While Pope Francis continued his progressive streak in 2014, other Christian leaders seemed determined to prove to the world just how regressive they could be. Here’s a look back at some of the craziest of the crazies:

Gordon Klingenschmitt

Disgraced Navy chaplain turned Republican lawmaker Gordon Klingenschmitt is one of the nuttier crazy Christians of 2014. In August, he warned that Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO), an openly gay U.S. congressman, would soon start beheading Christians in the name of sodomy.

“The open persecution of Christians is underway. Democrats like Polis want to bankrupt Christians who refuse to worship and endorse his sodomy. Next he’ll join ISIS in beheading Christians, but not just in Syria, right here in America,” he warned.

His outrageous remarks got him denounced by his own party, but he still managed to win a seat in the Colorado House of Representatives in November. After being elected, Klingenschmitt continued his craziness,warning that the “demon of rape” was granting bathroom rights to transgender people so that they could “violate your daughters.”

Earl Carter

Some anti-gay bigots have an unusually keen interest in men’s buttholes. One of these bigots is Pastor Earl Carter, who likes to deliver sermons about letting a “man to have his penis in the butt of another man where the dung come out.”

The Missouri pastor said this year that God should punish gay men with menstrual bleeding, hot flashes and pregnancy because they enjoy anal sex. He also hoped would they would “bleed from their butts.”

God provided you with a butt “so you can get rid of waste and bacteria.” Carter explained. “You saying it’s all right for a man to stick his penis in a cesspool? Are you crazy?”

The Duggar Family

Crazy Christians even have their own reality TV show. TLC’s 19 Kids and Countingfeatures the Duggar family, followers of the patriarchal Quiverfull ideology.

The family’s matriarch, Michelle Duggar, pushed Arkansas voters to overturn a local ordinance outlawing discrimination against people on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity. She warned the ordinance would make it legal for transgender child predators to invade girl’s bathrooms.

As head of the Family Research Council’s Action outreach group, her son Josh has frequently attacked LGBT rights — but only because he loves them.

Jessa Duggar also made news in 2014 for blaming the Holocaust on the theory of evolution.

“I walked through the Holocaust Museum again today,” she wrote in a post on Instagram, “very sobering. Millions of innocents denied the most basic and fundamental of all rights–their right to life. One human destroying the life of another deemed ‘less than human.’ Racism, stemming from the evolutionary idea that man came from something less than human; that some people groups are ‘more evolved’ and others ‘less evolved.’ A denying that our Creator–GOD–made us human from the beginning, all of ONE BLOOD and ONE RACE, descendants of Adam. The belief that some human beings are ‘not fit to live.’”

Ray Comfort

Creationist Ray Comfort believes that the Bible is the literal word of God, and is best known for his belief that that atheists have scary dreams about bananas — but the evangelist showed in 2014 that he also has an inkling for attacking astrophysicists and cosmologists.

Not only has he claimed that the Bible says Stephen Hawking is a fool, but he thinks that Lawrence Krauss sounds like Adolf Hitler. Comfort also insists that Neil deGrasse Tyson is wrong to claim that the Bible isn’t scientific.

“(The Bible) gives us the basis for all creation, and it passes the scientific method,” he explained. “It’s observable – Genesis – and testable. Evolution is not. You can’t observe something 60 million years old, but you can observe what Genesis says.”

Kirk Cameron

Ray Comfort’s pal Kirk Cameron, the former teen heartthrob from “Growing Pains,” is another religious wackadoodle. This year, Cameron decided to defend Halloween and Christmas from the banana-fearing atheists and similar ilk who were determined to corrupt both holidays.

He insisted that Halloween’s origins were purely Christian, and that pagans were trying to steal it by creating a false history. Cameron said Halloween was clearly a Godly celebration, because mocking President Barack Obama with a Halloween mask was similar to when “Christians would dress up in costumes as the devil, ghosts, goblins and witches precisely to make the point that those things were defeated and overthrown by the resurrected Jesus Christ.”

His efforts ended up getting him denounced by other religious nutjobs as a “papist”

Cameron went even further in his quest to protect Christmas, releasing a film with a unambiguous title: Saving Christmas. Despite begging fans to help boost his movie’s putrid rating on Rotten Tomatoes, critics hated the movie. It ended up being IMDB’s worst film of all time.

As MLive’s John Serba explained, “Cameron’s preferred tool of engagement is a prybar, applied to your eyelids with an indelicate hand.”

Ken Ham

Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis received a heaping dose of fame/infamy this year when he debated Bill Nye “The Science Guy,” and declared he didn’t need evolution or cosmological theories because he had a book.

Since then, this book has told him that human intelligence is declining because of sin, and that climate change is Earth “settling down” after God punished humanity by flooding the Earth. The Good Book also told Ham that comedian Bill Maher is going to face eternal torment in Hell because “God is a God of grace and mercy” — a fate Maher apparently shares with all of the extraterrestrial beings in the universe.

“You see, the Bible makes it clear that Adam’s sin affected the whole universe. This means that any aliens would also be affected by Adam’s sin, but because they are not Adam’s descendants, they can’t have salvation,” he explained. “Jesus did not become the ‘GodKlingon’ or the ‘GodMartian’! Only descendants of Adam can be saved. God’s Son remains the ‘Godman’ as our Savior.”

Ham is so far down the rabbit-hole that he thinks televangelist Pat Robertson is a “pagan” — which brings us to our next nutjob.

Pat Robertson

Though Pat Robertson thinks that creationists like Comfort, Cameron, and Ham are all silly people, his own brain is home to a swarm of silly thoughts. In 2014 alone, the televangelist has claimed that homosexual people are going to go extinct because they don’t reproduce, warned that towels can give you AIDS, called same-sex marriage “deadly,” urged and prayed for a revolution to overthrow Obama, told his co-host that she owes her husband sex for doing the dishes, and explained how demons get “permission” to wreck your car when you watch scary movies or pornography.

Robertson also explained that Jesus wouldn’t bake a wedding cake for a gay couple, because they would have been stoned to death in the anti-gay Roman Empire.

“I think you’ve got to remember from the Bible, you look carefully at the Bible, what would have happened in Jesus’ time if two men decided they wanted to cohabitate together, they would have been stoned to death,” he remarked. “So, Jesus would not have baked them a wedding cake, nor would he he have made them a bed to sleep in because they wouldn’t have been there.”

Logan Robertson

New Zealand has a crazy Robertson of its own. Pastor Logan Robertson of the Westcity Bible Baptist Church was a complete nobody until December, when he wrote an email to Jim Marjoram that said, “I pray that you will commit suicide.” Robertson was cranky that Marjoram had authored a book advocating a gay-friendly version Christianity.

“We are not interested in your filthy lifestyle or book. The Bible says you are vile, strange (queer), reprobate, filth, sodomite, natural brute beasts, made to be taken and destroyed. I pray that you will commit suicide, you filthy child molesting fag,” Robertson wrote in his email.

When an openly gay reporter tried to interview Robertson, he called the reporter a “filthy faggot” and said he hoped the reporter would commit suicide, too.

Steven Anderson

Steven Anderson of the Faithful Word Baptist Church is another pastor who would be a complete nobody if it were not for the fact that he is a vile human being. This year, the pastor implored his female congregants to keep their mouths shut — and to not to even say “amen” — during “learning time” in church. He also warned these women not to become one of the birth control-using “whores” who were destroying America.

“It used to be a young women, she gets married, she has children, and that’s her job,” he lamented.

All of his Jesus-driven craziness came to a head in December, when he called for the mass extermination of LGBT people so Americans could enjoy an “AIDS-free Christmas.”

“It was right there in the Bible all along — and they’re out spending billions of dollars in research and testing. It’s curable — right there. Because if you executed the homos like God recommends, you wouldn’t have all this AIDS running rampant.”

It should come as no surprise that his protege, Pastor Donnie Romero, brags about harassing lesbians.

James David Manning

This Cliven Bundy-loving pastor in New York is hard to distinguish from a parody of a crazy right-wing pastor. In fact, he can’t even distinguish his real self from a parody of himself. This year, Pastor James David Manning accidentally promoted a video that portrayed him admitting to being a “homosexual sodomite” who loved the taste of semen.

In another example of blurring the line between parody and reality, the pastor alsouploaded video of himself explaining that the NASA Voyager spacecraft proved homosexuality was unnatural and perverted.

“No life can come out of the rectum!” he ranted during his explanation. “The rectum is designed to get rid of death and waste! It’s designed for that one purpose, and the Sodomites are cheering on and praising the rectum!”

Robert Jeffress

Most crazy Christians don’t have the privilege of being invited to appear on Fox News, but that is not the case for Robert Jeffress. This year, the Texas megachurch pastor told Fox viewers that Jesus wanted the United States to build a giant fence across the entire U.S.-Mexico border. The United States was “enticing children and mothers” into dangerous situations by not blocking off the entire border, Jeffress said.

He also explained to Fox viewers how President Barack Obama is paving the way for the anti-Christ.

“He’s going to do it without any opposition, and my question was, how is he going to be able to pull that off?” Jeffress told Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. “My thesis is, people will have been conditioned long before the anti-Christ comes to accept governmental overreach, and that’s what you’re seeing with President Obama.”