On 4 August I blogged on Pastor Terry D. Jones’ book Islam is of the Devil, which had just been published by Creation House. The imprint was of interest: while Jones appeared to be a marginal figure, allied to Fred Phelps but repudiated by everyone else because of his plans for a Koran book-burning, Creation House is owned by the influential neo-Pentecostal media empire Strang Communications. It seemed to me that perhaps Jones, who had been part of the controversial Maranatha organisation in the 1980s, was not as far out on the fringe as he appeared.
However, I also asked whether Creation House was now embarrassed by the association with Jones. I observed:
Mention of the book on the company’s website is confined to a small entry in a pdf catalogue, and an associated Creation House Facebook page has recently deleted several messages from one of Jones’ fellow pastors at Dove, Wayne Sapp.
A couple of days after I wrote that, Creation House quietly revised its catalogue and scrubbed the book; although the old edition is still available from the link above, it’s an orphan document which someone forgot to remove. The Creation House frontpage links to the new version, which is almost exactly the same as the previous one except for page 19, where Islam is of the Devil has been replaced with a title by another author, entitled Snakes in the Pulpit. Meanwhile, the book is listed as “temporarily out of stock” on Amazon.
Jones, like his spiritual brother Fred Phelps, is a desperate attention-seeker: last year it was an “Islam is of the Devil” sign outside his church, and members of the congregation joined the Rifqa Bary circus while wearing t-shirts bearing the same message. His planned Koran bonfire for 11 September has brought him international attention, although he’s still keen to come up with new stunts to keep himself and his church in the limelight. His latest effort is a new video, in which he opines that the word “nigger” is not racist because (take a deep breath) “there’s white niggers, and there’s black niggers. A nigger is how you act”. Pastor Wayne Sapp then follows up with a different message, delivered in a weird passive-aggressive style: he explains that no-one should use the word, because it’s “demeaning” and “degrading”; however, it’s unfair that black comedians are allowed to use it, and he rails against the “double standard” of racism which this supposedly exposes. Bizarrely, the video ends with a snippet from the Pink Floyd song Goodbye Cruel World.
As well as being dropped by Creation House, Jones recently lost the support of a certain “Prince Shannon Carson”, who had previously promised to lead a militia to protect the church against Muslims. Gen J.C. Christian had a chat with him a few days ago.
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