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If this doesn’t disgust you, nothing will.

Pastor Donnie Romero of Stedfast Baptist Church in Fort Worth, TX told his congregation last Sunday that he agrees “100 percent” with Baptist Pastor Roger Jimenez, who made news with a sermon he preached in his Sacramento, CA church advocating that the government use a firing squad to “blow their brains out.”

Jimenez was referring to the wounded people from the Orlando shooting still recovering, people he described as “several dozen of these queers in ICU and intensive care.”

What would ever possess these ministers to say such vile things?

Homophobia? Fear? Emotional insecurities? Emotional illness?

Yes to all the above, but there is another reason that may be more important than these, though it is seldom mentioned: It is the absence of theological education that is widespread among evangelical ministers.

Many of them, I would even venture to say most of them, have had no theological education comparable to what Catholic priests and mainline clergy must have to be ordained.

Some have attended a Bible College that does not have the academic standards or faculty competence needed for serious theological education. Some haven’t even done that.

“Pastor” Donnie Romero hasn’t had any theological education. Neither has Roger Jimenez. They are typical of evangelical pastors.

This means that thousands of people listen to uneducated ministers preaching uninformed sermons every week here in America. Worse, they don’t seem to mind. All that matters is that the preacher “know the Bible.”

Of course, “knowing the Bible” is the problem because uneducated preachers don’t, and neither do their church members. The best they know is what a text says to them, but that doesn’t mean the text actually means what the preacher says.

An uneducated preacher, of course, doesn’t have to worry about such a distinction. What he says the Bible says is what it says, even when it doesn’t. Neither he nor his people know the difference, or that there is one.

It is true that education alone does not make someone a minister, and certainly not a good one, but preaching without the benefit of it is the equivalent of hospitals having doctors who didn’t go to medical school, courts having judges who didn’t go to law school, drug stores having pharmacists who never studied pharmacy.

The damage uneducated ministers do is impossible to measure, but the two mentioned above are perfect examples. Sadly, it happens all the time.

But evangelicals seem willing to take this risk. All that matters is feeling “called” to serve God. So when someone feels called to preach the first thing they do is to start a church.

This lack of education among evangelical ministers today is rooted in a long history of anti-intellectualism that sees knowledge as an enemy of faith and refuses to believe that the mind is a gift from God.

Frankly, I am convinced that anti-intellectualism also has an element of intellectual laziness to it. It’s not that evangelicals are not smart enough to do theological work. They just don’t. It’s not expected. It’s not required. Why bother?

Besides, it’s easier not to let knowledge get in the way of what you preach and teach, as irresponsible and dangerous as that is.

Unfortunately there are no signs that anti-intellectualism is being challenged from within the ranks of evangelicalism, except at the scholarly level which at this point seems to have had little impact on church members or ministers.

So it is likely that we will continue reading news stories about preachers like Romero and Jimenez making outrageous, vile statements because they don’t know enough to know they don’t know enough to dare to speak for God.

And every time it happens it will surely make God weep, as it has been doing for too long.