Special Episode: Undercover at Greg Locke's Book Burning
*Correction*: "Jeff" says that Locke's church is in McMinnville, TN. It is in fact in Mt. Juliet TN. Brad didn't catch it in the conversation. Both he and Jeff were a bit tense--wanting to get the story right and bring listeners into the scene, without giving away Jeff's identity. Our apologies.
Brad speaks with a man he calls Jeff (identity hidden) who went undercover at the book burning led by Pastor Greg Locke. The book burning happened ominously in the wake of the banning of Art Spiegelman's acclaimed graphic novel on the Holocaust "Maus" in a nearby school district.
Jeff wrote an article on the event: https://leftcoastrightwatch.org/2022/02/pro-coup-tennessee-pastor-holds-anti-masonic-anti-disney-bonfire/
Here is an excerpt:
In between threatening to kick in Dunkin Donuts employees teeth and refusing to follow his own dictates opposing divorce, Greg Locke is a pastor at Global Vision Bible Church (formerly Global Vision Baptist Church.) It takes little to find offensive comments on from him.
“Your kid could be demonized and attacked, but your doctor calls it autism.”
“Transgenderism is not a civil right. It’s not normal, it’s anti-biblical. And I’m sorry, just because I have morals and values that does not make me a discriminatory bigot. I’m sick of the day and age in which we live when people call good evil and evil they call good.”
Recently Locke also put out more serious calls to join things like the Black Robe Regiment, a far-right nationalist group of pastors that advocates preaching a “patriotic view” of American politics. Locke’s idea of patriotism meant encouraging his followers to attend the January 6th insurrection during sermons and railing in support of Trump’s lies about election fraud. But Locke also calls for more local forms of violence. Recently, he organized burnings of so-called “demonic” items like the Harry Potter and Twilight children’s/young adult books from almost two decades ago. LCRW attended one incognito on Wednesday last week and will tell the tale later.
Burning books isn’t new to Greg Locke. In 2019 he jumped to twitter to post a video of himself burning a book titled “The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American.”
Locke’s beliefs are firmly rooted in Christian Fundamentalism. The church he leads, Global Vision Bible Church, originally identified itself with the Independent Fundamental Baptist movement (IFB)—one of the most conservative groups of Christians in the nation. He dissociated from the IFB in mid 2011, claiming that the leadership of the movement had tried to pressure him into taking on a “legalistic mindset of man-made regulations.” Locke claims he pledged to remain amicable with the IFB despite parting ways. Incidentally, in 2019 in Knoxville an IFB pastor and sheriff’s detective called for the trial and summary execution of queer people.
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The Bible says, "Until Jesus comes again, yea, all that live godly in Christ "Until Jesus comes again, yea, all that live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer So don't be surprised when it comes.
Be surprised if it don't.
People are like, well, I'll tell you one thing.
I'm never under persecution.
That's because you're a sissy.
It ain't time to walk around all willy-nilly, mealy-mouthed, limp-wrested, noodle-backed.
It's time to stand up and say, you know what?
Persecution's here.
Persecution's coming.
And it's time that we push back and say, we don't care if you threaten us with death.
We don't care.
You can fire us.
You can kick our kids out of school.
We will not bend.
We will not bow.
We will not burn.
We will not get into your mess.
We will not be bullied into a corner of silence.
We just will not.
This means war.
The clip you just heard is from Pastor Greg Locke, somebody you might have seen on social media, talking about witches and exposing them in his congregation.
Locke has made headlines over the course of the pandemic for his vehement anti-mask and anti-vaccine stances.
He's also made headlines for other reasons.
He claims that many kids who are diagnosed with autism are in fact just demon possessed.
He says trans rights are not civil rights and that to be a trans person is not normal, is not biblical, and it's just not okay.
He encouraged his followers to attend the January 6th insurrection, and he says that Donald Trump is still the president.
Recently, he made headlines not only for threatening to expose all of the witches in his congregation, but also because he hosted a book burning, or what he called a demonic content burning, on the campus of his church in Tennessee.
Today I had the opportunity to speak to somebody who went undercover at that event.
We've used a different name so as not to put in question his identity.
But what he reveals is the scary reality of Locke's worldview and the people who attend his church.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show is in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
And I have a special episode today, a bonus episode that is for me, just a real important sort of event.
And I'll explain why in a minute.
So I have someone joining me.
I'm not going to use his real name.
I'm going to call him Jeff.
And so Jeff is joining me, has done some reporting.
For the Dirty South Right Watch and Left Coast Right Watch, which are both organizations that sort of monitor right-wing extremist activity in the South and on the West Coast and other places.
But Jeff was present recently at Pastor Greg Locke's demonic content burning.
Now, many of you listening will know who Greg Locke is.
He's someone who's made a lot of headlines for things like burning books.
He burned Andrew Seidel, Andrew Seidel's book, The Founding Myth.
He's made proclamations about the demonic forces in charge of our government.
He has basically turned in one of the leading conspiracy pastors on Twitter and other social media, I think in the United States.
Well, so my guest is, as I said, we're going to call him Jeff, was somebody who was present at something that made headlines, which was what I think was a book burning, but with what Greg Locke calls a demonic content burning.
And so we're going to get into it.
So Jeff, first of all, thanks for doing this.
I really appreciate it.
Yeah, for sure.
It's great.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, no, and so let's just start here.
A lot of folks, I actually used to live in Tennessee.
I used to live in West Tennessee and in Memphis, and my family's from the Boot Hill, Missouri, at least my mom's side.
I have some sort of geography and map of Tennessee in my mind, but there's a lot of folks who may not.
Where is Greg Locke's church?
What part of the state is it?
And what's it like there?
So it's located on Old Lebanon Dirt Road in McMinnville, which is kind of like a suburb or exurb of Nashville.
So it's like kind of dead in the middle of Tennessee, it's what like Greg's done.
He's over the past like couple of years.
He's made an attempt to like portrayed as this kind of like podunk town, but it's not it's actually like one of the faster growing parts of Tennessee outside of like the like extremely urbanized places like Chattanooga, Knoxville, Nashville, Memphis.
So like I'm sure when he like set up Global Vision Bible Church, I think in like the early 2000s, it was like McMinnville was kind of that like, Small town America, but like it is no longer that.
Yeah.
And so if somebody were to roll up to the church, I think a lot of us on Twitter and other places have seen it.
It seems like he's doing a lot of things in his tent.
It's almost a tent revival situation these days.
What's it like if I just pull up to this church?
So if you actually pull up to the church, the first thing you'd notice, I was expecting just like a field and a tent.
There is like, if you watch his sermons, he'll refer to it as like a campus.
And that is what it is.
There's like multiple buildings.
There's like, there's like a head like I yeah, and then At the at the center of it, there is the tent that you see in all the pictures and the sign that says we fear God, not viruses or something.
Basically just saying don't wear a mask outside of it.
Yeah, no, it's it's it's it's it's actually quite large, like the the campus, quote unquote.
I mean, that's one of his calling cards is he calling COVID a hoax and telling people not to wear masks.
And this is one of the ways he's really grown his fame and infamy.
So let's dig in.
You're in attendance at what was billed as a demonic content event.
I'll just start with this.
Why did Greg Locke decide to have a demonic content burning event?
And what was burned exactly?
So the impetus started like a couple of weeks before the event specifically.
He had I guess like stumbled that that's that's sort of the phrasing you used upon a need for deliverance from demons and throughout like all of his that that like he's continued to focus on this after That specific burning.
But he, I think, realized that Jesus's main, I guess, mission and the main thing he's done, or he did on his time on earth, is that it was just like deliverance from demons.
Every sermon he does, he harps on about how he walked on water twice, turned water into wine once, but almost every time he did anything, it was just like casting out demons.
So he's made a point of saying that We need to, I guess, like, go back to that.
And so, what are the things that are demonic?
I mean, what do we burn in here?
So, a lot of it was books.
Twilight, Harry Potter, the stuff that, like, you'd see in, like, the 80s, kind of, like, chick track stuff.
But also, there was, he called out the Masons.
I recently got in contact with other people who were there that night kind of like it's like undercover you could say and they said that they saw like Jewish items being burned although I never heard exactly what so yeah just like a lot a lot of stuff so there's books there's You know, there's other materials are there.
Was there anything that surprised you?
I mean, he's always going on about the demonic nature of American society and government and blah, blah, blah.
But you know, anything that caught your eye?
Particularly like, I guess, comical one was I'd like circled around the fire for a second.
And I saw this like giant plushy tiger just like disintegrating at the edge of the bonfire.
And it was, I guess, surreal, you could say.
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