Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who has masterminded many of the anti-immigrant policies that Americans find to be the most cruel, such as using family separations as a deterrent to entry — even for legal asylum seekers — was in Boston on Monday speaking about the future of religious liberty, when a few members of the audience began to speak up over the top of his prepared remarks.
It must have been a complete shock to Sessions, because the first man who spoke up was very obviously a man of the cloth, dressed in the garb of a Methodist preacher. In fact, he even identified himself as a Methodist, after loudly interrupting Sessions to recite from the Bible, Matthew, chapter 25, verses 42–43:
For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.”
Those were the words that the Apostle of Jesus said would come on a day of reckoning by Jesus, who would tell all the nations gathered before him that faith alone would not save them — that they must have been kind and good in life as well if they want to get into heaven.
Sessions himself is a Methodist, and is surely versed in Scripture (pun intended), and regardless, even non-Christians know the passage that the preacher recited — it is one of the most widely-quoted parts of the volume that holds the Guinness World Record as the best-selling book in history.
But whether Sessions is familiar with parts of the Bible that are inconvenient to him or not, what he said — and the action he allowed to be taken — belie any claim that he is any kind of a Christian at all. As the clergyman finished the verses, in a thick local Bostonian accent, he said to Sessions:
Brother Jeff, as a fellow United Methodist, I call upon you to repent. To care for those in need. To remember that when you do not care for others, you are wounding the body of Christ.”
Sessions, like the villain he is, called the man’s plea an “attack”:
Well, thank you for those remarks… and attack. But I will just tell you we do our best every day to fulfill my responsibility to enforce the laws of the United States.”
As he admonished the preacher, police escorted the man out of the room. A second protester, unidentified in this video, begins to say that the preacher being removed in exercising his freedom of religion, yelling over anti-immigrant boos that the preacher “represents the Christian tradition, the faith that everyone here professes to believe in.”
The second protester was also removed by police.
So I guess Jeff Sessions’ answer to the age-old question, “What Would Jesus Do” is, he would call the cops when people tried to remind him of what the Bible says.
Watch the exchange here — the video obtained was from someone’s personal footage, so it’s not perfect:
Featured image via screen capture
