MAGA Pastor’s Unholy Racket Is Driving Neighbors Nuts

Pastor Greg Locke has burned Harry Potter books and condemned yoga mats as “the devil.”

He has called the pandemic a scam, dismissed masks as useless, and declared COVID vaccine a menace.

He has said that autism and obsessive-compulsive disorder are indications of demonic oppression.

He also says Donald Trump won the 2020 election and President Biden has pedophile tunnels running under the White House and Hillary Clinton is the “high priestess of a Satanic church.”

He has decreed that Democrats are not welcome in the big circus tent that serves as his Global Vision Bible Church just outside Mount Juliet, Tennessee.

He has gone beyond Trumpian rhetoric to stage an actual witch hunt., announcing to his congregation in February that a demon had whispered to him “the last names of six witches that are in our church.”

“Three of you in the room right now,” he continued. “Look at my eyeballs. We ain’t afraid of you. You stinking witch. You devil worshipin’ Satanist witch. We cast you out in the name of Jesus Christ. We break your spells. We break your curse. We got your first name, we got your last name. We even got an address for one of you.”

But it is not simply the content of Locke’s pronouncements that trouble local residents such as Sarah Moore, a paralegal who is raising two teenagers just under a mile from the church.

What bothers her most is the extraordinary volume of the loudspeakers Global Vision employs when 2,000 people pack into the church at least three times a week.

“It seems like I’ve been hearing it for over a year, but it seems like the past several weeks it’s gotten louder,” Moore told The Daily Beast. “These services go on for hours. You can hear the music and then you can hear him yelling and then you can hear some more music.”

Moore added, “You can hear it in my house with all the doors and windows closed… On New Year’s Eve, it was going on past midnight.”

A number of the county commissioners in surrounding Wilson County are also concerned with the pastor’s decibel level.

“It will rattle the windows of your car if you’re anywhere near this thing,” County Commissioner Bobby Franklin reported during an October meeting. “It’s loud.”

Franklin added, “I’m five miles from the church and can hear the music… I have a lot of churches in my district. I’ve never had one complaint on a church in my district ever, except I’ve never heard another church five miles away, either.”

Chief Deputy Mike Owen of the Wilson County Sheriff’s office gave the commission a breakdown on the noise complaints his department received countywide in September.

“We had 41 noise complaints,” he said “Sounds like a lot. But 22 were from a church down in the west end of the county. One church.”

Owen did not name it, but he was clearly referring to Locke’s church. He noted another, lesser source of complaints at the other end of the county.

“Four calls were from a cannon being fired in the north east,” he said.

Wilson County was otherwise largely quiet, with the 12 remaining complaints involving “everything from a donkey to a motorcycle to kids playing in the street.”

However many complaints there may be, the county does not have an ordinance to remedy them. And it seemed to Owen that the church was a noise problem with no immediate solution.

“When it comes to a church worshiping… I don’t know how you can tell someone how loud they could sing—or how loud they could play their music,” Owen said. “ I think there’s too much protection by the federal law… I wish I knew the answer, but I don’t.”

Owen did guarantee that the sheriff's department would “without a doubt” enforce any law or any ordinances passed by the commission. Commissioner Jerry McFarland noted that there had been talk of instituting a noise ordinance, but he was not sure what happened with it.

“I think we just need to revisit it and see is it valid to move ahead with,” he said.

In response to a Daily Beast request for comment, Locke messaged via Twitter on Tuesday, saying, “Yes, people complain,” adding, “We do everything we can to minimize the sound.”

“We’re in total compliance and there is no sound ordinance that we have violated,” he noted. “Revival is loud. We literally meet in a tent and thousands of people are showing up. I’m not going to turn them away just because people can hear us down the road.”

He concluded, “We’re just getting started and won’t be bullied by people that tolerate many loud events all over the area but only want to complain about our church.”

Church spokesman Wayne Caparas told The Daily Beast that of the 2,000 who attended an average service, half are from outside the area.

“We have people driving as far as California,” he said.

With regards to the jangled neighbors, Caparas said, “We’re just having church.”

“We certainly empathize with them, but we just hope they’ll participate,” he said. “If they’re close enough to hear us, then they’re close enough to attend.”

“We do empathize…but we tend to believe it’s more than anything just people that don’t like hearing the name of Jesus shouted so loud,” he added.

For Moore, the situation is particularly frustrating because the church is just a few feet beyond the town line of Mount Juliet, which does have a noise ordinance. When she called the Mount Juliet police, she was told the church is outside their jurisdiction. And the Wilson County Sheriff's Office says it can do nothing.

Moore told The Daily Beast that her neighbors have begun circulating a petition that already has hundreds of signatures from people across the political spectrum. And in that Locke has triggered what might be considered a minor miracle in these divided times.

“There’s some unity,” she said of her neighbors. “He brought us together.”