What could be worse than “Snakes on a Plane”? How about “Preachers on a Plane.”
This is the latest trend going viral in white evangelicalism’s spiritual warfare campaign. And as Samuel L. Jackson would say, “Enough is enough!”
Attention to this annoying practice has been spreading online due to viral videos by Whitney Lynn, known as the “Sky Evangelist.”
“Good evening, San Diego!” Lynn calls out as she stands in the middle of a plane filled with 200 people. “I just want to make a quick announcement for everybody while they’re getting their bags! You know, San Diego’s known for the beautiful landscapes, right? And the perfect weather. But I wanna tell you who is so perfect and so beautiful. Better than anything in this life is knowing Jesus Christ personally as Lord and Savior. He died on the Cross for all your sins. He rose again in three days. He’s alive. He’s the one true God. But the wages of all our sin is death, hell forever. But the gift of God is eternal life. And if you know him personally, one day you’ll go to heaven and walk the streets of gold and have beautiful perfect peace like nothing you could ever imagine. So I pray you know Jesus, put your faith in him, repent of your sins. He loves you so much!”
Most evangelicals wouldn’t find anything objectionable in her message. It carries all the hallmarks of what most evangelicals believe: God is perfect, we sinned, we deserve to be punished forever in hell, Jesus took the punishment for those who place their faith in him. To evangelicals, the idea of their neighbors burning in hell forever isn’t objectionable. It’s justice.
The current controversy has more to do with whether or not an airplane is the place to proselytize. For most of us, that doesn’t fly.
White evangelical obsession with airplanes
Growing up in independent Baptist fundamentalism, I often heard preachers talk about evangelizing people on airplanes. I don’t remember many calls to evangelize in other specific contexts. But they always pressured us into witnessing to the person sitting next to us on airplanes, told us it may be that person’s only opportunity to hear the gospel and warned us their blood would be on our hands if they went to hell for eternity and we were too afraid to witness to them during our two-hour flight.
“Growing up in independent Baptist fundamentalism, I often heard preachers talk about evangelizing people on airplanes.”
In Manifesto for a Normal Christian Life, Bethel Church pastor and Seven Mountains Mandate promoter Bill Johnson tells the story of a pastor offering to heal people on an airplane.
“This was on an airplane over the Atlantic Ocean!” Johnson points out. “People started coming to him on the plane that understood what was happening.” In typical charismatic fashion, passengers started falling backward in the aisles as they were supposedly being “slain in the Spirit.” So Johnson says “a large Englishman” began catching people.
“He kept praying for people and they kept falling over,” Johnson writes. “Then the Englishman came over to him and said: ‘You have got to slow down. I’m running out of places to put bodies.’ He looked around and everywhere there was space there were bodies!”
Imagine if they ran into severe, unexpected turbulence.
According to Johnson, “It was a two-and-a-half-hour-long healing meeting over the Atlantic Ocean. … That is just the normal Christian life.”
But is it really that normal?
‘Doing what the Lord is telling me to do’
In 2023, Grammy-nominated gospel singer Bobbi Storm interrupted a Delta Air Lines flight to sing. “I’m up for two Grammys,” she began. “My name is Bobbi Storm and I’m up for two Grammys. And I sing for the Lord.”
When she wouldn’t stop, the flight attendant asked her, “Are you going to be quiet?”
“But they’re enjoying it,” she countered. And when he asked her to be quiet again, she replied, “Am I going to go to jail if I don’t?”
Then she added, “I’m doing what the Lord is telling me to do.”
After the flight attendant left the area, she began singing quietly.
‘Good, deep conversations’
In June 2026, Presley Mae Foster stood up in the middle of a plane and began, “Hey guys! Since the plane is, you know, not moving, and you know we might as well just have some good deep conversations, I just want to let you guys know that Jesus loves you guys and that God sent his only Son Jesus to die on the Cross for y’all. And I just want to share because we might as well. We’re not moving. We’re not doing anything you know. So I just want to share that. God loves you guys and we might as well have a good time on the plane and get to know each other, you know? So, love you guys! Just wanted to let you know that! Amen!”
Presley Mae Foster
Like Storm and Lynn before her, Foster tried to keep it casual. She had a nice friendly smile and didn’t come across like the angry street preachers we often run into while heading into sporting events or while walking to a local cafe for lunch. But her message most definitely implied the threat of hell.
Another video poste on X Aug. 1 shows a man standing up in a plane and preaching: “My question today is where do you spend eternity? Thanks to (Jesus), we can spend eternity with him in heaven forever.” With flight attendants casually walking around serving passengers, the man asks, “Do you want to accept the message of the Cross?”
Full-fledged worship services
While many of these examples are lone flyers popping up to do spontaneous sermons, occasionally evangelicals on planes break out into full-fledged worship services.
One British Airways flight earlier this year turned into a nearly three-hour worship service. According to witnesses, the worshipers were “standing in the aisle, singing, waving and shouting at passengers until they joined in and clapped along.”
A nurse who was on the flight said, “At some point I was thinking we need to settle down and we need to rest.”
“Jesus needs his worship. So they pressed on.”
But to evangelicals, there will be no rest for eternity for those who don’t bend the knee to their theology, and Jesus needs his worship. So they pressed on.
And again, this is nothing new. Baptist News Global reported in 2022 about an EasyJet flight where a worship leader with a guitar led a group of Christians in the Chris Tomlin song, “How Great Is Our God.”
“Worshipping Jesus 30,000 feet in the air,” the video captioned. “#Jesus is taking over this Flight.”
Christian privilege and persecution
When the worship video started going viral, Rep. Ihlan Ohmar, D-Minn, shared it on X and added: “I think my family and I should have a prayer session next time I am on a plane. How do you think it will end?”
Her point was fair. Imagine how outraged and terrified Christians in the United States would be if a Muslim stood up in the middle of a flight and started preaching, or if a dozen Muslims stood up and started singing songs to Allah.
Conservative Christians have no idea how privileged they are to be able to stand up on planes, threaten eternal hell for anyone who doesn’t agree with their theology and receive very little if any pushback, even after hours of droning on about their theology.
But as Fox News wrote in their coverage at the time, “(Ohmar’s) comment sparked backlash from many Republicans who attacked her for what they suggested was anti-Christian bigotry.”
To question their privilege is to persecute them. And notice who Fox News pointed out was attacking Ohmar: Republicans.
Racism and homophobia as spiritual warfare
With so much of this privilege and persecution complex tied to right-wing politics, there are undoubtedly going to be dehumanizing comments made based on race and ethnicity or on gender and sexuality. And sure enough, all that showed up in Whitney Lynn’s viral videos over the weekend.
When the flight attendant, a Black man, asked her to follow him off the flight due to her disruption and refusal to follow instructions, she replied: “I’ll tell you what this is. It’s called spiritual warfare. You know why? Yeah, ’cause demons don’t like the name of Jesus.”
While getting her suitcase, she looked into her camera and declared, “Last days, people! Can’t talk about Jesus anymore.” Then as she made her way down the center aisle to leave the plane, she continued: “We’re in the last days! We’re being persecuted! Persecuted to be a Christian. It’s coming! We’re gonna go to jail!”
As she walked through the door, she called back at the female flight attendant: “The Lord have mercy on your soul! Oh, touch ye not my anointed! Do my prophets no harm! You don’t know who you just messed with.”
Then when the Black male flight attendant asked her to follow him back to the gate, she replied: “I can’t understand what you’re saying. Where are you from? ’Cause I can’t really understand you. I can’t really understand you. Are you from Puerto Rico? You speak Spanish? Is that your main language?”
When he handed her a piece of paper and told her to call to get rebooked, she repeated, “I can’t understand what you’re saying.” So ironically, she started speaking in tongues: “Cala bo chee kin da dee ala bosa!”
As the flight attendant shut the door, she grabbed it from him and tried to pull it back open. When he repeated that she should call the number to get rebooked, she angrily warned, “God have mercy on your soul ’cause hell’s real, my friend!”
Then when police officers wanted to talk to her, she said the reason the flight attendant removed her was “because he was a homosexual. That’s why. He knows he’s in sin. He knows he’s wrong. So the demons started.”
White evangelicalism’s false gospel
While many conservative evangelicals who watch these videos will agree they’re over the top, nothing these airplane preachers have said is considered fringe or unorthodox. The reserved introvert who attends a local Southern Baptist church and who sits and squirms on these flights while the cameras roll still agrees with the words being said.
If they really believe everyone around them who doesn’t agree with their theology is dangling by a thread 40,000 feet above the mouth of an eternal volcano, why don’t they speak up?
“I’ve always said I don’t respect people who don’t proselytize,” atheist magician Penn Jillette once famously said. “I don’t respect that at all. If you believe there’s a heaven and a hell, and people could be going to hell or not getting eternal life, and you think it’s not really worth telling them this because it would make it socially awkward — and atheists who think people shouldn’t proselytize and who say just leave me alone and keep your religion to yourself — how much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize? How much do you have to hate somebody to believe everlasting life is possible and not tell them that?”
This reveals why white evangelicals preach a false gospel. To be quiet would be cruel. But to preach about eternal conscious torment on a plane, especially when children are present, would be abusive. So the spectrum for those who believe in eternal conscious torment runs from being cruel to abusive.
And what’s deeply concerning here isn’t so much what it reveals about them, but what it reveals about their God who would create such a reality.
I simply can’t imagine that a gospel focused on loving your neighbor as yourself, and where perfect love casts out fear, would become embodied on a spectrum from cruelty to abuse.
And I can’t bear the thought of being trapped on an airplane with these privileged evangelists who don’t understand the words of Ecclesiastes 3: There is a time to speak and a time to be silent.
Rick Pidcock
Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a bachelor of arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a master of arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and is the author of a forthcoming book, Weapons of Worship: How the Songs of Evangelicalism Form the Soundtrack of Extremism. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.