Salvation Army Major: LGBT People Should Be Put to Death

In an interview with Australian LGBT journalists Serena Ryan and Pete Dillon, a senior Salvation Army official said that non-celibate LGBT people should be put to death.

The official, Major Andrew Craibe, is the Salvation Army’s Territorial Media Relations Director for the Southern Territory in Victoria.

Australian pop star Darren Hayes, the openly gay former lead singer of Savage Garden, recently called for a boycott of the Salvation Army because of the church’s anti-gay beliefs (just as I did here in the States). Hayes’s comments caused quite the firestorm, so Major Craibe appeared on Ryan and Dillon’s podcast, Salt and Pepper, to discuss the Salvation Army’s official position on homosexuality and whether it’s evolved over time.

Above is the interview with Salvation Army Major Andrew Craibe in full.

Ryan told Craibe that she prepared for the interview by reading all 170 pages of Salvation Story: Salvationist Handbook of Doctrine, a manual published by the group’s international headquarters in London and available online.

Ryan expressed incredulity that the official Salvation Army handbook cites a scriptural passage which calls for the execution of LGBT people, and asked Craibe how he would respond to a hypothetical LGBT person receiving guidance from the Salvation Army who discovers the homophobic citation (around the 7:00 mark).

RYAN: . . . that says, according to the Salvation Army, that [they] deserve death. How do you respond to that, as part of your doctrine?

CRAIBE: Well, that’s a part of our belief system.

RYAN: So we should die.

CRAIBE: We have an alignment to the Scriptures,  that’s our belief.

RYAN: Wow. So we should die.

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