W.A. Criswell, who preached AIDS was god's punishment at First Baptist Church in Dallas.
W.A. Criswell had a long history of racism, anti-Catholic prejudice and prejudice against Gays.
The word doesn’t get out to the Gay community unless you help get the word out by sharing.
Prolog
W.A. Criswell gave sermons that AIDS was god’s punishment for “sodomy” in the 1980s.
However, before we review that history, we need to review how he was a cesspoll of bigotry and prejudice prior to him denouncing homosexuality.
The project to rename Ervay Street, a street that goes past First Baptist Church, to Harvey Milk St., is to have Dallas decisively break from its racist and homophobic past and to rebuke First Baptist Church. The link to the twitter https://twitter.com/milk_dallas and the Facebook page for that project https://www.facebook.com/groups/4511529965058.
This post will be updated as we get more information. Likely there is a lot to be discovered, even though the documentation in this post will be substantial. This post my be broken into two posts or it might have a link to a supplement post.
Introduction
We will have a section of Criswells infamous racism, then a section on his infamous anti-Catholic speech, and then about his attacks on Gays in seperate sections.
The Segregationist Speeches.
Back in 1956 before a convention of Southern Baptist ministers he gave a speech which was fairly rabid and obnoxiously smug. A full record of it wasn’t recorded, but newspaper reporters did report on it and it shows what a smug racist he was.
Excepts from South Carolina newspaper The State, “Baptist Leader Blasts Integration as “Idiocy,””, Feb. 22, 1956, Wednesday, pages 1 and 3.
But this thing they are trying to ram down our throats now is all foolishness; it is idiocy,” he declared emphatically.
And:
And they teach that spurious doctrine of the universal Fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man—which is a denial of everything in the Bible.
And:
Why the NAACP has got those East Texans on the run so much that they dare not pronounce the word chigger any longer; it has to be ‘cheegro.’
The speech was such a sensation for white people the South Carolina Legislature had him give an address to them. This attack on integration was so popular with racists that it was published as a pamphlet. I have transcribed the pamphlet and have it online as a pdf and you can download it. I think it will be easier to download it and read it as a PDF. It was given to a Joint Session of the South Carolina Legislature, Wednesday, Feb. 22, 1956.
https://issuu.com/edwardh.sebesta/docs/wa_criswell_1956_segregation_speech_to_the_south_c
In this speech Christ and the Confederacy are all mixed together.
Now, our folks where we are, are like the folks where you are, though we’re divided by the Mississippi River and by several hundreds of miles. My grandpap and my great-grandpap fought in the Confederate Army—one of them on my mother’s side and one on my father’s side. And I knew them as a boy, and to this day I’ll refuse to believe that any Yankee I have ever seen whipped either one of my grandpaps. I don’t believe they did. I’m like that fellow who said that there was a mistake made at Appomattox Court House. It wasn’t General Lee that surrendered his sword to General Grant, but it was General Grant who surrendered his sword to General Lee; and General Lee was too much a gentleman to call the attention of the press to the mistake.
Well, I am also glad not only to be a Southern but I am glad to be a Southern Baptist. You know Paul was a Southern—he was a Southern Baptist. All the though those letters in the Bible he says “you all—y’all”. That’s in the Bible. Now, he wasn’t a South Carolinian Baptist for he also said, “I have learned that in whatsoever state I am therewith to be content.” He wasn’t a Palmettoian but he was a glorious exponent of the gospel of Christ.
Criswell avoids ranting and obvious racist stuff. He want segregation for what he wants to come across as the nicest reasons and he has praise for African Americans for being good singers and all.
However, Criswell does reveal his real fear, his fear that his daughter might marry an African American. He is also making up stuff, in that the Supreme Court isn’t forcing anyone to socialize with anyone, or marry anyone.
Whom are you going to marry? That’s so personal. And that daughter of yours, and I can’t get that out of my mind, because we’ve just got one child. Whom is she going to marry? Those things are personal. All right, you listen to me. Wherever you cross over those social lines, wherever you cross over those social lines, that’s going to get into your family. “Aw, preacher, they say, we’re all going to be brothers and not brothers-in-law.” I have a great friend who’s a federal judge in New York, and he said to me within a week,
he said: “There were more than a thousand marriages last year in the state of New York between white and colored people.” And I happen to know a Baptist pastor up there that has lost his church because he said, “I’ll favor desegregation and all the young people being together in my church.” And, lo and behold, the thing happened immediately. One of his young men, white, fell in love with one of the young girls, colored, and when they had the wedding in the church, it blasted the church wide open—up there in the North, yes, sir.
Compares marrying an African American to “one that gambles and drinks and carouses and cusses.”
Some of these things are personal. Some of them belong to the inside of your heart and your soul. They belong inside your family. Whenever you cross them over, whenever you cross them over, you’re going to get into all kinds of trouble. I want my girl to be thrown with a certain kind of boy—you know what kind I’d want. I don’t want one that gambles and drinks and carouses and cusses. I’m segregating her all I can. I’m trying to put around her the friends that are like we are, of the pastor’s home, and for her to marry and fall in love with a boy like that, because she’s not going to fall in love with a she doesn’t know. She’s going to fall in love with a boy she knows and goes with. And that’s human nature. You’re going to build your home out of stuff that’s around you. And it’s a whale of a lot better for us to place our families and our young people and our children around groups like we are.
I’ll tell you another thing if I could be blatant about it. One of the worst problems I have found is for a Baptist to marry a Catholic. And I inveigh against it, all of the time. If you are a Catholic marry in your communion and if you are a Baptist, marry in your communion. It is better that way. You’ll be happier. You’ll have a greater opportunity for success in your home life and in your family. But when you start crossing over, you are going to meet lots of trouble. Now that’s the reason that we have our homes, and we have our families and we have our friends, and we have our groups. We build our lives according to those deep intimacies, some of which you don’t even talk about publicly. They’re so precious and so dear. Now that’s what I covet for all of America. [Boldface added.]
Continuing, Criswell is, again, just making up stuff. No one is forcing anyone to marry anyone or socialize with anyone.
If you want this group, or that group, or that group, or that group, brother, it’s a free country. If I want my group, let me have it. Let me have it. Don’t force me by law, by statue, by Supreme Court decision, by any way that they can think of, don’t force me to cross over in those intimate things where I don’t want to go. Let me have my friends. Let me have my home. Let me have my family. And what you give to me, give to every man in America and keep it like our glorious fore-fathers made it—a land of the free and the home of the brave.
His fear of integration is that his daughter will want to marry an African American.
Later when it was obvious that being an advocate for segregation would bring down your career or in the case of the Southern Baptist the influence of their denomination Criswell made a big show about apologizing and regretting being a racist. Besides, he was going to be going after Gays soon.
John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, runs for president.
Criswell gave a sermon, July 3, 1960, about what he saw as the dangers of a Catholic being president in regards to John F. Kennedy running for president. The sermon was published by First Baptist Dallas and put in circulation, but very interestingly, there was another version that was published anonymously, and published several times which was more explicit, more raw, in its expression of fear of a Catholic President.
These other rawer pamphlets are scanned and online at the John F. Kennedy Presidential library at this link. You can download the the images of all the pages of the multiple pamphlets at this link.
https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/JFKCAMP1960/1019/JFKCAMP1960-1019-007
I am not going to provide the official First Baptist Dallas published version since it is white washed some. I am going to quote from the bootleg pamphlets which I believe reprint the true version of Criswell’s sermon and compare them to the official version. The official version has stuff added to try to make the sermon more palatable. Some things are rewritten it appears to be less pungent, such as the smell of burning flesh.
I have a document in which I have done a side by side comparison, but again, because of copyright, I am not going to give First Baptist Dallas means to suppress me. They always can release the published sermon into the public domain, but I think Beelzebub will be ice skating before that happens.
This is what the official pamphlet stated:
[Official] The right of private judgment is the crown jewel of humanity. For any person or institution to come between the soul and God is a blasphemous impertinence and a defamation of the crown rights of the Son of God. Protestants regard an enormity any attempt to constrain men, by penalty or patronage, to this or that form of religious belief. What a frightful chapter has been written, the world around, by disregard of the lofty principle of freedom of conscience and its inimitable corollary, the separation of Church and State!
However, with this version in the bootleg pamphlets you can smell Protestants being burned at the stake.
[Bootleg] The right of private judgment is the crown jewel of humanity. Our Protestant forefathers waged an unyielding battle for religious liberty. They dared to be odd, to stand alone, to refuse to conform. It cost them suffering and even life itself. They pleaded and suffered and kept on with their protests and remonstrances [sic] and memorials until, thank God, forever their contention was won in these United States. It is written in our country's constitution, that church and state must be, in this nation, forever separate and free.
Whereas the Bootleg version brings up all the terrors of the religious wars in Europe, the official version confines the issue to the treatement of the Baptists by other Protestants in the American colonies. The official pamphlet refers to, “The imprisonments, persecutions, of our Protestant forebears everywhere in old Virginia,” and other Protestant persecutions of Protestants.
However, the official version was still fairly bad, but there were still significant differences.
Compare the official and bootleg versions of this section of the sermon.
[Official] The Constitution of Argentina states: "To be eligible to the office of President or Vice-President of the Nation, a person must belong to the Roman Catholic Church."
The Constitution of Paraguay states: "The President of the Republic must profess the Roman Catholic religion."
The Constitution of Spain states: "To exercise the office of Chief of Stale or King or Regent, it shall be necessary to profess the Roman Catholic religion." In the South American nation of Colombia, during the past eight years, with a government dominated by the Catholic Church, 49 Protestant churches have been destroyed, 34 Protestant churches have been confiscated, and 89 Protestant church leaders have been murdered.
Note the first sentence in the bootleg version.
[Bootleg] When the Roman Catholic hierarchy is able to seize political power in a nation, what happens? Here are a few examples: The Constitution of Argentina states: "To be eligible to the office of President or Vice-President of the Nation, a person must belong to the Roman Catholic Church." The Constitution of Paraguay states: "The President of the Republic must profess the Roman Catholic religion." The Constitution of Spain states: "To exercise the office of Chief of Stale or King or Regent, it shall be necessary to profess the Roman Catholic religion." In the South American nation of Colombia, during the past eight years, with a government dominated by the Roman Catholic Church, 49 Protestant churches have been destroyed, 34 Protestant churches have been confiscated, and 89 Protestant church leaders have been murdered. [Boldface added].
Whereas the official version has nations which don’t have principles of religious liberty, the second version has a Roman Catholic church plotting to seize political power.
Immediately following the paragraph with the burning churches, the bootleg version, but not the official version has this sentence.
[Bootleg.] We are now faced with the possibility of a Roman Catholic, John Kennedy, being elected as the President of the United States. Let us get better acquainted with the Roman Catholic from Massachusetts.
The rest of the pamphlet, official and bootleg, mentions Kennedy’s claim to not take orders from the Roman Catholic Church and makes the argument that Kennedy does follow their orders. Criswell contrasts himself to Kennedy as a supporter of religious freedom.
AIDS as god’s punishment for “sodomy.”
Whereas the anti-Catholic and pro-segregation sermons came to be seen by Criswell and his admirers as a mistake, a mistake for which they sorry, really they are, they still seem to be admiring of Criswell’s horrible record regarding Gays.
The online record of Criswell’s bigotry against Gays is extensive and only some of the material will be covered. Perhaps a supplement post will be done later.
If some of the following links disappear, put the link in the Wayback machine at the Internet Archive. They are likely there.
W.A. Criswell and his sermons on “sodomy.”
Before getting to his specific sermons on AIDS as being god’s punishment, we need to look at their general context. This section also exists as a downloadable pdf online at:
https://issuu.com/edwardh.sebesta/docs/wa_criswell_and_his_use_of_the_term_sodomy
There is a W.A. Criswell Sermon Library online.
At the library you can both listen to it and read a transcript.
So, what do we find if we do a word search using the term “sodomy?”
https://wacriswell.com/search/?wpv_post_search=Sodomy
We find the arrogant attitudes of a person with vicious opinions about Lesbians and Gays. These are some excerpts from his sermons. All boldface is added by myself. Not all the sermons found using the search term are in reference to the present. I provide a list of links at the end of this essay.
The quotes are somewhat longer than I would like, but I don’t want to hear whining that Criswell’s words were taken out of context. Also, in some cases, the full meaning isn’t clear without the context. I am including three quotes to show that I am not selectively choosing his sermons using the term, nor that one sermon was a fluke.
In a June 27, 1977 sermon, “The Smiting of God’s Glory, this is what W.A. Criswell had to say:
https://wacriswell.com/sermons/1977/the-smiting-of-god-s-glory/
In God’s sight and in the Christian faith, a thing is right or it is wrong. I cannot but be amused, almost, at the effort of these coming out of the wood termites, called sodomites, lesbians, and they are organizing for their rights and their privileges and their status before the law. And we have been caught up in reading about it in all of our magazines and of our newspapers. Does the Christian faith have anything to say about that? Just so long as the judgment of God fell upon Sodom and Gomorrah [Genesis 19:24-29], and just so long as the first chapter of the Book of Romans is in the Bible [Romans 1:17-32], just so long will the sodomite and the lesbian be an affront to God and a disgrace to the human race and an affront to the nation. Why don’t all of these murderers get together, and all of these thieves get together, and all of these violates who have violated the law, get together and say, “We demand status. And we demand our rights before the law.” [Boldface added.]
Christianity, as long as there is a Christian faith, says that some things are right and some things are wrong. And God says sodomy is wrong! It always will be—always has been and always will be—until the Lord Jesus comes again. Now that is the Christian faith.
In an Oct. 2, 1983 sermon, “We Begin our Fortieth Year,” this is what W.A. Criswell had to say:
https://wacriswell.com/sermons/1983/we-begin-our-fortieth-year/
… There is advancement and progress also in the evil of sodomy. When I began this ministry here, I never heard of a sodomonic community. And yet in the city of San Francisco they’ll have two hundred fifty thousand members of that community. They have a Sodom community in Dallas, and they clamor for recognition on the campus of the great Christian Southern Methodist University here in our city. I never heard of herpes. I never heard of AIDS. There is advancement and progress in evil. [Boldface added.]
https://wacriswell.com/sermons/1986/my-country1/
In a June 29, 1986 sermon, “My Country,” this is what W.A. Criswell had to say:
Whether we live or die lies in the judgment of Almighty God. And I do not think America can live in drunkenness, and in debauchery, and in desecration. We have an increasing floodtide of drugs to tear our bodies apart. We have immoral, promiscuous TVs and movies to tear our families apart. We have an increasing abortion to tear the very wombs of our mothers apart. We have crime and terror on our streets to tear our cities apart. We have secular humanism to tear our schools apart. We have sodomy and an epidemic of AIDS to tear the very moral fiber of our people apart. We have cults, weird and strange, to tear our churches apart. Where shall we find strength and deliverance? It will be found only in the Lord God Almighty, and a great turning of our people to Him. There is no other way. Whether we live or die lies in our turning to the Lord as a people, as a nation. [Boldface added.]
AIDS as god’s punishment
From Criswell’s sermon, “The Last Judgement,” August 26, 1984.
https://wacriswell.com/sermons/1984/the-last-judgment/
If we obey those laws, we are blessed. But if we disobey those laws, there is disaster, failure that awaits us. Let me give you dynamic and traumatic illustration of that in a terrible way. Because of the teaching of the Word of God, that it is wrong for a man to have sexual relationships with another man, and it is wrong for a woman to be sexually intimate with another woman, because of the teaching of God’s word, AIDS the disease of AIDS was eradicated from the earth. It was never known. It was never heard of. It had disappeared from the surface of God’s created planet.
In our lifetime, we are scoffing at the Word of God, laughing at these old-fashioned puritanical ideas, and opening up society and culture to the permissiveness of the lesbian and the sodomite and the homosexual. Now the terrible disastrous judgment of the sin and disease of AIDS startles and frightens the earth. [Boldface added.]
“The Sin of Sodom,” May 19, 1985.
https://wacriswell.com/sermons/1985/the-sin-of-sodom1
I have seen them parade through the city on television, and I have seen pictures of them in the daily paper; two hundred fifty thousand sodomites in one city. And, of course, having expatiated on that at the early service, one of the men, one of the fine men in our church came up to me after the early service and said, "Pastor, did you know the third city in America in the number of sodomites in it is the city of Dallas? Did you know that?" And he said, "Not only that, but did you know that the third city in the United States in the number of AIDS, the disease, the blight, the curse, the judgment of AIDS, is in the city of Dallas, did you know that?"
I said, "No, I did not know that. I did not know that." I cannot enter into it. It is absolutely beyond me. Why would a man want to lie with another man as a man lies with a woman? How is that? And they say, you’re born that way. You’re made that way. Most of your doctors and psychologists will say that’s not so. It’s a learned response.
But however it is, if a man had a tendency to lie with another man, like any other sin, you repulse it. If you were tempted to steal or to embezzle, you’re not to do it. You’re not. If you’re – if you are in your heart drawn to a woman that you work with in your office, just like any other temptation, you’re not to do it. I cannot enter into it. But what I see in this sin of Sodom that incurred the judgment of Almighty God, I see that promiscuity pervading all of American life. [Boldface added.]
“The wounds of Jesus,” April 9, 1989.
https://wacriswell.com/sermons/1989/the-wounds-of-jesus
I do not know how many times I have been challenged and condemned because I refer to AIDS and I refer to venereal disease as a judgment of Almighty God. “Why, pastor, do you say that so emphatically?” Simply because, if you live in a monogamous marriage relationship you would never hear of syphilis; you would never hear of gonorrhea; you would never hear of AIDS, never! It’s a condemnation and a judgment of the Almighty, the promiscuity that has become a part of the life of this modern world.
A man said to me, within the last few days,”Uganda, for example,” he said, “within ten years, the population of Uganda in central Africa will be one-half of what it is now because of AIDS.” These are judgments of Almighty God. And our people who live monogamously and who are faithful in their love for one another, they never, ever approach a judgment like that, never! [Boldface added.]
Criswell was quick to exploit the victims of AIDS. “The Work Awaiting Us,” Sept. 27, 1987.
https://wacriswell.com/sermons/1987/the-work-awaiting-us
There was a man who sat here in our church, right there, a tall, blond, good-looking young man about thirty years of age. He came to see me. And he said to me, “I am a homosexual, and I have AIDS. I want you to pray for me and with me.” He said, “I have repented. I’ve asked God to come into my heart, and He has forgiven me. But I just wanted you to pray with me,” just weep and cry and tell me those things in his life. Every service he was here, every Sunday morning, every Sunday night, every Wednesday night. And practically every service, would say a word to me after the benediction.
When I went to London about a week ago, about a month ago, within a week after we had left, he was dead. I cannot understand. I read what the physician says, what the scientist says. What is this that is coming upon our nation and coming upon our world? Is it a judgment of God? What is this? Is it a sign of these ultimate and final days, the night coming? [John 9:4]. I don’t know. I am so lost before it. I cannot believe that that young man, so strong and well—you would never in the earth know that he had such an affliction—and within a week he was dead.
Our hope lies not in the scientist and not in the laboratory. Our hope lies in the gospel message of Jesus Christ; our people speaking, loving, faithfully following the glorious hope we have in Christ Jesus. “We must”—a divine imperative. I must hasten. “We must do the work of our Lord in heaven; for the night cometh” [John 9:4], the urgency of our message! [Boldface added.]
Criswell didn’t let the opportunity of exploiting this victim of AIDS go to waste. He had him mentioned again in, “Jesus, The Light of the World,” Oct. 25, 1987. This unamed Gay individual died in a dark world of self-hating and Criswell was there to make sure it was as dark as it could be.
https://wacriswell.com/sermons/1987/jesus-the-light-of-the-world
May I take both of those just for a moment? There is no doubt, there’s no forensic confrontation that we would present against suffering as a result of sin. Here in our congregation was a tall single young man, blond, strong, just handsome, about twenty-five, twenty-six years old. He came to my study here at the church and sat there and for an hour, wept bitterly, pouring out his heart to me.
He was a homosexual. He had AIDS, and had the sentence of death in his body. And pouring out his heart to me, described his life of compromise and wrong, and how he had repented, and how God had forgiven him, and how he was ready to die. One of the most moving sessions I’ve ever been party to. The young fellow was so faithful here at church. Every Sunday morning you’d see him seated right there. Every Sunday night he was there. Every Wednesday night he was there, and most always, visit with me after the service was over.
Anyway, when I went to England the last of this August, he died within seven days, seven days, died of AIDS. No one would be of a disposition to dispute that there is a judgment that follows sin and transgression. [Boldface added.]
https://wacriswell.com/search/?wpv_post_search=AIDS
Other Sermons in which Criswell is referencing Lesbians and Gays.
https://wacriswell.com/sermons/1985/jesus-speaks-to-us-about-purposelessness
In this sermon he uses the term “sodomite.”
https://wacriswell.com/sermons/1984/the-last-judgment
Sermons found with the term “homosexual” and not previously listed. In these sermons he recounts how he exploited Gays who were downcast because they had AIDS.
https://wacriswell.com/sermons/1987/the-work-awaiting-us
https://wacriswell.com/sermons/1987/jesus-the-light-of-the-world
Conclusion
Criswell was utterly dispicable and yet still honored by First Baptist Dallas church. The creepy view of the Dallas Gay leadership of W.A. Criswell will have to be another post. The link to that article is below.
The following posts are about the current pastor of 1st Baptist Church.
People won’t know how horrible Criswell was unless you help get the word out.
The subscription is free.
This is the link to the petition to get a Human Rights Commission at Change.org https://chng.it/XrsMZ9P8cR Please sign and share. With groups and individuals like these in Dallas we need a human rights commission.