John MacArthur is dead; put his name on Bibles, said gays, women should be quiet

John MacArthur’s branded Bibles are bestsellers that made him wealthy. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

John MacArthur is dead.

I’m not going to pretend to grieve, though other Christian leaders are.

Somewhere in the Christian script is a line about respecting the dead, about saying only what is kind, about biting the tongue even when truth begs to be spoken.

But silence feels dishonest. Because John MacArthur didn’t just preach the Gospel. He distorted it.

This man built a ministry around a wrathful god who looked a lot more like himself than Jesus Christ.

And if you were queer, a woman, poor, or simply tired of the Church that used shame as sacrament, MacArthur’s God was no refuge.

I grew up in a family with diverse religious traditions, but I claim a Reformed theology. MacArthur claimed he was also Reformed. He certainly wasn’t. Not my kind.

My God is sovereign, yes. But my God is also tender.

My God is just, and merciful, and scandalously loving.

My God is not threatened by pronouns or abortions or women in the pulpit.

My God is not small.

But MacArthur’s God?

He was furious.

He was a patriarch with a pulpit.

He turned “Biblical” into a weapon and “truth” into a bludgeon.

MacArthur famously banned LGBTQ people from full personhood who didn’t deserve basic human rights. Not LGBTQ rights. No. He was talking about basic human rights.

He insisted women should “sit down and shut up” and called reproductive justice a sin.

Then he put his name on the Bible like he had editorial rights over Scripture! A man who claimed to stand on the Word of God yet sold it like merchandise.

This was a man who railed against prosperity preachers while living off a million-dollar ministry empire.

The hypocrisy wasn’t subtle.

And still, he will be mourned in many churches as a “faithful servant.”

That’s the part that stings.

Because people like me—we faithful, flawed believers who are gay or trans, who’ve had abortions or preached sermons with our whole hearts, who still dare to believe in the wideness of God’s mercy—we were the ones he told to leave.

To repent of existing.

To get back in line or burn.

But I smile over one thing. We are still here. We never needed his approval to belong to God. And now that he’s gone, I hope the Church has the courage to stop pretending he spoke for Jesus.

John MacArthur is dead. May his theology of exclusion die with him.

And may the Church remember that God is love. Not condemnation in a suit and tie.