NASHVILLE – Last Wednesday, Mount Juliet’s Global Vision Bible Church Pastor Greg Locke took on demonic forces by holding an old-fashioned book burning. The pastor urged his followers “stop allowing demonic influences into your home.”
Those influences include the Harry Potter series and the Twilight books as well as witchcraft books and crystals.
Pastor Locke frames the book burning as an act of deliverance. He says that churches do not talk about the topic because it is uncomfortable the Christian devil capitalizes on that act.
The pastor is also an anti-vaxxer who denies COVID-19 exists, referring to it as a “fake pandemic,” and “urged his congregation not to get vaccinated, and called Tennessee Governor Bill Lee a ‘coward’ for allowing the National Guard to assist hospitals struggling to cope during the height of the pandemic.”
Burning papers [Photo Credit: S. Ciotti]
In his sermon prior to the burning Pastor Locke said that he was fighting the “Free Mason devils” and that “I ain’t gonna be suiciding myself no time soon.”
“I ain’t messing with witches no more, I ain’t messing with witchcraft…I ain’t messing with demons… I’ll call all of them out in the name of Jesus Christ,” the pastor said.
Locke said, “We’re not playing games. Witchcraft and accursed things must go. If you think we’re crazy, then scroll on. We’re exposing the Kingdom of Darkness for what it is. It’s time for people to be delivered.”
Locked shared list of demonic items that lurk in people’s lives to bring to the burn. Locke said, “all your Twilight books and movies. That mess is full of spells, demonism, shape-shifting, and occultism. Bring tarot cards, Ouija boards, healing crystals, idol statues, spell books, and everything else tied to the occult. It’s got to go.”
Locked added that the burning is a demonic showdown and that his church “don’t do things like the church down the road or the one you grew up in. We can’t unsee the miracles that are happening around us. It’s time to break covenant with the Devil and grow in the Lord.”
Footage of the book burning is available on multiple sources including the pastor’s Facebook page.
Chris Hardin posted on YouTube, “Husband and I went to a book burning in Mount Juliet Tennessee Thursday, before joining atheist and pagan counter protesters across the street playing Highway to Hell and Harry Potter on a projector. Video of us as my husband throws a Bible in and declared he was saving Darwin’s Origin of the Species and Fahrenheit 451 as he held them up to the crowd. It took him shouting “I Burned a Bible” several times before they stopped cheering and realized they’d been had – they aggressively threw us out but we had a chance to disgust them with a kiss before we left.”
Tyler Salinas attended the service, verified Hardin’s account and posted shocking pictures on Instagram. Salinas wrote, “These are the same people that want to ban the teaching of US history in the classroom. These are the same people that have been working to build legal framework to overturn elections they disagree with. This proto fascist jingoism is the image they want to present to the world. We should all be concerned with what lies beneath the surface.”
Locke said that some of his engagements had been canceled because of the book burning and responded to the criticism via a video on Facebook.
He discussed what he perceives as “this unbelievable literal Firestorm of controversy that is now taking place in regards to me our ministry and our church in Mount Juliet Tennessee.”
Locke said, “just want to say this the devil on the news media there’s a reason if he even calls him the prince of the power of the are fake news is just that it’s just his faith in wicked and evil now as it ever has been.” He added that the news does not cooperate and tell the truth.
He added, “When you expose the works of darkness you bring an invisible kingdom out visibly,” then paraphrased Acts 19:19 as the justification for the book burning, “Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver.”
He said that the media and even neighbors had come out against him and his church. He added that they are the same people who are involved with crystals, occult movies, and “hexes, vexes, and curses.”
The book-burning comes in the context of a book ban in McMinn County 150 miles east of Mt. Juliet. McMinn County School Board voted unanimously to remove the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Maus. Maus is a graphic novel by Art Spiegelman that tells the story of two parents who survive Nazi camps. Spiegelman called the banning of Maus “disturbing,” “terrifying” and “troubling” during an interview with CNN.
McMinn County School Board said in a statement that Maus was removed because of “because of its unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide.”
Editorial Note: All the characters in Maus are depicted as various types of anthropomorphized animals, and the book does not include human nudity.
Sales of the book soared after McMinn County School Board removed it.
1933 image of book burning from the German Federal Archive – Image credit: Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-14597 / Georg Pahl / CC-BY-SA 3.0
The events are not linked, but they are eerily reminiscent of 1930’s Germany. As the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum noted:
“As part of an effort to align German arts and culture with Nazi ideas (Gleichschaltung), university students in college towns across Germany burned thousands of books they considered to be ‘un-German,’ heralding an era of state censorship and cultural control.”
“On May 10, 1933, university students burn upwards of 25,000 ‘un-German’ books in Berlin’s Opera Square. Some 40,000 people gather to hear Joseph Goebbels deliver a fiery address: ‘No to decadence and moral corruption!’”
Last week’s book burning is not Locke’s first foray into the practice, though it is certainly the one that attracted the most attention.
In October 2019, the pastor burned Andrew Seidel’s book, “The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American,” which was gifted to Locke by the author. Locke considered the book “ridiculous” and the fact the Founders did not consider the United States a Christian nation, “nonsense” and “revisionism”.
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