America’s evangelical extremist goes to war against imagination and children’s toys.
American pastors are an eccentric – we might more accurately say delusionally insane – bunch and few are more consistently and relentlessly mad than Pastor Greg Locke, a man who was once banned from Twitter for hate speech, declared Covid-19 to be a fake pandemic, railed against vaccination, claimed that autism was actually demonic possession and took part in the January 6th attack on the Capitol, which he then blamed on Antifa. So when even he says “I’m going to show you something crazy”, you’d better strap yourself in, because this is going to be something that takes crazy to a whole new level.
And sure enough, his performance from last week is one for the ages. Sitting in the centre of his stage is a Barbie Dream House, the very epitome of harmless children’s entertainment you might think. In his hand is a most unusual weapon – a Bible taped to a baseball bat, which is definitely the sort of thing that a sane and balanced individual would be carrying around. Given that Locke has been accused of beating up his ex-wife – the woman that he eventually divorced after having an affair with (and then marrying) her best friend – some might be reasonably wary of seeing him wielding a baseball bat, but fear not. Today, his target is… erm… Netflix? Dating? It’s all a bit vague really, though the main target of his ire would seem to be ‘imagination’, which perhaps tells us a lot about the inherent miserablism of Christianity and the lack of self-awareness that evangelicals have. It seems that playing with toys or (presumably) watching the Barbie movie is bad because it causes you to use your imagination, unlike the stories of the Bible that are all clearly grounded in proven fact (I’m sure Barbie also threatens his view of how a good, Christian woman should behave). The Dream House is smashed up in the most pathetically desperate show of misplaced machismo and worrying, hate-driven rage that we’ve seen in a while – and then Locke dances a merry jig of the sort that suggests mental instability.
How anyone can watch this and be impressed is beyond me. I suspect – or at least hope – that most Christians would look at this demented display of petty violence and irrational, unstable hatred for everything outside Locke’s delusional, conspiracy-driven world and be aghast. Who in their right mind would want to be a part of a faith that is represented by people who would cheerfully use a Bible strapped to a baseball bat on anything – or anyone – that they disapprove of?
Thanks to the ever-reliable Christian Nightmares for alerting us to this. They unearth more religious insanity every week than we could ever cover, so we very much suggest following them.
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