The pastor of a Baptist church in Tempe, Arizona has created a Biblical word salad of a sermon, with accompanying YouTube "documentary," about how dirty and drug-ridden San Francisco is and how this represents a nationally important sin against God.
The video, which is a hodgepodge of clips from newscasts, biblical verse citations, and clips of Pastor Steven Anderson himself sermonizing, is titled "San Fran Sicko." Around the 55-minute mark in the video, Anderson evokes the Loma Prieta earthquake, and makes the tired connection between it, San Francisco's liberal and pro-homosexual politics, and God's wrath.
"They didn't just throw out morality," Anderson preaches. "They threw out sanitation!" He then cuts to a cellphone video shot in January 2019 in which an apparently mentally ill man brought a dead raccoon and plopped it on a table in a San Francisco McDonald's.
"I'm sick of this politically correct garbage that won't call out the homelessness for what it is: laziness," Anderson says around minute 15:30.
The whole video appears predicated on a quote from Zephaniah, itself a minor-profit Old Testament book that isn't often quoted: "Woe to her that is filthy and polluted, to the oppressing city!"
Inexplicably, around the 1:03:00 mark, the documentary transitions into some random footage of people on drugs from various news sources from all over the country, including Los Angeles and Fort Lauderdale.
Anderson is from Sacramento, and as the bio page on his Faithful Word Baptist Church explains, he met his wife of 18 years in Germany while on some sort of mission, "led her to the Lord," and now they have 10 children — the latest having just been born last month, per the wife's blog.
"Faithful Word Baptist Church is a totally independent Baptist church, and Pastor Anderson was sent out by an independent Baptist church in Northern California to start it the old-fashioned way by knocking doors and winning souls to Christ," the copy reads.
So, yes, Anderson appears to be obsessed with his home state of California, and has gotten really good at YouTube searches and incorporating YouTube scaries into his sermonizing. The hashtags on the latest video are #SanFran #SanFrancisco and #Sodom.
As he concludes at the end of the video, which has footage of the end of some sort of class he was leading with a white board, Anderson says, "We do have a few minutes for questions about salvation or about the End Times."
I have a question: Why have 10 kids if we're that close to the End Times?
