Former pastor Alistair Begg recently doubled down on his controversial advice to a grandmother in 2023, which advised her to attend her grandchild's wedding to a transgender-identifying individual.
Begg, whose radio ministry "Truth For Life" is carried by nearly 1,800 radio stations nationwide, drew backlash that year when comments he made went viral on social media after he shared his advice to the Christian grandmother that she ought to attend the wedding and buy a gift to avoid reinforcing "judgmental" stereotypes about Christians.
Touching on the issue again during an interview published this week by the Christian podcast "Expositor's Collective," Begg said he was attempting to be compassionate with his advice.
"If people said, 'What do you know about Begg?' I don't think compassion is necessarily the first word that they would use," he said.
"I'm not trying to be unkind to myself," he said regarding how others might assess him. "I think, realistically, they might say he's very direct, they might say he's funny. They could say a bunch of stuff, but I don't think they'd say 'compassion.'"
"So now, in my one attempt at compassion, I should have known better," he added, as the audience laughed. "I don't do compassion. I do compassion, all hell breaks loose against me."
Begg, who has been in pastoral ministry since 1975 and became senior pastor at Parkside Church in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1983 before stepping down last year, echoed the sentiment he expressed in a sermon in the wake of the controversy, during which he said he feels no need to repent over his advice.
"I repent for a bad attitude, or an unkindness, or whatever it might be, but I'm not going to repent for giving somebody compassionate encouragement in relationships," he said.
Begg said he first thought the grandmother's letter about her grandson's transgender wedding was "a bad joke" until he realized it was "a fearful thing."
"It was a girl that had already begun to grow facial hair," he said. "It was [a] very sad-looking picture."
Begg nevertheless pushed back against accusations that his advice to the grandmother was an endorsement of gay marriage.
"I had just finished doing Jude, for crying out loud," he said. "And I had done Romans, Chapter 1 in the previous months as well. I thought I was going to be torched from another department, but I never thought it would come this way."
Begg went on to claim he was attacked by his own friends for being compassionate, with some turning on him over the issue without first reaching out to him.
"I had guys that I played golf with, Christian guys, who went on and did podcasts and [were] throwing me under the bus," he said. "But they never, ever picked up a phone. They never verified anything at all. That's distressing."
The late pastor John MacArthur, who noted he knew Begg well enough to have known his son when he was an infant, publicly rebuked him for his advice and suggested his ministry would be defined by his stance on the transgender wedding.
Days after his comments went viral, Begg was scrubbed from the website of the Shepherd’s Conference, which is a ministry of MacArthur's Grace Community Church.
"I would never say that, because you have to calculate the cost of that," MacArthur said last year of Begg's advice. "And how do you calculate that? The price for that is really epic, it's really epic."
"There's so much more about him that is wonderful and faithful and his ministry, just passed 40 years of pastoral ministry in that church," he continued, adding the church had just celebrated Begg's milestone in ministry.
"And now he's going to be defined by that. I don't know how you calculate doing that for that reason, unless there is some very personal relationship with someone you're trying to win over or protect, but that's really speculation in my mind."
