Church takes down website amid backlash
A Baptist church in Tennessee has taken down its website amid calls for its pastor to step down after a video clip surfaced in which he stated that “sometimes violence is necessary” when speaking about the Trump administration’s efforts toward fiscal transparency.
Dr. Steve Caudle, senior reverend at Greater Second Missionary Baptist Church (GSMBC) in Chattanooga, delivered a sermon on Sunday in which he appeared to threaten the “possibility of violence” over the newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and its ongoing investigations into misappropriation of taxpayer funding.
In a message titled “The Violent Kingdom,” Caudle warned about the DOGE initiative as a threat to “steal your personal information and your Social Security check” and appeared to link the effort to “the devil.”
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“I pray that the peace of God will win out and overcome the madness that is attempting to take over this nation. And I’ll say to you, beloved, no one likes violence, but sometimes violence is necessary,” said Caudle. “When Elon Musk forces his way into the United States Treasury and threatens to steal your personal information and your Social Security check, there is the possibility of violence.
“Sometimes the devil will act so ugly that you have no other choice but to get violent and fight,” he added.
When Caudle anticipated the objection of some of his congregation to the threat of violence as not a very “Christian thing to do,” he pointed to what he argued was a biblical mandate from Jesus Himself.
“Why not talk this way? Because Jesus did,” he said, citing Matthew 11:12: “From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has been subject to violence, and the violent lay claim to it.”
“The kingdom of God is a war zone,” Caudle continued. “It is a battlefield. … It is a place where the forces of Hell clash against the angelic host of Heaven in a violent spiritual warfare, and we are included in the battle. The violence of this warfare affects every part of our existence; it affects our bodies, it affects our minds, it affects our peace.
“The stress, the chaos and the pressure produced by the violence can be so intense we find ourselves on the verge of collapse, but although we feel that sometimes we are about to break, our charge is to hold fast because Jesus is our battle axe and he will fight our battles.”
The clip quickly went viral on social media, where Musk himself shared a video of Caudle’s sermon with the caption, “They are afraid that their fraud will be discovered.” Musk suggested that Caudle’s sermon indicated “he is trying to hide MASSIVE fraud.”
Weston Wamp, mayor of Hamilton County, where Caudle’s church is located, slammed the pastor’s “hateful rhetoric” and called for his “immediate resignation” from the county’s planning commission. He accused the pastor of using the pulpit to “justify violence” against the Trump administration and Musk.
As of Tuesday morning, the GSMBC website was offline and displayed an “under construction” message.
Neither Caudle nor the church has responded to a request for comment Monday from CP.
Caudle later told ABC affiliate WTVC Chattanooga he does not plan to apologize for his sermon and denied calling for violence against Musk.
“I never called for violence against Elon Musk, and he knows that it’s propaganda,” he told the outlet. “They take things, they twist it, they only play portions of a particular sermon in order to push their propaganda.”
He said the sermon was strictly about the passage in the New Testament, not contemporary politics.
“I was talking about the passage out of the Gospel of Matthew. The 11th chapter, the words of Jesus, not my words. When he said, ‘Since the time of John the Baptist, the kingdom of Heaven suffers violence and the violent take it by force.'”
According to a cached version of the GSMBC website, the church’s vision is to “develop a multi-racial community church committed to the social, economic, and spiritual renewal of the Eastdale community through seed sowing evangelism, gospel preaching, workshop education, youth mentorship, charity outreach and justice intervention.”
Under its “Our Beliefs” section, GSMBC calls the Bible “inerrant in the original transcripts” and is the “divine authoritative standard for living for every age and every people.”
A cached version of the site also lists its ministry directors and deacons as well as 12 members’ names as representatives of the “Twelve Tribes” from Asher to Zebulon.
