(OPINION) Nearly four months after revealing that he got too involved with politics to the point where it was overshadowing his ministry, Pastor Greg Locke, the internet-famous leader of Global Vision Bible Church in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, announced that he scrubbed thousands of videos with billions of views from his Facebook page to minimize some of the “collateral damage” they caused.
“We took [down] thousands … of videos, took about three or four days, deleted every one of them,” Locke told his congregation in his Sunday message posted on Facebook. “All of them, all the rants.
Not because what I said was wrong, but because when I became a man I put away childish things. And I’ve learned to say things better.”
Locke, who began sharing content on his Facebook page in 2015, became an overnight conservative star after he posted a video on Facebook on April 22, 2016, criticizing Target for its then-new policy of allowing men to enter women’s bathrooms and dressing rooms.
He is now well-known for his outspoken support of hardline conservative positions on issues such as abortion and divorce, even though he divorced his first wife, Melissa, whom he said he “loved for 21 years,” and remarried her best friend, Tai Cowan McGee, in 2018.
The Tennessee pastor who was also an outspoken supporter of former President Donald Trump and was present during the Jan. 6, 2020, riot at the Capitol, told his congregation that the only way he gets political again is “if God tells me to do it.”
“I promise you, my word will be for Jesus, not for any candidate. It just won’t. So some of you are going to [have to] get past, or at least if you’re going to stick around, you’re going to have to get past the notion that, because we’re coming into an important year, that I’m about to amp things up,” he said.
“I am, but I’m not amping it up on politics. I’m not. I’ll still spit in the face of Planned Parenthood and call out baby butchers. I’m not going to compromise to the alphabet community,” he added. “I’m [not] going to lay down the sword. I’m just going to be more meticulous and specialize at who we swing it at.”
Locke said even though in January he spoke at “The Reawaken America Tour,” a politically-themed rally accused of spreading conspiracy theories about vaccines and the 2020 presidential election, he was only there because he had made an earlier commitment to make an appearance.
“We only did that because I’m a man of my word. And we promised them that we would. But we still get so many people that want to interview me about my red-hot political statements,” Locke said. “They’re like, ‘Oh, you know, we ’bout to go into 2024.’ And I tell them, I don’t care. I don’t care.”
Locke said his July 2 message was one of the most difficult he has ever delivered because, “for a guy like me, sometimes humility can feel like compromise because I’m a born fighter.”
For this new season, however, he is convinced he should be pursuing an agenda of “boldness with brokenness.”
“The new season is courage with conviction not courage for the sake of just saying something because I’m Greg Locke and I can get away with it,” he said.
He spoke extensively about his evolution as a preacher who has learned from his mistakes in ministry and teared up several times during his speech.
“I think I had to go through a lot of the politics, and I had to go through a lot of the celebrity Christianity nonsense in the green rooms. I still go to big conferences and all that, but I say all that to say this kind of circle the wagons and bring it to center point.
