When a Pastor Asks the Government to Kill People Like Me
An Op-Ed on the Indianapolis Sermon, the Lieutenant Governor's Share Button, and the Christianity I Am Still Trying to Claim
I read the transcript twice before I let myself feel anything.
It was a Thursday in July of last year. I was at home in Sioux Falls, scrolling through the news on my phone, and in the middle of the story was a sentence that stopped my breath.
A lay preacher in a strip-mall church in Indianapolis had stood at the pulpit and told his congregation that gay and lesbian people should go home and kill themselves. He named the method.
I am a queer transgender woman. I have lived in South Dakota most of my adult life, which is not Indiana, but it is near enough in spirit that a sermon like that does not feel abstract to me. It feels like the weather.
What I want to tell you is what happened next. How one small fundamentalist church in a storefront turned into a news cycle. How that news cycle happened in the same two weeks the federal government closed the phone line queer kids had been calling to stay alive. And what the whole stretched summer taught me about where American Christianity is right now, and where I think it is going.
I want to begin somewhere gentler, though. I want to begin with the fact that most Christians I know would read the pastor’s words and feel the same sickness I felt. The question I cannot stop circling is whether “most Christians I know” is still a meaningful majority of the people who have the pulpit right now, and whether the Christians who are my friends are speaking as loudly as the Christians who are not.
What Actually Happened
Here are the facts, stripped down.
On June 29, 2025, a lay preacher named Stephen Falco gave a sermon during a Men’s Preaching Night at Sure Foundation Baptist Church in Indianapolis. Speaking of gay men, Falco told his congregation, “You ought to blow yourself in the head in the back of the head” (The Advocate, 2025). The sermon was broadcast on Facebook Live and posted on YouTube. YouTube later removed it for violating its terms of service.
On July 3, the church’s lead preacher in Indianapolis, Justin Zhong, published a Facebook post defending the sermon. He refused to apologize. He called LGBTQ+ people domestic terrorists. He wrote that gay people “deserve the death penalty” imposed by a theocratic state (Metro Weekly, 2025). Zhong added a line that has stayed with me since I read it. He was not calling for private violence. He was careful to make that distinction. He was calling for state execution by a government that shared his theology.
That distinction matters, and not in the way Zhong thinks. Private hatred is one kind of horror. A pastor asking the American government to impose capital punishment on his neighbors is a second kind, and it is the one that scares me more.
The Concerned Clergy of Indianapolis, a local fellowship of pastors rooted in the Black church tradition, released a statement within days calling the sermon “theologically irresponsible but pastorally dangerous” (Interfaith Alliance, 2025). The Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League classify Sure Foundation Baptist Church as a hate group (Anti-Defamation League, 2024).
Two weeks later, on July 13, a small group of protesters stood outside the church with rainbow signs. The church continued its Sunday service without disruption, with its typical attendance of about 35 people (Jackson, 2025).
And on July 17, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration closed the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline’s dedicated service for LGBTQ+ youth. This program has taken an estimated 1.5 million contacts since 2022 (The Trevor Project, 2025).
I am not asserting a conspiracy. I am giving you a calendar.
What It Feels Like to Read All This at Once
I am not going to pretend I have a cool, scholarly remove from this material. I do not.
What I can tell you is that a trans woman in Sioux Falls, reading about a pastor in Indianapolis who wants her government to execute her, in the same month her federal government shuts off the phone line queer kids had been calling to stay alive, does not feel like she is watching an isolated incident. She feels like she is watching something coordinated, whether or not anyone wrote it down on a whiteboard.
The sequence matters. The sermon was preached on June 29. The defense was published on July 3. The Lieutenant Governor shared the defense the same day. The 988 line for queer kids closed on July 17. That is a calendar, and the people on the receiving end of it cannot unsee the pattern.
What the Bible Actually Says About This
I want to tell you where I am writing from. I still belong to an ELCA congregation in Sioux Falls. I have sat in Lutheran pews most of my adult life.
What that long apprenticeship has given me is not certainty. It is skepticism, of a particular kind.
I have grown, over the years, into a deep distrust of anyone who tells me confidently that they know what Jesus meant. The religion I inherited has passed through two thousand years of human hands. It has been translated and retranslated, copied by tired scribes, edited by rival councils, preached by saints, weaponized by emperors, and rebuilt every few centuries by people who were sure their version was the right one. Anyone who claims a clean line back to the original message of Jesus is overreaching. I do not believe any of us alive today holds that message without distortion, and I am skeptical of every pair of hands that has ever touched it, including the ones inside my own tradition.
What I will commit to is a much smaller claim. Whatever Jesus was, and whatever he actually said to the people standing in front of him, he did not mean for a preacher in Indianapolis, twenty centuries after his death, to stand at a pulpit and tell his congregation that I should go home and kill myself. That one claim I will defend to the last word I ever write.
From inside that narrow confidence, I can notice two things.
The first is that Jesus, in the four Gospels, does not say a single word about homosexuality. He says a great deal about wealth. He says a great deal about judgment and the hypocrisy of religious people who know their scriptures and miss the point. He says a great deal about welcoming strangers and the danger of adding burdens to the people who are already carrying them. He opens the Sermon on the Mount with a list of who is blessed. The merciful, he says, receive mercy. The peacemakers, “for they will be called children of God” (Matthew 5:9, New Revised Standard Version Bible, 1989).
The second is that the verse the Indianapolis pastor cited, Leviticus 20:13, sits inside a chapter that prescribes death for children who curse their parents, for adulterers, for mediums, and for a long list of other people whose execution no serious American Christian has proposed legislating in my lifetime. Reading Leviticus 20 as a blueprint for 21st-century American criminal law is not supported by the surrounding text. You cannot pick one capital offense from that chapter and leave the rest on the shelf and call the result biblical.
This is where most Christians I know would tell me the verses condemning homosexuality are being taken out of context. They would tell me their tradition rejects the reading the pastor gave. They would tell me he speaks for a small and aberrant minority.
I believe them. The Concerned Clergy of Indianapolis proves them right.
The question is how loud their voice is, and whether it is getting louder or quieter.
