He shouted ‘Jesus saves!’ at Chuck Schumer. Why? ‘Honestly, I felt so sorry for him.’
His booming voice and oft-repeated message — “Jee-sus SAAAAVES! JEEEEEE-sus SAAAVES! JESUS LOVES YOU, GUYS!” — have by turns comforted and annoyed people who live or work in uptown Charlotte for more than five years now.
But for the next several weeks, Charlotte’s most well-known street evangelist will be absent from the Queen City because, he says, God has called him to spend election season trying to spread the gospel: In Washington, D.C.
And Sam Bethea is already making his mark there, in what some might consider not the most flattering ways.
Just hours after arriving in the nation’s capital last Friday, on the night news broke of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, the 48-year-old delinquent-turned-preacher was outside the Supreme Court Building repeatedly shouting “Jesus saves” as mourners gathered to pay their respects to the late Justice. His shouting created an uncomfortable tension, and a couple of times people confronted him and asked him to “please say something else”; he responded by singing and reciting Bible verses.
Then on Tuesday, Bethea — or his voice, at least — managed to be heard well beyond Washington, during a press briefing outside the U.S. Capitol that was being broadcast live on various news channels.
He says he stumbled upon the news conference by accident that day, as he was on his way to evangelize outside the Supreme Court Building. As he got closer, he says he realized the man speaking was Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who was in the middle of reading remarks on the partisan fight over the Supreme Court vacancy created by Ginsburg’s death.
“I was wanting to tell him (‘Jesus saves’) like I normally tell everybody, but I wanted to be respectful and not blast on him,” Bethea says. “I was exercising self-control and I said, I can do it at the end. Soon as he puts a period in this conversation, I’m gonna let everybody out here know.
“So I’m just sitting and listening, and about three feet in front of me there’s this big, burly Black guy. I mean, a brother looked like a street brother. He wasn’t like in a suit or anything. He was just a common-old folk.”
What happened next was caught by the microphones providing the audio feed for the TV broadcast.
“We Democrats are fighting as hard as we can to protect Americans,” Schumer said. “And we need Americans ...”
“You ain’t doing s---,” a heckler interrupted, as Schumer paused and glared out at the crowd. (Bethea says this was the man standing in front of him.) “Stop lying to the people.”
Not even a second later, Bethea can be heard shouting: “Jee-sus SAAAAVES! JEEEEEE-sus SAAAVES!”
Then the heckler repeated: “Stop lying to the people.”
“JESUS LOVES YOU, GUYS!” Bethea shouted — to which Schumer responded, “Thank you” before continuing.
Bethea insists he had no plans to chime in until it was over, but says the heckler made him change his mind.
“Honestly, I felt so sorry for (Schumer),” Bethea says. “He looked like a deer in headlights. He was frozen. He was like, ‘Is somebody gonna shut him up? Is somebody gonna get him?’ ”
“I had a little compassion. So when I saw his reaction of his eyes wide and his mouth shut and he stopped talking, the Holy Spirit just said, Tell him. ... And after I said, ‘Jesus loves you, guys,’ that’s when (Schumer) said, ‘Thank you’ and he continued with his speech. So I felt like it helped him out. I could see him focus. He could focus back after he heard the message put on my heart.”
Fox News, The Hill and The Washington Times were among the media outlets that wrote stories specifically about the incident. On Tuesday afternoon, WSOC-TV’s Joe Bruno was the first reporter in Charlotte to identify Bethea’s as the voice in the crowd.
Bethea — who earlier this month was the subject of a profile in the Observer that focused on his antagonist relationship with Black Lives Matter and anti-Trump protesters — says he plans to spend two months in Washington. He has also done street preaching over the past several years in cities including Houston, Oakland, Philadelphia, Sacramento, San Antonio and San Francisco, but this is the longest he’s ever spent evangelizing in a city other than Charlotte.
“Where the Holy Spirit leads me,” he says, “I go.”
He does say, for what it’s worth, that he wishes he had been led to the Supreme Court Building on Thursday in time to be on hand for President Donald Trump’s visit to Ginsburg’s coffin on Thursday morning, when protesters on the street below chanted, “Vote him out!” He missed the appearance by 30 minutes, he says.
“But I wouldn’t have been chanting (to) remove him,” Bethea says. “I would have been saying, ‘God bless the president! We love you, President Trump!’ Letting him hear from a Black man, that would have been a shocker, ’cause I know they think all Black folks don’t like Trump.”
That’s right, “The Jesus Saves Guy” is pulling, and planning to vote, for Donald Trump. He says it’s because he wants a leader who stands for what he calls “Christian rights” — one who is anti-abortion, pro-Israel, and has said he supports “traditional marriage.”
And, in case you’re wondering, it’s possible Bethea won’t be back in Charlotte for some time.
“Two months (in Washington), actually, that was the goal,” he says. “It could be sooner or it could be later, just depending on what the Holy Spirit says and then with this election. If nobody concedes and it goes on afterwards and people are out here and the Lord provides, I’ll still stay here if he wants me to.”
Observer senior visual journalist Jessica Koscielniak contributed to this report.
This story was originally published September 25, 2020 at 3:38 PM.
