President Joe Biden has indeed kept his campaign promises, but that is not something to be seen as a positive from a conservative or Christian perspective, according to Robert Jeffress, senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas.
"Well, I think we have to be fair and say that Joe Biden has kept every campaign promise he’s made," Jeffress said in a recent interview with The Washington Times.
Biden, Jeffress said, "has quickly transformed America from the most pro-life [nation under] President Donald Trump to becoming the most pro-abortion president in history. He is doing everything he can to cram the radical LGBTQ agenda down the throats of the American people."
Jeffress has been an ardent supporter of Trump and his agenda, though he has not always defended some of his personal actions and was not among those who argued that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
"I don’t think that the majority of our members buy into the conspiracy theories and that 5 million votes were stolen along with the election," he said.
Jeffress said his congregants more likely "would attribute the loss in November to any number of factors, including perhaps the increasingly progressive nature of our culture right now. And I think also, frankly, the way Republicans handled the pandemic and being on the wrong side of the stimulus issue."
Jeffress, who leads an influential 13,000-member congregation and hosts a popular TBN show, said Biden "is hellbent on doing what his mentor, Barack Obama, promised to do, and that is to transform America."
Society is changing in other ways than politics as well, Jeffress said.
"I don’t think God wants us to put our head in the sand and be unaware of the culture and how it’s changing," he said. "We need to be aware of what’s happening. And the truth is our culture is becoming more and more ungodly with each passing day."
Jeffress and his church also refuse to politicize the COVID-19 pandemic or vaccines.
Social distancing and masks are required for the unvaccinated.
“We had the vaccine clinic here a few weeks ago, partnering with the city of Dallas to do that,” he said. “I was in the news when it first came out around December saying I thought the vaccines were an early Christmas gift from God. I think it’s really unfortunate that some people politicized this vaccine.”
"Jesus taught in Matthew, chapter 5, that Christians are not to isolate themselves from the culture, nor are we to identify with the culture. We’re to influence the culture," Jeffress added. "That’s what he meant when he said, 'You are the salt of the earth and the light of the world.' Salt couldn’t prevent the decay of meat, but it could delay the decay of meat. In order to have that preserving influence, it had to penetrate the meat and couldn’t stay in the salt shaker. It’s the same way for Christians. If we’re going to push back against evil, even if it’s just temporarily until the Lord returns, we have to be involved in the culture."