John MacArthur, an influential evangelical pastor and Biblical originalist who espoused misogyny, racism, and homophobia over a sixty-year career behind the pulpit, died on Monday. He was 86.
MacArthur was noted for his expository preaching, narrowly focused on the meaning and historical context of a particular piece of scripture. In thousands of sermons delivered from his 3000-seat megachurch in Sun Valley, California, MacArthur walked his congregation line by line through a single Bible passage to reinforce his view that “Authority and submission pervade the whole universe.”
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The pastor also condemned Biden’s support for “all the transgender nonsense.”
Late in life, MacArthur became an outspoken culture warrior, denouncing critical race theory and an epidemic of “wokeness” in the church and American society. He was also an unrepentant supporter of President Donald Trump in the wake of COVID-era lockdowns.
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In August 2020, Mr. MacArthur told an interviewer for a podcast associated with Liberty University that Trump had called to thank him for “taking a stand” on church closures, The New York Times reports. The two men discussed why “Christians could not vote Democratic,” MacArthur said.
“There’s no way that a Christian could affirm the
MacArthur clashed with other perceived enemies within Christianity, including the Roman Catholic Church, Baptists, and leaders espousing charismatic theology and the prosperity gospel, among them televangelists Robert Schuller and Joel Osteen.
According to MacArthur, American evangelicals had led millions of people astray with the “damning false assurance” of “insidious easy-believism.”
Christians who believed they were filled with the power of the Holy Spirit were teaching a counterfeit, “aberrant” Christianity, he said. He called them “harebrained people … prompted by Satan” and decried the charismatic movement’s widespread presence in Christian media.
MacArthur’s first sermon as head of Grace Community Church, delivered in 1969 when he was just 29, parsed Matthew 7:21, which says, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.”
MacArthur’s death was met with restrained relief from his perceived enemies.
“MacArthur’s theology was and remains toxic,” wrote the publisher of Baptist News Global.
"When someone who has harmed real people over & over again dies, we need to pause & consider that reality… In part because it is so painful for those who were victimized to hear others heap laurels on the person who harmed them." – @markwingdallas https://t.co/Ab1bPkqcuQ
— Christa Brown (@ChristaBrown777) July 16, 2025
Grace grew rapidly under MacArthur’s leadership, and demand for his sermons exploded. By the end of the 1970s, more than 100,000 Christians nationwide were receiving MacArthur’s recorded sermons every week. The church later launched a separate ministry, Grace to You, to broadcast MacArthur’s messages on Christian radio.
In 1979, MacArthur taught on Titus 2 and the apostle Paul’s instructions that women “be busy at home” and “subject to their husbands.” Women, MacArthur maintained, should not work outside the home, and families should not require two incomes. He consequently removed all women from staff positions at Grace.
“God has designed that men be given the position of authority, and women the position of submission. … A woman, whether she is married or single, must recognize the fact that in general, as a woman, she must have a spirit of submission to all men.”
MacArthur was unstinting in his condemnation of gay people.
When a society “turns to sexual immorality, homosexual immorality, and a reprobate mind, God gives them up,” he told far-right website Breitbart.
“There’s a sense in which God takes His hand of blessing off that society. When He gives them up, it means he gives them up to the consequences of their choices. If you follow that pattern, what you get is Joe Biden, who is the epitome of all those things.”
He condemned marriage equality as a blasphemy against God.
Same-sex marriage is “not a marriage at all” because it goes against God’s design for the institution. “It is a blasphemy against God, as is transgender life and homosexuality, as well,” he said. “That is the message to give in love.”
Of another pastor’s advice to a congregant to attend an LGBTQ+ wedding in 2024, MacArthur told his congregation, “It’s not loving to help somebody celebrate stepping into the fury of God’s judgment.”
MacArthur also denounced gay-affirming Christian denominations as “Satan’s church,” claimed that gay people don’t really exist, that Christians should be actively “offensive” against homosexuality, and that Jesus hates those who don’t hate LGBTQ+ people. The church leader was also a proponent of conversion therapy.
No tenet in his preaching defined MacArthur’s worldview better, however, than the special place slavery held in his heart.
“To throw out slavery as a concept simply because there have been abuses, I think, is to miss the point,” he said. “There can also be benefits. For many people, poor people, perhaps people who weren’t educated, perhaps people who had no other opportunity, working for a gentle, caring, loving master was the best of all possible worlds.”
“Slavery is not objectionable if you have the right master,” MacArthur claimed. “It’s the perfect scenario.”
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