Megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress said Sunday that addressing gun violence with new legislation alone was akin to “putting a Band-Aid on a cancer.”
Appearing on Fox News Sunday to promote his church’s “March for Eternal Life,” which marked Palm Sunday with a march through downtown Dallas, Jeffress noted it came a day after the “March for our Lives,” in which young people nationwide advocated for gun control legislation.
“We don’t think there’s anything wrong with that,” he said of the gun control march. “That’s great, but if we’re depending on legislation alone to solve the problem of gun violence, that’s like putting a Band-Aid on a cancer.”
“It doesn’t deal with the root problem,” Jeffress continued. “The root problem is we need to change people’s behavior and that can only happen with a change of heart, and we believe only the gospel of Christ can do that.”
The pastor is a close ally of President Donald Trump: Jeffress delivered the pre-inaugural sermon at St. John’s Episcopal Church, and has defended Trump during some of his most difficult moments in politics.
“I would remind people that for the last 70 years there has been a crusade by secularists to remove any acknowledgment from God from the public square, including our schools, saying that we can be good without God,” Jeffress said Sunday. “Well, that’s been a dismal failure.”
He recalled the days when schoolchildren prayed, read scripture and memorized the Ten Commandments in schools, “including the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”
“I think we need to return to that,” Jeffress said. “Teaching people, starting with our children, that there is a God to whom they’re accountable is not the only thing we need to do to end gun violence, but it’s the first thing we need to do.”
h/t Dallas Morning News.
