#2214: Joe Schimmel

Joe Schimmel, of something called Good Fight Ministries, is a delusional fundie of the kind that gets invited on Rick Wiles’s radio show. He is also pastor of Blessed Hope Chapel in Simi Valley, California, Vice President of Blessed Hope Records, host of the documentary “Hollywood’s War on God” and director of (e.g.) the genre-bending “Left Behind or Led Astray?: Examining the Origins of the Secret Pre-Tribulation Rapture”.

As suggested by his documentary (or whatever you call it), Schimmel tends to be concerned with what he perceives as degenerate or unfortunate elements in popular culture. So according to Schimmel, Miley Cyrus’s fame and fortune is for instance to blame on having (non-metaphorically) made a “deal with Lucifer.” Apparently she has also been “baptized into the Illuminati” and is currently teaching people how to have sex with Satan. She is not the only one. Schimmel tastefully weighed in on Robin Williams’s suicide, too, saying that Williams killed himself because he was possessed by demons, just like lots of other “famous celebrities.” Indeed, the whole reason they got famous in the first place was because Satan has possessed them and given them talent to glorify himself and “promote evil and darkness and increase mankind’s rebellion against God.” As evidence, Schimmel draws on his own complete failure to understand how metaphors work – indeed, ascribing to Schimmel a complete lack of ability to understand non-literal speech is actually remarkably explanatory with regard to many of his views and claims (also beyond this example).

Now, Schimmel has written extensively on such issues, and many of writings fit nicely into the tradition of the anti-rock preachers of the eighties. And based mostly on rumors and his own imagination (and interpreting any metaphor or simile ever used by his targets literally), Schimmel finds demonic connections more or less everywhere, from Kurt Cobain (“one does not have to look very deeply into the life of Kurt Cobain to see that the spirit that inspired him was not the Sprit of God”) to Kesha, the “Satanic cult leader”. 

Much of his work is explained in the potential cult classic “Rock-N-Roll Sorcerers of the New Age Revolution”, available on VHS, where he shows how all rock music, broadly construed, from Elvis and the Beatles to Michael Jackson and onward, is rooted in the New Age movement and the occult. According to one Amazon reviewer “[t]his is not just some crazy pastor ranting about sex, drugs, and rock’n roll.” At least the reviewer sensed that someone might potentially raise precisely that concern. The work is, of course, exactly some crazy pastor ranting about sex, drugs and rock’n roll. There is also the 10-hour series They Sold Their Souls for Rock N Roll (“Rock’n roll sorcerers” might be part of that) in which Schimmel “reveals just how Satan has been effectively using popular music to undermine Gods plan for family and ultimately heralding the coming of the Antichrist and his kingdom on earth,” which shows “hundreds of artists” being “used by Satan to destroy many lives” such as “Elvis, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, U2, Creed, Madonna, Britney Spears, DMX, Tupac, Tori Amos and many more.” 

Schimmel was also mildly freaked out about the movie The Shack (based on the novel), in which God is portrayed as an overweight black woman: “Young’s pretentious caricature of God as a heavy set, cushy, non-judgmental, African American woman called ‘Papa’ (who resembles the New Agey Oprah Winfrey far more than the one true God revealed through the Lord Jesus Christ – Hebrews 1:1-3), and his depiction of the Holy Spirit as a frail Asian woman with the Hindu name, Sarayu, lends itself to a dangerous and false image of God and idolatry.” God is a fit, white man, and much more like Joe Schimmel, of course. 

Diagnosis: A throwback to the Satanic panic of the eighties, really. Schimmel is mind-bendingly insane, yet still has plenty of fans out there.