A group of churchgoers from Kentucky sparked nationwide headlines after they went into a public library and checked out — and are now refusing to return — books they deemed “sexually perverse.”
“My initial response is where do I send a donation to help this continue,” joked Pastor John Amanchukwu during an appearance on CBN’s “Faith in Culture,” asking, “How do I help fund this mission?”
The North Carolina-based minister’s comments come after the leadership of a Baptist church in Shelbyville, Kentucky, said that, while they support members of their congregation who have chosen to “not return” pro-LGBT children’s books to the public library, it was not an official “church directive.”
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Located about 30 miles east of Louisville, leaders at Reformation Church of Shelbyville said the ordeal began in June 2024, after a family who attends the church discovered more than a dozen “sexually perverse books” for kids on the shelves of the Shelby County Public Library.
Among the titles in the library were “My Two Dads” by Claudia Harrington, “Julian Is a Mermaid” by Jessica Love, and “Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out” by Susan Kuklin. The third of which, according to the church, includes narrative descriptions of a child performing sexual acts.
Amanchukwu told CBN News, “Respectfully, I don’t think that any school should have books that seek to indoctrinate children into heterosexuality or into homosexuality, into transgenderism, into bestiality, and all of these other ‘isms’ and schisms of our culture. I don’t think that should be the focus of education. We should teach our students how to think — not simply what to think.”
He went on to boldly claim exposing children to sexualized content at increasingly younger ages is akin to “mental rape” that “assaults the soul, stains the brain, and robs kids of their innocence.”
Amanchukwu then read concerning excerpts from the children’s book “Worm Loves Worm” by J.J. Austrian:
The pastor went on to argue that, just because the U.S. legalized same-sex marriage via a Supreme Court ruling in 2015, it does not make it morally acceptable.
“Heaven doesn’t endorse the marital bond between two men and two women,” he said. “But this has been the movement afoot in the American education system.”
A major part of the problem, Amanchukwu explained, is the lack of biblical understanding among Christians in the United States.
In 2022, CBN News reported on the concerning findings of a survey released by Dr. George Barna’s Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University. The analysis found that, while 67% of American parents with preteens identified as Christians, only 2% held to a biblical worldview.
That same study found only 39% of pastors possessed biblical worldviews on matters related to truth and morality.
“In the Christian church today, we have people talking about God and preaching from the Bible that don’t trust and/or believe God in how they should carry out their every day lives,” he said. “Weak pulpits create weak Christians. … Weak shepherds create weak sheep, and that’s what we’re contending with today.”
“I think that, today, we need to have a come to Jesus meeting around the significance and the inerrancy and the infallibility of the Word of God,” Amanchukwu added. “We need preachers to get back to believing the Word of God from Genesis to Revelation and preaching the Word of God, the whole counsel of God’s truth.”
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