Former megachurch pastor James MacDonald seeks mental health diversion to evade penalties for assault and battery charges
Pastors should check their anger, not use their pulpits for anger management therapy, and not use other people as punching bags (metaphorically or literally)
I grew up hearing preachers yell, but I always thought of it as fiery preaching. It wasn’t until I had a lot of experience with preachers and their egos that I started to wonder - could their yelling be motivated not by the passion of God’s Holy Spirit, but by their own anger? Could the pulpit be a form of anger management therapy with a church full of parishioner-therapists willingly to lend their ears?
I was listening to James MacDonald’s radio program more than a decade ago. After his message, he started angrily yelling at the people working on some part of the production and/or transmission of his broadcast for some perceived shortcoming. He didn’t realize he was still on air.
As Julie Roys demonstrated in her reporting, this was one of those situations in which for years people who spoke out against his behavior were vilified as devilish people attacking a pastor, until finally everyone realized it was the pastor who was devilish all along and those people they ostracized were right about him all along.
It all came to a head a few years ago when after defending MacDonald for so long, his church fired him. I won’t repeat the details here. It can all be found on the Roys Report, including the report than over ten years ago John MacArthur warned Moody Bible Institute about MacDonald’s character problems. Whoever was involved with that radio broadcast I witnessed long ago must have known of his anger problems.
And now, MacDonald’s anger has allegedly led to violence against a woman. As Roys reported earlier this year, MacDonald was criminally charged with felony assault and battery for allegedly attacking a woman on the street in Coronado, California.
If you review MacDonald’s Twitter posts, he claims to be living in repentance but it does not seem he has fully accepted responsibility for his faults and misdeeds. He seems to engage in the same manipulation, brainwashing, blame shifting and gaslighting I have seen other egotistical religious leaders engage in.
He has even likened some of the people who have criticized him to Alexander the Coppersmith, who the Apostle Paul said in 2 Timothy 4:14, “did me much evil.” And MacDonald wished evil upon them just as Paul said God would punish Alexander. It seems more likely to me MacDonald should liken himself to the coppersmith. The evidence seems to show that it is MacDonald who has injured others, including a woman he had an altercation with on a public street.
And now he seems to be trying to evade taking full responsibility for the injury he allegedly caused her as well. On September 5 he will have a hearing seeking to take advantage of California’s 2018 law implementing a mental health diversion, to avoid criminal penalties. If he is guilty of the charge of violently attacking a woman and causing her serious bodily injury, he should show true repentance by willingly accepting the full penalty for the crime.
