Isaac Simmons, a United Methodist Church candidate for ordination and associate pastor at Hope UMC in Bloomington, Illinois, recently spewed blasphemy in a new slam poem ode to the LGBTQ+ movement.
The drag queen pastor and self-styled “drag-evangelist” who goes by the stage name, Ms. Penny Cost, declared over and over again that “God is nothing,” “the Bible is nothing,” and “religion is nothing” in the profanity-laced video posted on his website.
Yet while the God of historic Christianity is but a farce, according to Simmons — who repeatedly refers to the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as female — queer spirituality and LGBTQ+ identity are, in fact, the true expression of divinity.
“God is nothing, but if she were, she would be yes, queen-ing her way down the runways of Paris and Montreal, strutting between that tightrope pulled taught between absurdity and opulence, balancing between too much and never enough,” he proclaims. “Nothing, but if she were, she would be a seamstress of divine couture, weaving together string theory and self portraits to form the fiercest gowns of queer existence.”
“God is nothing but a drag queen with a microphone of biblical f***ing proportions,” he adds.
“Out of a closet of darkness, from under a shroud of secrecy came the beauty of humanity, humanity made in the gender-bending, identity-breaking, system-shaking image of God, the imago Dei,” he declares. “From Adam and Steve to you and to me.”
Simmons then turns his attention to the “f***ed up theology of toxic masculinity and the s***y ideals of the oppressive regime” and “Christian terrorists who wield their flappable doctrine to inflict harm on God’s queerly-anointed creation.”
The Bible, God, and religion “must be nothing,” he concludes, unless we wield it into something.”
In the caption of the video, Simmons dedicates his performance to so-called deconstructionists, non-literalists, and queer spiritualists, and claims his message is “directed to those who actively and passively cause harm against the LGBTQIA2S+ Community due to their understandings of Scripture.”
Amazingly, despite his clear denial of and hatred for the basic tenets of Christianity, the United Methodist Church has certified Simmons as a candidate for ministry. At Hope UMC, where Simmons currently serves, the proudly queer pastor has hosted “drag queen Sundays,” which he describes as “basically just a church service that just happened to be performed in drag.”
Simmons has become a lightning rod amid a years-long clash over LGBTQ+ issues within the United Methodist Church. Earlier this year, the Global Methodist Church — a more conservative Methodist denomination that holds to a traditional view of marriage and opposes ordaining LGBT clergy — announced it would formally split from the denomination.
Simmons discussed in more detail his efforts to merge drag and spirituality in an interview with UMC, posted below.
