Originally Written, March 14, 2022 By Brandon Durham
Introduction
For the second time in 8 months, the circus has come to town! (For the first time, read here.)
I had not planned to put the spotlight on the mayor in my first year as a new pastor (more on that in a minute); especially not when John the Baptist lost his head for calling out King Herod’s sexual sin. It seems the ringmasters of the clown show simply won’t let me conduct my pastoral ministry quietly.
This time, the mean girls of Freeport have teamed up with the outrage mob of Tiktok to bring down the new pastor of First Baptist, making for quite the clown show!
Most of this traveling sideshow has moved on down the road, to trash other pastors in other towns, leaving only a few clowns and some broken beer bottles in the parking lot of FBC’s google map reviews.
There’s a lot to juggle here, but essentially, some bitter biddies on Tiktok appear to have had too much wine and started trying to outdo one another in smearing a pastor (me) whom they’ve never met.
Apparently, they took exception with some things I’ve said, not to mention, my mere existence as a card-carrying member of the patriarchy. Hoping to dirty me up real good, they cranked out a series of videos shoveled high with more manure than a Joe Biden “State of The Union” address.
This traveling circus might have passed us by if not for the heroic efforts of the Freeport Mean Girls Association (FMGA). Thanks to them, our small town got a nose full of the greatest dung show on earth. They broadcast these slanderous videos far and wide, including on a Freeport community page (Facebook), to thousands of people, and gave a valiant effort at slaying my reputation.
Older Than Barnum & Bailey, Plus More Star Power!
Smear campaigns against preachers are nothing new. Two thousand years ago, we read (in Acts 13:50) that “women of high standing and the leading men of the city” attempted to drive out faithful preachers of the gospel (Paul & Barnabas) by stirring up controversy with lies and slander. (Don’t worry. Most of Freeport’s pastors are safe, because they pose no threat. See here).
The all-star cast fueling controversy here in Freeport are very well connected and exert an oversized influence through their variously held community roles and positions.
Once again they’ve set up tent to fling manure at the preacher. They keep hoping something is going to stick. I just hope they can get their nails clean before church on Sunday.
Two of the ring masters are former members of First Baptist (where I pastor). They left disgruntled after they didn’t get hired for the job they wanted. On their way out the door, they poisoned a third of our church against leadership, resulting in a church faction.
I don’t want to take anything away from these ladies. They say they have other reasons for leaving, and I believe them! By their own words, these ladies are against what I preach, especially when it comes to gender & sexuality.
In reality, I simply preach the Bible; the same truths that orthodox Christians have believed for 2000+ years. It's only in recent decades that radical feminist ideology has crept into the church and led many astray.
Circus Elephant In The Small Town
The ugly truth is, Beth Jackson, Leslie Barr & others in our community have aligned themselves socially with a small, but LOUD “progressive” crowd in Walton County whose “sexual ethic” is diametrically opposed to God, in His Holy Word.
Take a gander at all the folks piling on to Beth & Leslie’s online smear campaign, and you’ll see more rainbow than Noah did after the flood.
That’s what ALL of this is about; there’s a sexually perverse undercurrent here in Freeport, that runs clear to the top.
I don’t know to what extent local churches and pastors have bowed the knee, but there’s an elephant in this small town that few are willing to talk about. Anyone who’s been here longer than 5 minutes, and is paying attention, knows this.
Naturally, the folks waging war against God, right here in Freeport, can’t have anyone pointing out how far to the left they’ve leaped in their rejection of God’s Word on sexuality. Pastors & churches who actually preach a Biblical sexual ethic are bad for business, and must be silenced.
I’ve clearly committed the unpardonable sin…of talking about sin. But, that’s part of my job! I’m a preacher. No less, I’m a follower of Christ. Jesus said, “the world hates me because I testify that their deeds are evil.” (John 7:7)
To quote David French, (who hasn’t said anything good in a long time): “It took me a long time to realize the following truth: No matter how compassionate, charitable, winsome, and kind you are, if you oppose the sexual revolution you are the enemy.”
Lies & Slander; A Small Town Recycling Program
In order to get rid of me, they’ve set about to destroy my reputation. (Which I don’t mind, after seeing how Nick Sandmann fared.) They’ve got their crew working overtime, digging up every speck of dirt they can find, and twisting it in the most creative ways. Imagine what they could do at a birthday party with animal balloons!
We all (myself included) keep holding our breath, hoping they’ll find a smoking gun of sorts, but each time it’s something more wacky and contrived than before.
It’s almost as if these “Good Christian folks” don’t believe bearing false witness is a violation of God’s law; almost like they have no fear of God.
So far they’ve spread all over town that I’m a racist, a misogynist, a pedophile, and a sex trafficker, even the devil himself. That reminds me of a good joke: A “racist” is anyone winning an argument with a liberal.
We saw this same dirty play run during the Kavanaugh Inquisition. Wicked people wanted the good judge gone because they hated the righteous rule he upheld. So, under the guise of "believe women" they fabricated lies, brought in shady witnesses, and did everything in their might to drag him through the mud.
And they got away with it because, in clown world, women are never devils, and men are always devils.
This latest spectacle was almost entirely recycled from the previous show in July. They’re hurting for new material! If you’d like free admission to the original showing of their Big Top lies, then you can read my previous refutation of their recycled refuse program, here.
For the sake of time, I'd like to turn my attention, now, to the newer manure being flung around town; something about the devilish preacher calling some sweet angel a skank.
Tiktok; When Mean Girls Go Slumming
When the mean girls of Freeport go slumming, they go all the way! This time they rented an 18 passenger van, drove down to the Big Easy, parked on Bourbon Street, found the skankiest bar in town, went straight to the back, gave a password to a big hairy man, and followed him down a long, dark corridor strewn with the bodies of passed out crack addicts before finally reaching a rusty door underneath a dimly flickering neon sign that read, "Tiktok." As they opened the door, sulfuric smoke billowed out and a dark, shadowy figure summoned them to gather round.
Meet Rachel. Rachel runs a mudslinging smut channel on Tiktok, proudly dedicated, in large part, to slandering pastors. She’s a veritable geyser of vulgarity, spewing and sputtering profanity as she mocks faithful Christians and pastors, bragging, on video, that she has a long list of names (of pastors & Christian men) that she plans to target. She boasts, over and over again, that her spiritual gift is “pettiness." She's not wrong. Small-minded spitefulness is her brand, and bitter, misandric women come from all over to get their "petty fix" in her sadistic man-bashing sessions.
In one of her videos Rachel dresses down a pastor for his sin of encouraging Christian women to dress modestly. In order to demonstrate how moderate and reasonable she is, she dons a low-cut shirt intentionally exposing her breasts as she tells that pastor, “I have great fuc*ing breasts, and I can fuc*ing wear whatever I want.”
Amazingly, this obscene, R-rated accuser-of-the-brethren became super triggered, and fell on her fainting couch, when a PG-rated Baptist preacher threw the mild (and accurate) word “skank” in her direction. (skank; a sleazy or unpleasant person.)
Even more amazing is how contagious her conniption fits have become here in Freeport. Contrary to all the conflated cackling around town, I did not call Rachel a "skank," which is to say, I may owe her an apology. Perhaps I should have just called a spade a spade, but, alas, I did not. The actual phrase I used was “skank lens.” For context, Rachel was trolling pastors (and men, in general) on Twitter, and mocking anyone taking stand on modesty. Like the loud demoniac woman hassling Paul, I could hear Rachel coming from a mile away, and when she crept up behind me with her derisive dismissal of modesty, I simply told her the truth—”Your skank lens has blinded you to logic.”
For anyone with eyeballs in your head, my above statement clearly runs in the same vein as the old quip: “You’ve got your beer-googles on.” My point was that Rachel is obviously under the influence of something that is clouding her judgment; namely a warped view of sexuality which condones women exposing themselves in public. Contrary to local gossip, I do not go around flippantly calling women names, but I am willing to issue an appropriate rebuke when rephrensible behavior calls for it.
To Rachel’s credit, she did help me prove my point, (which I thought was charitable of her), by living up to her reputation of being extraordinarily petty...and skanky!
Rachel produced a series of “hit pieces” loaded with as much fake tabloid news & phony outrage as she could muster. She then directed her eighty thousand online circus fans to harass our church. Our office was bombarded with emails and phone calls. Our Google Map Reviews was trashed. Our secretary resigned. Rachel even found a way to monetize all that petty outrage by selling shirts that say, “Skank Lens.” And for extra measure, she announced a special fundraiser, in my honor, to help murder babies at a local Planned Parenthood, with all donations to be made “in honor of Pastor Brandon Durham.” Naturally, this back-alley affair attracted additional shady characters and soon #BrandonDurham was a hashtag on Tiktok for more smut videos.
If you’re wondering why the mean girls of Freeport got taken in by the slum show of Tiktok, consider this Proverb (17:4): “A wicked person listens to deceitful lips; a liar pays attention to a destructive tongue.”
There are clearly some folks in our small town (in every small town) who revel in controversy, “going from house to house and being not only idle, but also gossips and busybodies, discussing things they should not mention.” (I Timothy 5:13)
Drunken Camel In The Tent
This ongoing effort to paint the new preacher as a creepy clown is nothing more than a dirty, desperate attempt to divert your attention from the real circus–the sexual revolution happening right here in Freeport! The revolutionaries are working tirelessly to get their camel nose underneath the tent without causing too much commotion.
It’s no secret that feminists, homosexual activists, and now, wokesters have infiltrated our nation at every level, including politics, public education, the workforce, social media, and even the local church. Yet, our normalcy bias makes it hard for us to believe that it could be happening in our town, but it is! If you don’t believe me, ask the mayor…and his boyfriend.
Shouldn’t every Christian in Freeport find it the least bit odd that after just three months in town there was a concerted effort to brand the new preacher as a danger to children? Yet you can look on Facebook and see two of Freeport’s most prominent men, living, openly, in uprenentant homosexual sin, and, for years now, they’ve had their hands all over Freeport’s children. We’ve been played. The powers that be have legitimized, especially in the eyes of our children, a sexual immorality that violates God’s Holy Word, and now they’re demonizing anyone who dares to say that.
To give you a better idea of the play being run right here in Freeport; in 1987, two homosexual activists wrote a landmark piece titled, “The Overhauling Of Straight America.” Their opening line reads: “The first order of business is desensitization of the American public concerning gays and gay rights…to help it view homosexuality with indifference…the way they register different tastes for ice cream or sports games: she likes strawberry and I like vanilla; he follows baseball and I follow football. No big deal.”
For decades (even longer) Christian pastors and parents have sat idly by as our nation has been lulled into passive indifference to sexual perversion. We’re now so deep into clown world that even prominent “conservatives” have defended the insanity of pedophilic men dressing in drag to read to children.
Feminism has wrecked homes through no-fault divorce. Abortion has slaughtered 60 million babies in their mothers’ wombs. Pornography & the hook-up culture have rendered an entire generation of men and women barren & impotent through fake, fruitless sex. And gay is the new black.
A recent poll showed 30 percent of U.S. Millennials identify as LGBTQ, while a staggering 40% of Gen Z (age 18-24) claim LGBTQ identity. Gender confusion among children and teens has spiked 700%+ while children as young as ten take puberty-blocker drugs, and 13-year old girls have their breasts cut off and genitals mutilated.
In other words, the sexual revolt has made it inside the tent and they’re trampling upon everything sacred, like a drunken camel dancing around in a tutu, smashing all the good gifts our Christian Heritage handed down; like joyful marriages, intact families, and a deep reverence in our hearts for God the Father, who made and ordered everything according to his good & perfect will.
Enough Clown’n
Those driving this smear campaign against me (and First Baptist) are as cunning as the devil. And that’s not an insult. Rather, it’s a wake up call to faithful Christians. Christ tells his followers that he sends us out as “sheep among wolves,” so, therefore, be “shrewd as serpents, innocent as doves.”
The problem facing us is that the devil’s doers have “shrewd as serpents” down pat, while today’s church is a total patsy, proud as a peacock over taking home first prize in the “always be nice to everyone” contest, which, as it turns out, is sponsored by the devil. How nice of Him!
We’re at war, and we’ve got to snap out of this “only always nice” nonsense. We need Freeport’s Christian leaders to wake up, and stop playing footsies with the world. To quote another: We see a shepherd out in the pasture with the sheep. Our ethical evaluation of this man is not determined by whether he is nice or not. Rather, if he is nice to the sheep and mean to the wolves, he is a good man. If he is nice to the wolves, and mean to the sheep, he is not a good man.”
In Acts 20:29 the Apostle Paul told the Church at Ephesus, "I know that after I leave, savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock."
Wolves can’t abide a shepherd in their way. They're hell-bent on ruining the reputation of any church, pastor, or Christian who stands in the way of them having their worldly way & devouring the Lord's flock.
Those howling over my "mean tweets" have shown themselves to be either goats with sore throats, or worse, wolves. They've lied & slandered, and spread lies & slander, to know end.
For those sheep concerned about my tone, consider Dr. Voddie Baucham’s recent remark: "Here is what I’ve found out about those who complain about tone: the tone they don’t like is “masculine.” They don’t like strong, direct, and clear communication."
Evangelicals have grown so accustomed to soft, effeminate preaching that they can’t stomach the truth, manfully spoken. This has created an environment where rank heresy and dangerous ideology run rampant. As G.K. Chesterton noted, “Nine times out of ten, the coarse word is the word that condemns an evil and the refined word the word that excuses it.”
When it comes to my preaching ministry, I strive to give God’s Word to you, straight. I don't preach ear-tickling, self-help TED talks so popular today. I've been known to call a spade a spade. In the thick of battle, as occasion calls for, I do fire heavy artillery in the direction of those seeking to disarm & destroy the Lord's Church in our generation. Per Paul’s instruction in 2 Corinthians 10:5, “we destroy…lofty (proud) opinions that set themselves up against the knowledge of God.”
None of that is inconsistent with the call to love our enemies. When the Judaizing clown show stuck their nose under the Lord's tent in Galatia & Philippi, the Apostle Paul called them wicked dogs, and told them to go emasculate themselves! (Gal. 5 + Phil. 2) The Lord Jesus called the corrupt establishment of his day all kinds of mean names. But Jesus, and his servant, Paul, also held forth the gospel and called the Lord's enemies to repent and produce fruit that evidenced that repentance.
I haven't returned evil for evil. Our church's Google Map Reviews was thoroughly trashed and my personal phone/email was fed to the wolves so they could call and harass me night and day. I could have just as easily asked my people to retaliate, in kind, against Rachel by trashing her wedding photography reviews and calling her at all hours of the night via her listed phone, but I didn't.
Likewise, I’ve not returned spite against Beth and Anne by disparaging them in their Christmas Angel reviews, or in any number of easy marks on social media. They’ve run all over town, and even out of town (via social media), trying to ruin my reputation and life. I’m still holding out hope of their repentance.
In 2 Peter 3:9 the ungodly are warned to flee God's judgment and told that the Lord, "is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance." To all those trying to bury me underneath a pile of manure for the truth I preach, you need to know it’s God’s truth, and it’s HIM you oppose. You’re storing up wrath for the day of judgment (Romans 1). You need to know that you’ve transgressed the law of a Holy God, and therefore deserve death & hell (as we all do). The good news is that you don’t have to die in your sins. You can be forgiven. God has made a way, thru the atoning death, burial, and resurrection of His Son, for you to be washed white as snow and reconciled unto God the Father, for eternal life.
“Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.” – I Corinthians 6:9-11
I don't hate my enemies. My greatest hope is their salvation, through faith in Christ, to the glory of God. As G.K. Chesterton wrote, “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” I love God’s people, God’s truth, God’s Salvation & God’s glory. As long as I have breathe, I’m here for this fight—the good fight.