Outspoken California pastor John MacArthur appeared on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” Thursday to discuss his state’s coronavirus restrictions on religious worship and what he referred to as the “moral free fall” engulfing the United States.
Host Laura Ingraham began the segment by noting that while a “judge has ordered San Diego strip clubs to be reopened,” California churches “are still fighting for the right to open their doors once again.”
She proceeded to introduce the 81-year-old MacArthur, the pastor of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, describing him as “a thorn in the side of California’s COVID crusaders.”
“How do strip clubs deserve more constitutional protections than churches at this point?” Ingraham asked MacArthur.
The pastor, who also runs a syndicated Christian teaching radio and television program, responded by offering to explain “the big picture,” namely that “America’s in a moral free fall.”
“You murder the babies in the womb. If they survive the womb, you try to seduce them into transgender sexual deviation when they’re young. If they survive that, you corrupt them with a godless education,” he contended.
“If they survive that, you have divorce in the family and if they grow to be adults, you drown them in a sea of pornography,” MacArthur added. “This is a nation so far down in the sewer of immorality and wickedness that nothing surprises me.”
Ingraham asked MacArthur to address a Los Angeles Times article with the headline “COVID Outbreak Strikes LA Megachurch That Defied Public Health Orders,” which she characterized as “not true.”
According to MacArthur, the article’s portrayal of an “outbreak” at Grace Community Church lacked the appropriate context.
“We had three part-time security guards who went to some event somewhere and I guess they were checked and tested positive,” he explained. “These were three part-time security guards, none of them was ill and within a few days, they were back at work. The Times writer picked up on that and called it an outbreak at Grace Community Church and they said about me that I had ‘mocked COVID’ and I was getting my due.”
MacArthur recalled how the health department visited the church, finding no evidence of a coronavirus outbreak.
“They sent us a letter and said you are removed from our website as having had any outbreak at all,” he recounted.
“We’re talking about [6,000 to] 7,000 people have been in church for months — Sunday after Sunday — no one ill, no one in the hospital and no one dies,” the preacher said. “We’re like a living illustration of the narrative of COVID being a lie.”
The segment concluded with a discussion about the hypocrisy of politicians who fail to abide by the coronavirus restrictions they impose on everyone else, specifically California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
MacArthur contended that throughout history, “every revolution took place in a time when the powers of the people in authority were enlarged because of a supposed emergency.”
“Power-hungry people are using this emergency to gain greater power. This is historic, this is nothing new and if people don’t fight back, they’re going to fall victim to whatever the intention of this revolution is,” he warned.
MacArthur has emerged as a staunch critic of the restrictions on worship services implemented to stop the spread of coronavirus. He defied orders barring churches from holding indoor worship services and ended up suing the state of California over its worship restrictions.
MacArthur has faced the prospect of fines and the threat of jail time as a result of his refusal to comply with coronavirus regulations.
Other California pastors have also been threatened with steep penalties for failure to abide by state and local coronavirus restrictions.
Pastor Mike McClure of San Jose’s Calvary Chapel has faced hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines for holding indoor church services while North Valley Baptist Church in Santa Clara was fined more than $50,000 for conducting in-person church services, violating social distancing guidelines and singing.
Catholics in San Francisco marched in protest of the city’s strict coronavirus restrictions on worship services. Not long after the “Free the Mass” protest took place, Mayor London Breed lifted the restriction that enabled only one person at a time to enter a church for prayer.
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