Somehow, in the course of a 45-minute sermon, Fred Lowry was able to tell enough lies and spout enough conspiracies to fill a garbage truck, which is exactly where his May 30 sermon belongs.
Everything from a stolen election to QAnon quackery to pandemic denial.
We normally wouldn’t take the time to comment on a random pastor’s unhinged sermon. But Lowry isn’t just the senior pastor at Deltona Lakes Baptist Church in Volusia County.
He’s also an elected member of the Volusia County Council, representing Deltona and part of DeBary.
Yes, a Facebook Live video shows one of Volusia County’s top elected officials preaching to the congregation about satanic rituals and torturing children and using their blood to extract a compound called adrenochrome, which is then used in the belief it brings on hallucinations, intensifies personalities and slows the aging process.
“This issue is supposed to be rampant I hear in Hollywood and among the elite,” Lowry told his flock. “I don’t know if it’s true, but where there’s smoke …” Lowry then held his hand behind his ear and awaited the answer he was looking for: “Fire.”
Maybe that was Lowry’s clumsy way of buying deniability. We don’t know and we don’t care.
What we do know is that lunatic fringe conspiracy theories are infecting this nation like a disease, and an elected member of the Volusia County Council is a carrier.
Fred Lowry needs to resign. Now. And if he won’t do that, the County Council needs to use whatever powers it possesses to condemn Lowry for bringing shame not only on himself but on the office he holds.
His colleagues ought to be appalled. Lowry’s not only an embarrassment, his judgment is now in serious question. The council is charged with making consequential decisions that are supposed to be rooted in fact and reality.
How can anyone trust that Lowry’s making fact-based decisions when he’s preaching sermons about cabals of Satanists using the blood of kidnapped children to get high and live longer?
To set the stage for Lowry’s descent into QAnon hell, the preacher told the congregation that some 500,000 children go missing each year. He then added that less than 5% of those were attributable to kids being taken by family members. That part is fairly true, according to FBI statistics.
What Lowry left out was that the overwhelming majority of kids who go missing are runaways, and most of them are returned home, leaving his congregants to imagine that 95% of missing kids ending up in secret torture chambers where they’re drained of blood to satisfy the cravings of Hollywood elites.
When Lowry wasn’t off in some QAnon fever dream, he was telling outright lies.
“We did not have a pandemic, folks. We were lied to,” Lowry said, citing consistent death rate increases from year to year, including 2020.
Not true. Starting in 2015, the Centers for Disease Control has reported annual increases in total U.S. deaths in the range of 1-2%. The jump from 2019 to 2020 was more than 15%. The death toll in 2020 attributed to COVID-19 was 377,883 people.
No pandemic? The only lie here is what Lowry told his congregation, a lie that doubles as an insult to everyone who fell ill or lost a loved one to this horrible disease.
What rant would be complete without a stolen-election fable?
Lowry repeated the widely shared and thoroughly debunked Facebook claim that the election was rigged because 155 million votes were cast but only 133 million people were registered to vote. It’s a social media lie easily disproved with a 30-second Google search.
The federal government reported after the 2018 election that 211 million people were registered for the election that year. Unless tens of millions of Americans fell off the voter rolls in 2020, the U.S. had more than enough registered voters to reach 155 million.
For good measure, Lowry told churchgoers that Thomas Jefferson, a theist who rejected the Holy Trinity and the divinity of Jesus, was nearly disqualified to be president because he had missed church twice.
We could find no evidence that ever occurred. We asked Lowry for his sourcing on that an nearly a dozen other claims he made. He didn’t respond.
We did, however, find scholarship that described Jefferson’s contempt for lying clerics and his belief that Christianity would be better off without the clergy at all.
The irony of Lowry’s sermon was the consistent theme that our problems would be solved through the telling of truth. The man spends an entire sermon spinning one outrageous lie after another, then has the gall to call for more truth.
Don’t count on Lowry, a Republican, paying a price for spreading grotesque conspiracy theories and telling huge lies in a place of worship.
The former Deltona City Commission member represents a red district in a red county. The political base eats up this junk with a spoon.
Plus, his political campaign in 2018 had the financial backing of Volusia County’s longtime political power brokers like International Speedway Corp. and homebuilder Mori Hosseini’s development companies.
Maybe Lowry’s fellow County Council members will care, knowing that the guy up there on the dais weighing in on policy — including a response to the pandemic he denies took place — is the same guy who’s buying what QAnon is selling, and then peddling that garbage to his church congregation.
Don’t let him get away with it, Volusia. Find the courage to speak out against conspiracies, misinformation and lies before it’s too late.
Editorials are the opinion of the Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board and are written by one of its members or a designee. The editorial board consists of Opinion Editor Mike Lafferty, Jennifer A. Marcial Ocasio, Jay Reddick and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Send emails to insight@orlandosentinel.com.
