Anti-LGBTQ+ Christian activist Sean Feucht said in a video published on September 29 that the entire state of Minnesota has been “hijacked with toxic empathy towards … the LGTBQ community,” Muslims, and “so many other groups” that have allegedly “hijacked the niceness or the empathy of the church.”
In his conversation with former NFL player turned right-wing Christian evangelist Jack Brewer, discussed their upcoming October 3rd “Minneapolis Miracle” worship and revival rally. Brewer said that people in the state have manipulated the meaning of the word “love” to accept “sin.”
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“We’re repenting for folks who have manipulated the word of God,” Brewer said, “and so there’s a there’s a big heavy burden and a need for repentance, particularly around, you know, Minneapolis and St. Paul.”
Feucht then said, “They say, you know, ‘Minnesota nice,’ which is real, like, really nice people, like you’re saying, they have been hijacked with toxic empathy towards not even just the Muslim community, which has really taken advantage of the city and the system, but also the LGTBQ and so many other groups that have come and hijacked the niceness or the empathy of the church.”
He then falsely claimed that “Minneapolis was the very first city in America, first large city in America, to completely allow the call to prayer from mosques to be blasted out over the city any time of day or any time of night.” It is not true, as no mosque has the power to have its prayers heard citywide, and the city has anti-noise laws that restrict such sounds past certain hours.
The term “toxic empathy” was popularized and brought into mainstream political and religious discourse by transphobic conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey in her 2024 book, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion.
In 2022, Stuckey claimed that a children’s book acknowledging that trans kids talk about their identities with trusted adults was “pushing sterility and destruction” and “encouraging our daughters to hate their bodies, halt their puberty, & cut off their breasts in the name of ‘self-love.’” She was also one of several conservatives recently included on a web campaign to overturn marriage equality nationwide.
Feucht rose to prominence in 2021 by protesting church closures during the COVID-19 shutdowns. He has called Disney “child groomers” (an anti-LGBTQ+ slur equating queer people and their supporters with child rapists) who claimed the company has been “fighting for children to be sexually indoctrinated as a kindergartner.”
He has called the Pride flag a “demonic flag of perversion;” called gender-affirming care the “mutilation of children’s bodies” (even though such surgeries are almost never conducted on children); claimed, “The modern trans movement is radicalizing activists into terrorists,” and has called the LGBTQ+ community “a cult bent on perverting and destroying the innocence of every child.”
In a June 2024 X post, he wrote, “June is the month you discover which people… have sold their soul to a demonic agenda seeking to destroy our culture and pervert our children.”
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