Jeremy Vuolo’s Sermons Prove He’s Not Much Different From the Duggars After All

"Hispanic culture" encourages young boys to do "impure" things.

In a sermon discussing how children of non-Christian parents should respect their parents, Jeremy is level-headed while addressing his pretty hardcore, devout congregation (although it's more like a classroom). He tells them that you definitely should not turn down a party invitation just because they're playing secular music and that it's OK to be around family members who smoke cigarettes and curse. However, the most alarming part of the video is toward the beginning when Jeremy makes a wild, racially charged statement that comes out of nowhere.

It starts when someone in the audience says that non-Christian fathers will encourage their sons to do impure things to make them "into a man." Jeremy butts in and says, "Isn’t that prevalent in the Hispanic culture?" He continues, "It is. I have dear friends I went to college with in the Hispanic culture and in inner-city Brooklyn and New York City and Manhattan, and it’s prevalent among the fathers to say, ‘Son, you’re of age now. This is part of growing up.'"

Oookay.

Transgender children are a sign of bad parenting.

In a discussion about the breakdown of the American family, Jeremy stops to talk about the show The Keswanis: A Most Modern Family, a reality TV web series about a family that has a transgender daughter named Devina. Apparently, this upset Jeremy very much. "Well that’s a sign of — the child is ruling," he says in the video. "The parents have no discipline over the child and no instruction over what’s right and wrong. Just, 'Whatever you feel, you do.' And now you got a child who’s barely come to cognitive understanding of the world determining that how they were created is wrong and they’re going to redo that. And we see that all over the place."

Catholicism is a "pagan religion."

Jeremy ruffled a few feathers when he bellowed this lesson to his followers in this sermon last year. "I just want to say this, kind of as an aside for us here in Laredo," he said. "There are spiritual strongholds in our world today, aren’t there? Just as Paul and Silas encountered the demonic in Philippi, so we encounter that here in Laredo. In this city, we have the pagan religion of Catholicism gripping the souls of the majority." Whoa, so that escalated. But he wasn't finished. He then took a collective dump on all the other major religions because, hey, he was on a roll:

"When the question comes, 'What must I do to be saved?' Catholicism tells you to clean up your life and adequately perform the sacramental duties. Islam tells you to follow Islam. Do enough good deeds to outweigh your bad and perhaps Allah will allow you to enter paradise, but even then you can’t be certain. In fact, the only way for you to be certain of paradise is if you die in jihad.

Hinduism, though varying and ever-changing the requirements, they teach salvation through bathing in a sacred river or uttering mantras or prayers. The message of salvation from those who claim to be Jews, but are not, commands you to do your best to be righteous in keeping the law found in the Torah. Just do your best.

All of these and the thousands of other religions and the sects that come out of and veer off the major world religions demand salvation from within yourself. But that leaves us despairing and lost — sinking in the deadly pit of our own depravity. The message of the Christian is that of grace — ill-deserved favor from the hand of God to a wretched, depraved sinner. And that is the foundation upon which the church is built."

All right then.

Abortion leads to suicide.

All the Duggars are staunchly pro-life, and that's cool if that's what they believe, but Jeremy is especially intense whenever he talks about it in his sermons. In this particular one, he starts off by reading a research study he says was not written by some "conservative right-wing nut" but by a scientist who found that women who had abortions were likely to suffer from depression and possibly commit suicide later. He then follows up with the craziest reason to explain this — that God is punishing the women for their sin. “It is true what God says, 'The wages of sin is death,'" he says. But by that logic, shouldn't all the pedophiles of the world be dead by now?

Homosexuality "rejects God's truth."

Well, this isn't much of a surprise, but considering how fans love to tout about Jeremy's "liberalism" it's important to point out that he's staunchly anti-LGBTQ and doesn't even attempt to shy away from it like the other Duggars. “All you have to do is look at the sexual revolution pressuring them, and they cave into a worldview that rejects God’s truth and embraces popular opinion,” he says in this sermon that refers to us, apparently. "Do you want to see the gun? Do you want to see the threatening of being burned alive?… Look at the revolution of popular thought. Look at the postmodernism of today’s culture. Look at the sexual revolution. Look at the false idea of tolerance. Look at the false definition of love."

In a separate sermon, he talks about how other Christians love to talk about how "love wins" instead of preaching about hell. "Don’t you see 'love wins' in the spirit of homosexual marriage be touted on the banners from the football fields into the courtrooms?" he asks. "Truth is being degraded."

Suicidal people are selfish.

This nugget of wisdom came from his Twitter, not his YouTube sermons. Earlier this year, he tweeted this anecdote about a woman with a suicidal lover: "Alan Redpath tells the story of a young woman who came to her pastor desperate and despondent. She said, 'There is a man who says he loves me so much he will kill himself if I don’t marry him. What should I do?' 'Do nothing,' he replied. 'That man doesn’t love you; he loves himself. Such a threat isn’t love; it is pure selfishness.'"

Fans appropriately dragged him for ignoring mental health. "God calls people to be psychiatrists to help people just as much as he calls people to be ministers," a fan wrote.

"Your Christ is hated by the world."

Toward the end of this sermon, he gives an important tidbit of advice to his followers who don't know how to exist in a world of non-believers. He tells them not to go too overboard with being offended by everything (good advice), but then he ends on a weird tangent. “Your Christian life is offensive enough," he says suddenly in a deep voice. "The fact that you stand for Christ, you will be persecuted. You know why? Because if you’re living for Christ, your Christ is hated by the world."

Around this part of the speech, we paused the video to google religion statistics in the US. Yep, Christians are still No. 1. Moving on then.