Last year, radical Religious Right pastor and activist Rick Scarborough was tapped to head up the Washington, D.C., arm of Jim Garlow’s Well Versed ministry, which seeks to “help governmental leaders become well versed, teaching God’s principles in order for these leaders to apply them to their nation’s governance.”
While former Rep. Michele Bachmann serves as “pastor to the United Nations” for Garlow’s ministry, Scarborough serves in a similar capacity in the nation’s capital, where he pastors members of Congress and various governmental leaders, despite his long history of virulent opposition to LGBTQ people, such as his attacks on the “sodomites,” his declaration that AIDS is God’s “judgment as a result of an immoral act,” and his insistence that “God would probably give us the cure for AIDS today” if the U.S. stopped supporting gay rights.
Last week, Scarborough preached at First Baptist Church in Mt. Enterprise, Texas, where he bragged that Rep. Louie Gohmert regularly attends the Bible study sessions that he leads for members of Congress, and revealed that he has “constant communication” with White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
“We’ve been establishing some wonderful relationships,” Scarborough said. “Louie Gohmert is in a Bible study that I teach every Wednesday morning; he never misses. He was there this past Wednesday, along with others.”
“I’m teaching the Bible to one of the members of the World Bank,” Scarborough added. “I’ve been discipling him and he’s just been asked to become the president of the World Bank, he’s considering that right now. I’ve been working with several congressmen and one of them was just elected to the highest role that you can play in terms of leadership in the Republican Party … It’s Mike Johnson, who heralds right out of Shreveport. We’ve been friends for a long time and God just elevated him to be head of the Republican Study Committee.”
After revealing that he also leads Bible studies in the State Department, the Pentagon, and Department of Health and Human Services, Scarborough declared that protests against members of the Trump administration is exactly like what happened in the days of Sodom and Gomorrah, during which he mentioned that he has regular contact with Sanders.
“Satan doesn’t have any new ideas, he just recycles the old ones,” he said. “When you see these people storming around the lives perfectly good people doing their jobs in government, hurling stones at the window, shouting epithets, standing over their table while they’re trying to eat—I have constant communication with Sarah Sanders; her father, Mike Huckabee, and I graduated from seminary together and have been lifelong friends. I pray for her every day. She and her family can’t go out in public and it goes right back to the days of Lot. Satan doesn’t have any new ideas, he just recycles the old one and terrorizes people.”
