Pastor's Fiery Sermon Lambasting Christians' 'Hypocritical' Treatment of Gays Goes Viral: 'You Can't Evangelize and Antagonize!

A fiery church sermon featuring a Georgia pastor lambasting his fellow Christians for their supposedly hypocritical treatment of gays and lesbians, and proclaiming that his fellow believers can't "evangelize and antagonize at the same time" has gone viral.

Pastor E. Dewey Smith of the House of Hope in Decatur, Georgia, is seen in the short video message pushing back against how some Christians have applied biblical sentiment to the issue of homosexuality.

"And God said to me, 'Here's the problem. You guys in the church can be so hypocritical,'" Smith said from the pulpit. "[God] said, 'In the African American Church, you've really got to be careful ... because you are guilty of condemning the Supreme Court system and preaching against something.'"

He continued, "But if you look at half of our choirs — and a great number of our artists that we call abominations and we call demons — we demonize and dehumanize the same people that we use, and we don't say anything about the gay choir director because he's good for business."

Smith went on to say that he believes that some people pick and choose the Bible verses that they will adhere to, while arbitrarily ignoring other bits of scripture.

"On one hand, you quote homosexuality as an abomination from Leviticus, but you say that right after you ate some shrimp, some catfish and some lobster," he proclaimed, noting that the Book of Leviticus also calls on people not to wear mixed linens. "We pick and choose the scriptures that we want to use to beat folk up with rather than look at our own lives."

Smith made a comparison between what Christians and churches have done to gays to what the slave masters once did to African Americans.

"We have done what the slave master did to us — dehumanize us, degrade us, demonize us,  but then use them [for our] advantage," he said. "It's hypocritical to talk about the Supreme Court and calling them Sodom and Gomorrah, which is not what it's all about, but if thats the case half our churches have been Sodom and Gomorrah for 100 years."

(H/T: Independent i100)