Stedfast Baptist Church, a congregation known for calling for the deaths of queer people, as well as for its staunch antisemitism, has purchased a building in Cedar Hill, Texas, following a string of evictions for hate speech.
Cedar Hill is likely to be the permanent home of the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist church, as it now owns its meeting space and is no longer subject to the conscience of a landlord.
Steadfast Baptist Church is a part of a loosely affiliated group of right-wing Baptist churches led by Arizona pastor Steven Anderson, who is known nationally for espousing violent rhetoric against the LGBTQ+ community. Anderson is also a Holocaust denier.
Preachers at Stedfast Baptist Church have repeatedly emphasized their antipathy toward the LGBTQ+ community, saying in sermons that queer people “are worthy of death” and should be “shot in the back of the head.”
In October 2022, Stedfast senior pastor Jonathan Shelley alleged that Jewish people “want to destroy everything that’s holy and everything that’s righteous.”
Bringing up the Jewish Holocaust, Shelley said, “Why do I care?”
“I mean, if someone walks into a homo bar and shoots a bunch of homos and kills all of them, you know how many tears I’d shed for that? Zero,” Shelley continued. “People that worship the devil, I don’t care how many of them die. I don’t care.”
Shelley indicated that he doubts 6 million Jewish people were killed during the Holocaust, adding, “Only if we were lucky.”
Because of its rhetoric, which has not only been hateful but often violent, Stedfast Baptist Church has been evicted from several meeting spaces. In February 2022, the church was evicted from its location in Hurst, Texas, and was forced to move to Watauga, Texas. The church was subsequently evicted from that location in December 2022.
In January, Stedfast Baptist Church began meeting in hotel banquet rooms.
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“The reality is nobody wants to lease to us,” Shelley reportedly told the congregation at the time.
