Special Report: The Worst Homophobic Churches in America
Coral Ridge Presybyterian Church
Ft. Lauderdale, FL
W. G. Tullian Tchividjian, senior pastor
D. James Kennedy, founder
When Coral Ridge Ministries founder D. James Kennedy died of a heart attack back in 2009, the church decided to calm down some of their homophobic rhetoric, thanks to Tullian Tchividjian’s more laid back evangelistic approach. He’s also a grandson of famed evangelist Billy Graham. But after surviving an unexpected church split, some of their gay-attacking propaganda agenda reemerged. “Though carefully distancing themselves from the Christian Reconstructionist roots of the Coral Ridge movement that included advocating the extermination of LGBT people, adulterers, “witches,” “sorcerers,” and dissenters, the inflamed hate speech generated by CRM underpins the extreme logic of people who justify violence against gay people,” Unfinished Lives blogger Stephen Sprinkle wrote. The church itself is still listed at the Southern Poverty Law website, and has reported that the church pumped monies into the campaign of Alabama Chief Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore, the “Ten Commandments Judge” who in a 2002 “special concurrence” court opinion suggested that the state could impose “physical penalties, such as confinement and even execution” to protect children from gays and lesbians.
Brandon K. Moore of the Broward-Palm Beach New Times wrote that “Coral Ridge Ministries is one of America’s sole necrotheistic institutions, still faithfully, lovingly, kind-of-creepily-obsessively rebroadcasting the utterances of its dearly departed founder, the noted dominionist and young-Earth creationist D. James Kennedy.”
