Short clips from Michele Bachmann’s speech at the Twin Cities megachurch Living Word Christian Center have circulated on the web in the two years since Bachmann — then making her first run for Congress — gave the soon-to-be-notorious talk on October 14, 2006. This is the speech in which Bachmann declared herself “hot for Jesus.” It’s also the appearance at which LWCC’s pastor, prosperity gospel devotee Mac Hammond, landed in hot water for effectively endorsing Bachmann from the pulpit. (He told parishioners that he’d be voting for Bachmann; later it turned out he doesn’t even live in her district.) (And still later, Pastor Mac found himself under further IRS investigation for allegedly wiring up sweetheart loans for himself through the church.)
Here, presented for the first time, is Bachmann’s complete six-minute speech from that night. Captured by Ken Avidor of Dump Bachmann — the king of the Bachmann documentarians in the blogosphere — it offers a remarkable portrait of the Minnesota congressional representative who has been thrust into the spotlight in the past week by her assertion that Barack Obama and numerous unnamed members of Congress were “anti-American.”
In a church setting, Bachmann is extremely candid about the right-religious basis of her politics and her political career. A full transcript of her remarks is reproduced below [still online at the Archive]; here are some highlights:
It’s the job of Christians to wage war on ‘radical Islam’ in God’s name: “We are sitting right now at a time in our history when we’re going to be dealing with some of the most important issues of our time. Number one being, which your pastor is going to be talking about in the next few weeks, radical Islam. How will our nation deal with this threat of radical Islam? There’s so much at stake, but we listen to the Lord and we decide we’re going to suit up, we’re going to sign up, we’re going to be hot for God, and we’re going to do what He is calling us to do! And we’re going to watch out and see what He is going to perform in our midst.”
God told Bachmann to get into politics, and later to run for Congress: “Twenty-two months ago, He called me to run for United States Congress. And my husband thought, you need to do this. This is a big deal to do something like this. So we set aside three days where we fasted and we prayed, and long about the afternoon of day two, we knew. We knew that we knew that we knew. This was it. And so we jumped in, and little did we know that out of 435 seats for Congress, this race would turn in to being one of the top three in the country.”
God wants you to be hot: “I’m 50 years old. I came to know Him when I was 16. For 34 years, I’ve been hot! And you want to be hot! Because when you are hot for Jesus Christ, there is nothing that is like that life! It is the most exciting life! When you are praying in the spirit, when you are meditating on his word, when you are fellowshipping with white-hot believers, He turns your life around. And it isn’t just for you. It’s for the world! He changes the world through hot people!”
Whether that sort of simple minded nonsense is there in the MN CD6 race or not as sentiment, at least the silence that way is progress.