WASHINGTON — A White House spokesperson insisted he did not know how an American Christian pastor had been chosen to offer prayers at Monday’s inauguration of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem after the minister was called a bigot for his view of non-Christian religions.
The Rev. Robert Jeffress, leader of a Southern Baptist church near Dallas and a spiritual adviser to President Donald Trump, delivered the invocation at the ceremony in Jerusalem, attended by an official U.S. delegation featuring Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner.
Jeffress has said Jews and other non-Christians, a group in which he includes Mormons, will go to hell — a belief he reconfirmed Monday.
Mitt Romney, the Republicans’ 2012 nominee for president, a Mormon who is running for a Senate seat in Utah, expressed his dismay via Twitter: “Jeffress says ‘you can’t be saved by being a Jew,’ and ‘Mormonism is a heresy from the pit of hell.’ He’s said the same about Islam. Such a religious bigot should not be giving the prayer that opens the United States Embassy in Jerusalem,” he wrote.
Jeffress responded by, essentially, doubling down: “Historic Christianity has taught for 2,000 years that salvation is through faith in Christ alone. The fact that I, along with tens of millions of evangelical Christians around the world, continue to espouse that belief, is neither bigoted nor newsworthy.”
White House spokesman Raj Shah, pressed by reporters on Jeffress’ comments, said he did not know how the evangelical minister was chosen to speak at the event. He said that if the comments were accurate, they reflected sentiments that “wouldn’t be embraced by this White House.”
Jeffress is a member of Trump’s Evangelical Advisory Board and White House Faith Initiative.
Many evangelical pastors believe the Mormon faith to be a cult. Some support Jerusalem as Israel’s capital because they interpret that as being consistent with New Testament prophecies related to the second coming of the Messiah, when Jews, along with other non-Christians, convert or be destroyed.
Evangelicals form the largest religious grouping among Trump’s supporters.
The other evangelical minister who gave the benediction in Monday’s ceremony was John Hagee, also a Texas pastor and founder of Christians United for Israel, who said in his prayer that Jerusalem “is and always shall be the eternal capital of the Jewish people.”
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PHOTO (for help with images, contact 312-222-4194): Robert Jeffress
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