Stedfast Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas is the place where Pastor Donnie Romero recently resigned after admitting to a night of doing drugs, gambling, and “being with prostitutes.”

His replacement was announced as Pastor Jonathan Shelley of Pure Words Baptist Church in Houston. He had his own set of problems (being an anti-vaxxer in addition to the expected anti-LGBTQ bigotry). But in a sermon delivered yesterday, Shelley went even further.

He insisted that rebellious children should be put to death because that’s what God commands in the Bible.

… [Kids are] going to continue being more rebellious, more mocking, more arrogant, more prideful. You see, it’s never enough. They just want to keep mocking their parents and disobeying their parents. You’ve got to squash out the rebellion in your child. … You know you could squash rebellion in a public school today? Take the rebellious one out and stone him. I bet they’d shapen up pretty quick. I bet they’d figure out, “Maybe I should hearken under the authorities in my life.” And we see, unfortunately, our society is continually destroying itself, because [all of these] rebellious, arrogant, prideful teenage jerks that just don’t want to hearken to their parents, you know, and God said they should be put to death. The guy that’s the lazy gamer, “I don’t want to get a job. I just want to play video games all day and drink alcohol with my buddies,” that guy should be put to death. You know what? As a young man, you should be able to work! And you should work hard! And you should be sober! And the man that’s not going to do that, God says, “Well, I think you’re worthy of death.” That’s pretty serious. Now obviously, in this society we live in today, this would never happen, right? America, this isn’t happening. You can’t take your child up to the government and say, “Look, this guy won’t listen to us, hearken to us.” But here’s the thing. When man fails to execute God’s judgment, do you think God’s just gonna let that go? God will repay. When man fails to put someone to death, God will take care of it. And if you’re a stubborn and rebellious child, you better be careful every single step you take…

That’s… not comforting.

The description of this sermon clip posted by the church on its YouTube channel takes away any ambiguity, too: “Pastor Shelly explains how the Bible teaches that Rebellious teenagers who are lazy drunkards should be executed by the government.”

I guess that’s supposed to be a more nuanced death penalty policy. We’re not saying it’s okay to just kill anyone. Just the lazy drunks. And even then, only the government should do it. See? We’re a religion of love.

One of these days, someone in one of these Independent Fundamental Baptists is actually going to do what the pastor says. A guy’s going to beat his rebellious child to death. Or maybe he’ll kill a gay person. And whenever it happens, these pastors are going to claim plausible deniability, insisting they didn’t really mean it, and that God was supposed to sort it out, not the people here on Earth.

But the evidence is right here. This guy sincerely wishes a disobedient child — which, I assure you, is every child — would be murdered in order to teach the rest of them a lesson. The only thing stopping him is a wussified America that’s too secular for its own good.

