Pastors slam Todd Starnes for urging Christians to leave churches if they didn’t preach on Trump attack
Conservative media personality Todd Starnes has come under fire from a number of pastors after he urged Christians to leave their church if their pastor did not address the assassination attempt on the life of former President Donald Trump from their pulpits on Sunday.
“If your pastor did not address the assassination attempt in today's service, you need to find another church. There is tremendous spiritual warfare being waged in this country. This is no time for limp-wristed wokevangelicals,” Starnes wrote on X Sunday evening.
Starnes’ comment came less than 24 hours after Trump, who is expected to accept the Republican nomination for president for a third time at the Republican National Convention this week, was injured during the assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday evening. The attack, according to The Associated Press, was the most serious attempt to assassinate a president or presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981.
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In a statement on Truth Social after the attack, Trump said, “I was shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear,” but his campaign said he is now doing “fine.”
Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old gunman in the attack, as well as audience member Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old volunteer fire chief, were killed during the attack. David Dutch, 57, of New Kensington, Pennsylvania, and James Copenhaver, 74, of Moon Township, Pennsylvania, were also injured.
James White, a well-known pastor and elder at Apologia Church in Tempe, Arizona, who also serves as director of Alpha and Omega Ministries in Phoenix, said Starnes’ comment about what pastors should be preaching about on Sunday was out of order and urged him to get “back in your lane.”
“You've GOT to be kidding me. No sir, I did not address the assassination attempt in today's service. I taught on Jesus' view of Scripture, actually. There would have been nothing wrong in mentioning it, even praying about it. In fact, if we had wanted to address, again, the proper role of the church in calling magistrates to obedience to Christ (something we were doing long before it became popular after 2020), that would have been fine as well,” White wrote on X.
“But how dare you get on your high horse and pretend to dictate to the elders of Christ's churches what they must address on a given Lord's Day from the pulpit lest they be labeled ‘limp-wristed wokevangelicals.’ You need to apologize for this absurd tweet and delete it. Back in your lane, sir.”
The Rev. Johannon Tate, senior pastor at New Era Baptist Church in Middletown, Ohio, said he didn’t preach about the attempted assassination of the former president and said it had nothing to do with “spiritual warfare.”
“I didn’t [preach about the assassination attempt] and I guarantee not one member of our church will leave…this ain’t spiritual warfare…try again,” Tate wrote on X.
And Pastor Clifford Mayes, who didn’t share his affiliation, also disagreed with Starnes’ position.
“I am a pastor, and I did not address the assassination attempt, but I did declare Jesus Christ, His crucifixion, His resurrection, His ascension, and His return. Jesus is my king and He’s the only one who saves….,” he wrote on X.
Taylor Combs, a pastor at King’s Cross church in Nashville, Tennessee, was a bit more nuanced in his response to Starnes but he, too, did not agree that Christians should leave their churches if their pastors chose not to preach about the assassination attempt against Trump on Sunday.
“There are reasons to leave your church. This isn’t one of them. At every membership interview, I tell future members that there will come a time when they think I say too much, too little, or the wrong thing about some cultural issue. But that’s no reason to leave!” Combs said in a thread on Starnes’ comment on X.
“It’s possible to hold together truth from ‘both sides’ on this. For example: I do think it would’ve been wise for pastors to address this yesterday. People came to church with it on their minds. Some were fearful, sad, angry. Shepherds are called to speak the Gospel to this!” Combs wrote.
He also doesn’t think it is wise to tell pastors to “just preach the Gospel.”
“’Just preach the Gospel’ doesn’t carry the weight here some think. Did John the Baptist ‘just preach the Gospel’ at Herod? Paul when he confronted Peter? James when he addressed partiality? We speak the Gospel *to* real life realities, not to escape them,” he insisted.
“That said, we do speak *the Gospel* to those realities — not our party’s talking points, not our political opinions, not conspiratorial speculation. This isn’t a time for partisanship (frankly, there is no time for that, as Gospel preachers).”
Combs further added: “None of this has anything to do with being a ‘woke Evangelical’ or ‘limp wristed’ any more than speaking the Gospel to the insurrection had anything to do with being non-woke. All of it has to do with lovingly meeting our people where they are with the gospel.”
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