Jeremy Vuolo: Duggar Husband Calls ‘Unite The Right’ Rally ‘Abhorrent,’ Decries White Pride
Jeremy Vuolo, who joined the Duggar family last year by marrying Jinger Nicole, has released a new sermon, and in it, he addresses the Charlottesville, Virginia, riots, and the murder that took place when an attendee of the white nationalist rally drove a car into a crowd. Vuolo has made waves among Duggar viewers with sermons about topics like LGBT rights and avoiding unity with Catholics. However, some of his sermons have drawn a different kind of attention — one has widely been read as condemning Vuolo’s sister-in-law Jill Dillard and her husband, Derick, in their missionary efforts.
However, the new sermon stands out in a different way.
As America absorbed the fact that a woman had been killed protesting against white supremacy, individuals across social media expressed an expectation for churches to condemn these rallies.
It’s hard to be certain just how many pastors took this sentiment to heart, but Jeremy Vuolo was one of them. Whatever he had intended for his sermon on Sunday, the Duggar husband either scrapped it or edited it, because by the time he spoke Sunday morning, Jeremy’s sermon included references to white pride, nationalism, ethnocentrism, and specifically to the Unite the Right rally, which Vuolo termed “abhorrent.”
If you ID as white Christian & in church your pastor/priest doesn't condemn neo-Nazis in #Charlotesville then you have to SPEAK UP. 1/
— Ashmead (Ashmeads2.tumblr.com) (@ashmeads2) August 12, 2017
If your church leader doesn't condemn the evil of the White Nationalist today, you may want to find a new church.
— Jennifer A. Wiredu (@jennifer_kochis) August 13, 2017
Jeremy goes on to link all of this to secularism and rejection of God’s rule, but before that point, Vuolo makes it very clear that he considers the white nationalism marches to be entirely unacceptable and unChristian.
In the first few minutes, Jeremy Vuolo is listing examples of a lack of unity in the world. He incudes the threat of nuclear war, the divide between American political parties, and human rights, among others, before listing “race relations, as in horifically evident this weekend, as we see the abhorrent ‘Unite the Right’ rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia.”
Vuolo steps away from that topic a while and lists other matters America can’t agree on (with a dig at gender and sexuality as two of them) before returning to American ethnocentrisim.
“It is only in our arrogance that we think…that those ‘savages’ in those third-world countries need to…become like us.”
It’s not quite clear if this is directed at Jeremy’s in-laws again — Jill and Derick have certainly shared a few stories that involve them “teaching” people in Central America (here, here, here). However, it’s clear that Jeremy and Derick are divided on a few matters, and this seems to be one of them.
After taking a moment out to assert that humanism, unity, and understanding will never cure the problem of hatred, he quickly returns to define what he says the problem actually is.
“Although the world recognizes the problem of division and hatred, what they fail to recognize is the source of the problem — pride.”
The rest of Jeremy Vuolo’s sermon moves away from the topics of racism, nationalism, ethnocentrism, and white supremacism to speak more generally about pride, obedience to God, and Christian calling, but he does refer back a few times, mentioning pride in skin color, among other things.
Ben Seewald and Derick Dillard have also addressed the white nationalist riots, but with this sermon, Jeremy Vuolo went the furthest of all the Duggar husbands, actually naming the “Unite the Right” rally as abhorrent and calling out white pride.
[Featured Image by Duggar Family/Facebook]
