she refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples — a long-shot effort activists hope will result in justices ending nationwide legalization of same-sex marriage.

Liberty Counsel, a legal nonprofit that also describes itself as a Christian ministry, has long been involved in the case of Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who in 2015 gained international attention after she wouldn’t issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples despite the Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court decision, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide that same year.

Davis’ refusal — which she said was rooted in her evangelical Christian faith — led to a series of legal battles she lost, resulting in a brief prison sentence as well as being ordered to pay $100,000 in damages as well as additional legal fees.

The nonprofit filed a petition with the court on Thursday (July 24), requesting an appeal to Davis’ case and asking the court to overturn Obergefell.

Liberty Counsel founder Mathew Staver said multiple justices have voiced frustration with the Obergefell decision over the years. When the court passed over Davis’ case in 2020, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a statement joined by Justice Samuel Alito that blasted the same-sex marriage ruling, saying, “Davis may have been one of the first victims of this court’s cavalier treatment of religion in its Obergefell decision.”

“We think that it’s not a matter of if, but just a matter of when, the Supreme Court will overrule Obergefell,” Staver said.

The court has grown more conservative since the 2020 ruling, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett — who has voiced criticism of Obergefell in the past — filling the slot on the bench left open after the death of liberal jurist Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And Thomas explicitly called for Obergefell to be reconsidered in his concurring opinion for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the 2022 ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide.

https://wordandway.org/2025/07/31/evange...ge-ruling/

If this gets before SCOTUS, they will 100% overturn gay marriage.  They will also uphold any discriminatory laws that come on its heels.

Democrats can't tie their shoes, while the White Christian Nationalists are focused on what they want.  To them, all that matters is winning, even if democracy must fall (probably especially).

[Fake Messiah]

Why Evangelicals Couldn’t Care Less About Trump’s Epstein Scandal

One of the maddening—and seemingly unanswerable—questions for many concerned Americans is how deeply religious Christian voters have remained so loyal to President Donald Trump despite his many divorces, relentless vulgarity, flagrant dishonesty, and conviction for sexual assault. And now with the recent controversies around the Epstein files, Trump’s friendship with the convicted child trafficker, and the vast conspiracy theories surrounding it all, this question seems even more urgent and baffling. How is it possible for godly men and women, whose Bibles are frequently read, who consider the teachings of Jesus Christ as their guide for living, how can these men and women devote themselves to a man who appears to be a living contradiction of all that they believe?

To understand this phenomenon, one must appreciate that for white American evangelicals, Trump’s MAGA movement is, at its core, religious, which is how deeply religious voters experience it. For them, the Epstein affair is a ruse ginned up by God-haters who want to bring down the man who embodies their hopes and dreams for themselves, their families, and their country.

No matter how the Epstein files controversy unfolds—and even what the files might reveal, if and when they are ever released—or the related backlash from right-wing podcasters, or the resulting tensions within the GOP, nothing will break their support. The reason goes to the heart of how Trump and his enablers have marketed MAGA to religious voters, how those voters now experience the movement, and the role that conspiracy theories circulating among evangelicals play in the drama.

Trump knows how to use Christians collective gullibility for his benefit. He can read a room, and when he summoned some 1000 top ministry leaders to a Times Square hotel ballroom in June 2016, he immediately understood what it would take to woo them away from the other GOP presidential hopefuls, co-religionists Ben Carson and Ted Cruz.

Trump asked the assembled clerics what they cared about, and they told him Hillary Clinton’s anti-Christian elitism, ending Roe v. Wade, and stopping LGBTQ progress, especially reversing the Supreme Court’s Obergefell opinion legalizing same-sex marriage. As attendees made their comments into microphones set up for that purpose, Trump listened and nodded his head with interest. Trump played to his audience’s fears and grievances. He assured them they were right about everything and that he’d do what was necessary to fix what was wrong, in particular, appoint anti-Roe justices. He said he would fight for Christians and defend Christianity. He received a standing ovation, and from then on, Trump had virtually every prominent evangelical influencer in his pocket.

As more and more evangelicals joined the Trump train, his rallies took on features that looked and felt a lot like what evangelicals experience in church on Sunday morning or in a revival tent: fervent opening prayers, gospel and country music groups, and emotional testimonials of how patrons were once on the other side, but they came to see the light and get behind the only true patriot leader, Donald J. Trump.

Employing Christian language, music, and “ordinances,” like baptisms and exorcisms, has not only been a clever marketing device for MAGA promoters, but it has also successfully laid out the explicit terms of the relationship for deeply spiritual but heretofore apolitical constituents.

Trump’s devotees have sacralized every step of the MAGA initiation process. Ministry Watch, a donor watchdog group, reports that while Trump addressed the February 2024 convention of the National Religious Broadcasters in Nashville, “One vendor in the NRB exhibition hall turned a MAGA chant of ‘Let’s Go Brandon’—meant to send an obscene message to President Biden—into ‘Let’s Go Jesus’ flags, hats and shirts.”

Over time, these techniques have helped MAGA followers engage in a momentous transfer of power: Moving their devotion from Jesus to Trump as the embodiment of God’s favor for America, shifting their respect for their pastors to MAGA celebrities as mouthpieces of truth, and channeling the heavenly exhilaration they feel during worship inside a sanctuary to the group high of belonging to a much larger movement on the ascendency of unrivaled earthly power.

The fusion is inseparable once the transition from God and church to Trump and MAGA is complete—and the 2024 election sanctioned that completeness. For these Christians, MAGA is their new denominational home. And because it’s transcendent, the bond cannot be loosened by outside forces—not by reports of a souring economy, not by videos of shrieking moms being separated from their children by masked ICE agents, not even by the call to release the full Epstein files. About the possibility that Trump may be implicated in Epstein’s crimes, the Reverend Kenneth Johnson, a widely-admired conservative evangelical leader in deep-red Adams County, Ohio, said of the Trump voters he ministers to, “If Trump is accused, most of his followers still would not believe it.” Of course, for the few outside Adams County who might believe it, there is always the Bible’s King David, who committed both adultery and murder, but was forgiven and was called “a man after God’s own heart.”

For right-wing Catholics, politicized evangelicals, and socially frightened Pentecostal-Charismatics, MAGA is the new American religion. The experience believers have in their relationship to it is anything but rational.

When you see the United States as a “Christian country,” as the MAGA religious do and are convinced that white people of European descent are best suited to rule it, you might think we’d be better off without the Constitution or even democracy in any form. True believers are convinced Christ will return to earth not to establish a constitutional democracy but an absolute theocratic monarchy in which the ruler can never be questioned. In the end, this both explains what we are witnessing in the evangelical dismissal of the Epstein scandal and encapsulates the gravest danger we face as Americans.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/202...n-scandal/

[Fake Messiah]

Why aren’t we calling Vance Boelter a Christian terrorist?

If Vance Boelter had a different faith or a different skin tone, we might have an easier time seeing him as a religious terrorist.

The alleged assassin of Minnesota’s DFL House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, who also attempted to take the lives of DFL state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, would perhaps be more believable in that role if he more closely resembled the religious terrorists we’re used to hearing about — most often, radical Islamic terrorists. Instead, here’s this middle-class white guy from Minnesota.

There’s been a focus on Boelter as a political terrorist because his list of about 70 targets included mostly Democrats. But it seems apparent they were on that list because their beliefs didn’t line up with Boelter’s religious beliefs, and therefore were selected to die by him. That would make him a Christian terrorist — a person using religion as a vehicle to terrorize others into submission. His warped faith seems to have led to his bloody suburban rampage, just as the warped faith of other religious fanatics have led to horrific deeds done in the name of their religious beliefs.

When Boelter was 17. He had a religious conversion that “shook his life.” He later enrolled at Christ For The Nations Institute in Dallas, Texas, where he graduated in 1990 with a degree in practical theology.

Known as a prominent training institution for charismatic Christians, Christ For The Nations Institute was founded in 1970 by evangelist Gordon Lindsay, a disciple of the revivalist movements that began in this country soon after World War II.

“Followers believed that an outpouring of the Holy Spirit was under way, raising up new apostles and prophets and a global End Times army to battle Satanic forces and establish God’s kingdom on Earth.” This was all part of the New Apostolic Movement, which the story noted, is considered the grassroots engine of the Christian Right.

Instructors at the school also promoted the belief that “Everyone ought to pray at least one violent prayer every day.” Violent prayer, also known as imprecatory prayer, is often defined as praying to God to rain down curses on one’s enemies, and is found in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament’s Book of Psalms.

As writer Logan Davis has noted, one of the instructors at the institute was Dutch Sheets, a prominent Christian evangelist who started his own ministry that advocates a very literal kind of spiritual warfare.

Sheets and other prominent pastors of this approach not only believe in battling satanic beliefs by force but also view Democratic policies as manifestations of demonic influence and claim that Christians face persecution in the U.S., according to Davis.

A steady diet of demonizing Democrats may have inspired Boelter to compile a list of about 70 politicians and other officials, most of whom were Democrats, as enemies of Christians.

Just what beliefs qualified victims for his list can be glimpsed from some of the videos of his sermons to a congregation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo over the past few years. The videos show him condemning Christians who don’t fight abortion and homosexuality and insisting “God is going to raise up apostles and prophets who will correct his church.”

So politicians and officials not opposing abortion as a choice or those in favor of LGBT people having civil rights seem to have qualified for Boelter’s list. Apparently Boelter felt they deserved to die, both for their views and to prevent them from allowing anyone else such choices.

Some of these views used to be the talking points of a handful of extremists. Now, according to Davis, “These false beliefs of demonic Democrats and persecuted Christians are not the views of a far-out minority but central to the modern Christian nationalist movement.”

This is exactly the approach the founders of this country wanted to leave behind. They insisted on a separation of church and state, with people able to choose whatever religion — or no religion — and allowing everyone the same rights to choose their own religious beliefs.

https://www.startribune.com/minnesota-la.../601450869