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‘My first calling is to my savior’: Pompeo brags he is using role of Secretary of State to evangelize world leaders
April 14, 2020 8:36AM ET
Mike Pompeo speaking at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, DC. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is not only admitting, but bragging that he is using his official government role to evangelize world leaders, apparently hoping to bring them to Jesus Christ.
Pompeo is widely known for “brazenly inserting his evangelical Christian beliefs into discussions of foreign policy,” as The New York Times reported in earlier editions of this 2019 article. But it was not known until now that he has been ignoring the Constitution’s critical tenet of separation of church and state to preach the gospel to foreign leaders while on the taxpayers’ dime.
Secretary Pompeo spoke on a conference call for conservative Christian clergy, hosted by the anti-LGBTQ hate group Family Research Council last Thursday, and “told FRC’s pastors that he has used his official travels as an opportunity to evangelize,” according to Right Wing Watch’s Peter Montgomery.
“I’ve been unabashed in my role as Secretary of State to talk about the fact that I swore an oath to the Constitution, but that my first calling is to my Savior,” Pompeo told the conservative Christian pastors. “And I’ve made that something that I tell world leaders, whether I’m with President Sisi in Egypt or whomever, whatever faith they may be of or of no faith.”
He appeared to admit some world leaders were not pleased by his overtures, saying: “we’ve watched some of us be called out for that, to think that, to say that we don’t care about science, that we don’t care about the rule of law, all the things that I know we all care so deeply about.”
Pompeo appeared also to try to gain favor with the pastors and the Family Research Council’s president, Tony Perkins.
“My relationship with pastors across America, with Tony and all of you, reminds me of the important reason that I believe the Lord put me in this place to have this opportunity to make religious freedom such an important part of what this administration is doing.”