A burning trailer filled with Bibles was left exterior an evangelical church in Tennessee on Easter morning, in response to native police, with the church’s far-right pastor denouncing it as a “100 percent” deliberate act.Round 6 a.m. on Sunday, police and firefighters responded to a trailer hearth at an intersection exterior the World Imaginative and prescient Bible Church in Mount Juliet, a metropolis round 20 miles east of Nashville, in response to the Wilson County Sheriff’s Workplace. Firefighters “promptly extinguished” the blaze, the sheriff’s workplace mentioned in a information launch.“The trailer, containing bibles, had been dropped off in the middle of the intersection and then intentionally set on fire,” it mentioned. No additional particulars had been instantly disclosed, with the sheriff’s workplace citing the necessity to “uphold the integrity of the ongoing investigation.”Pastor Greg Locke, World Imaginative and prescient’s founder and a self-professed “social media firebrand,” took to Fb and Instagram to share photographs of a charred utility trailer holding dozens of burned Bibles. In a caption, he mentioned that the church’s safety cameras had caught “a man” parking the trailer “right in front of our church.”Addressing his congregation at a live-streamed Easter service, Locke mentioned that the perpetrator could be “getting in quite a deal of trouble” quickly. He mentioned he hadn’t personally considered the safety footage but, however went on to explain it. “He’s got his hazard lights on at 5:58 in the morning,” the pastor mentioned. “I’m like, ‘Wow, here’s the most polite crook I’ve ever met in my whole life.’ I’ve never met, you know, polite Satanists.“And so he unhooks the trailer and douses it with gasoline, with fuel, and then—there were probably 200 Bibles,” Locke continued. “I don’t know where he got them.”The pastor mentioned he had needed to “start passing out” the scorched Bible pages, however that authorities had confiscated them as proof. He claimed that the incident was being investigated as a hate crime, and that the FBI was concerned.The Every day Beast has reached out to Locke for extra data. A spokesperson for the Wilson County Sheriff’s Workplace didn’t instantly reply to requests for touch upon Sunday. NewsChannel 5 Nashville reported that Sheriff Robert Bryan had mentioned he had “no doubt” the Bibles had been burned deliberately.“We’ve had people do things to our building, we’ve been vandalized a number of times, hence why we have to have security, but never 200 Bibles being burned,” Locke instructed native station WKRN. “That’s a pretty rebellious statement towards the church.”An outspoken fan of Donald Trump who peppers his sermons with denunciations of President Joe Biden, the information media, and “crack-smoking, demon-possessed leftists,” Locke is a controversial determine, having drawn nationwide headlines for his vaccine skepticism, anti-LGBTQ+ stunts, and ebook burnings. He has additionally locked horns with each neighbors and county authorities up to now over the noise from his rowdy late-night companies and development tasks.World Imaginative and prescient has confronted plenty of vandalism incidents lately. In 2020, forward of a scheduled look by Trump loyalist Roger Stone, the church was tagged with the phrases “repent” and “Locke + Stone will burn in hell.” The letters “FU” had been sprayed on the pastor’s pulpit. The following 12 months, Locke mentioned his cameras had caught extra vandals attacking the church—portray “FU” once more on the pulpit and “your lies cost lives” on a wall.It was not instantly clear if any arrests had been ever made for the alleged acts of vandalism.Throughout his Sunday sermon, Locke framed the burning trailer as one other warning shot. “The average church would be like, ‘Oh, my goodness, they’re coming against us.’ And I’m like, thank God they are. Thank God they are,” he instructed his viewers, who cheered again at him. “If you think that Christianity is not under attack more than ever before in the United States of America, you have not been paying attention.“You need to get your head out of the sand,” he admonished. “Quit being lukewarm—quit being so passive aggressive and mamby-pamby and spiritually sissified.”
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