Last Friday morning, Texas pastor Zach Lambert tweeted a selfie of him with his “I Voted” sticker with a 13-word description: Straight, White, Male, Lifelong Texan, Lifelong Christian, Local Church Pastor, Kamala Harris voter.”
Pastor Zach Lambert’s selfie posted on X.
Before he could deliver a Sunday sermon, his post had been viewed 5.5 million times and generated 12,000 comments — most written by trolls from the religious right and political right who mocked him, condemned him and questioned his sexual orientation.
The next day he tweeted: Receiving 1,000s of vile responses, including dozens of death threats, just because I voted for Kamala really illuminates how Trump’s violent rhetoric has infected our politics. Is he really the person you want in charge of our nation and the most powerful military in the world?”
Lambert serves as pastor of Restore Church in Austin, is co-founder of the Post-Evangelical Collective and is a doctoral student at Duke Divinity School.
On Sunday, he followed up with another longer tweet:
On Friday morning, I quickly tweeted out this voting selfie and then spent the rest of the day hanging out with my family because my kids were off school. Later that day, I opened Twitter to find thousands of comments and DMs filled with slurs, insults, death threats and other malicious messages. It’s only gotten worse since then as this is now my most viewed tweet ever.
I’m not telling you this so you’ll feel sorry for me; so many people have it much worse. I’m telling you because this morning at church I did something I really didn’t want to do — I preached about Jesus’ command to love our enemies. To be blunt, I don’t want to love my enemies right now. I want to be hateful. I want to demean the people who demeaned me. I want to dehumanize the people [who] dehumanized my family. I want to degrade the people who degraded my friends.
But that’s not the way of Jesus. The way of Jesus is love of neighbor and enemy. This doesn’t mean we don’t have boundaries or that we put ourselves in positions to be abused, but it does mean that we don’t return hate for hate. We meet hate with love instead.
One of the responses on X to Zach Lambert’s “I Voted” tweet.(Screencap)
As Dorothy Day says, “I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.”
As BNG recently reported, Lambert’s experience illustrates the trash-talking that dominates X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, in general and the evangelical side of X in particular.
As shocking as his experience may be, it is more the norm than the exception, as multiple articles have documented the “hellscape” on X ever since Elon Musk bought the platform, which originally was a reliable place to share quick links to legitimate news articles.
Here’s a sampling of some of the 12,000 responses to Lambert’s original tweet:
@pnwguerrilla: “Your faces looks like you need your hard drive checked.”
@YellowFlashGuy: “Straight? Are You Sure”
@MegladonMa52673: “Barf, Gag. Pastor is pro murder of babies in stomach and woman with man sticks showering in girls’ locker room. What bible do you use?
@GryphiusEitel: “You are no Christian. We know that by your fruit.”
@WadeMiller_USMC: “You worship something, but it isn’t the religion of Christianity.”
@LiberPublius: “What kind of pastor advocates for a party that believes in war and late term abortion?”
@VoteHarrisOut: “You are not a Christian, you are not a pastor, you are a fraud.”
@DolioJ: “Straight? If a man has to tell you he’s straight, he isn’t.”
@JustinTHaskins: “I think it’s possible to be a true Christian who does not think it’s wise to vote for Trump. But I really don’t think it’s possible to be a Bible-serious Christian pastor and also vote for Harris. Not possible. You haven’t thought this through, pastor, or you’re not a Christian.”
@William_E_Wolfe: „Not a Christian. Not a pastor. A wolf in shepherd’s clothing leading people to hell.”
That last comment is from William Wolfe, a controversial current leader in the Southern Baptist Convention who is a former special assistant to Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Related articles:
Here’s how things are going on the platform formerly known as Twitter
The dubious ethics of Christian Twitter | Opinion by David Gushee
What will Twitter’s $44 billion purchase do to theological discourse? | Analysis by Rick Pidcock
Assessing the damage Twitter has done to American Christianity | Opinion by Mark Wingfield