Colorado pastor: Sign these anti-trans ballot petitions or "you're a traitor" to Jesus

Jim Burgen's recent sermon to Flatirons Community Church exposes how fear and lies drive anti-trans Christian politics

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A Christian megachurch pastor in Texas linked LGBTQ people to child traffickers while telling his congregation to support ballot initiatives that would make it harder for transgender people to receive health care. He added that if they didn’t do it, they would be considered a “traitor” to Jesus.

All of this happened at Flatirons Community Church in Lafayette, Colorado (near Boulder). It’s one of the largest churches in the country with over 10,000 people attending one of its five campuses.

Pastor Jim Burgen (screenshot via YouTube)

In early November, Pastor Jim Burgen used part of his sermon to tell a series of lies:

That Christians were being silenced.

That millions of babies were being slaughtered annually.

That the government was allowing people to choose their gender and sex.

That kids in kindergarten had to sit through “gender/pronoun awareness puppet shows.”

That school libraries were filled with pornographic instruction manuals.

He lied to his congregation because he presumably believes it’s okay to lie to advance a conservative message.

Every political ideology out there is driven by some form of faith in something. But the only one that’s told “You can’t come in here” is Christianity. And the only people saying, “Well, I guess you’re not allowed to say anything or we’ll get in trouble” are Christians!

The result is the government will take over. The government decides when life begins. Now millions of babies get slaughtered every year. Where are the Christians? Or the government decides this is what marriage is. And now the government has decided that they can determine what gender and sex really are.

And now your children are being made to sit through gender/pronoun awareness puppet shows on the first day of kindergarten. And go to a public library or your school library: It’s filled with pornographic how-to instruction books.

And the largest, fastest growing industry in the world is the sexual exploitation and sale of children, which is a spiritual issue, not a political issue.

And Christians shake their heads and go, “How did all this happen?”…

…

… We became more concerned with, “Am I being fed? Do I like the message? The sermon went a little long and I got a ball game coming up. I hate it when we do this song. I don’t like this song. It’s too loud. It’s not loud enough. I think the pastor is too political. I don’t think the pastor is political enough.” Heard from both of you, all right?

In the meantime, our children are being hunted and consumed by predators and pedophiles. Our children are being in surgery to alter their bodies, to align with their misguided feelings in biology. And boys are unfairly competing against our daughters.

Let me say it this way: Our churches might be full and our Bible studies at capacity, but our children are being slaughtered, stolen, killed, and destroyed.

And it’s time to say “Enough.”

After priming his audience with those lies, he explained why he was doing it.

In Colorado, where Democrats have a legislative trifecta, voters can still put policy proposals on the ballot if they can collect enough signatures. A group called “Protect Kids Colorado” was formed to get three measures in front of voters in the 2026 elections. One of them would mandate life imprisonment without parole for child sex traffickers. The other two would ban trans kids from playing gender-segregated sports and ban certain kinds of “irreversible” forms of gender-affirming care for minors. (Male circumcision would still be allowed, of course, because religion.)

While the first one could be justified, the other two have nothing to do with sex trafficking whatsoever and would merely deprive trans children from leading fuller and better lives.

Burgen wanted his congregation to know that it was their religious duty to make sure trans kids suffer.

In order to facilitate that, he needed them to sign the ballot initiative petitions.

… Before you leave the building, whatever campus you’re on, you can rescue and restore what’s happening to our kids here in Colorado.

This weekend—we’ve never done this before, all right?—in every one of our campus lobbies, we are partnering with Protect Colorado Kids [sic], where you can sign a petition to get three proposals on the upcoming ballot next year. All spiritual matters because… they all are centered around the identity and safety of our children. It’s non-partisan, it’s non-political, it’s a spiritual matter.

Here’s the three issues we want to get on a ballot: Make trafficking of children a harsher crime with severe penalties. Second thing, stop irreversible sexual surgery on minors. Third thing, keep girls’ and boys’ sports biologically fair.

We just got to get our voice out there. If we can get 100,000 signatures in the next couple of months, all right, these three issues will go on the ballot. And then, hey, Christian, go vote!…

… If you’re a Christian, to not take up your shield of faith and your sword of the spirit, which is the word of God, of truth, to not engage in this spiritual battle to protect kids, to me, is the equivalent of mutiny and deserting your post.

I say you’re a traitor to your first allegiance, Jesus, and let me remind you, Jesus is the one who said, “Anyone that hurts one of these children of mine, it’d be better if you had a millstone around your neck and thrown in the sea.” Matthew 18. All right?

…

… If you’re more passionate about your this feels political more than your passion and opportunity to protect Colorado kids, you need to repent, because your politics have become your idol. There’s no other possible explanation…

[Random grunts]

It never crossed Burgen’s mind that some people may not want to sign these petitions because two of those proposals would just impose Christian cruelty on children while overriding the expertise of their doctors.

But by equating sex trafficking with gender-affirming care, this pastor made it sound like all three were in the best interest of children. The reality is that the latter two measures would make kids’ lives worse due to the willful ignorance of conservative Christians.

Reporter Jamie O'Rourke of the Colorado Times Recorder offered some useful context to this situation. The church wasn’t always this overtly political regarding LGBTQ issues, but that changed a few years ago.

Even Flatirons’ pastor has not always been hostile towards LGBTQ people. In 2013, one of Burgen’s sermons spotlighted a transgender woman who attended Flatirons’s services, saying, “We don’t have an official stance on anything except this — point people toward Jesus and what he said, open our arms wide and love everybody that God brings into this place.”

But that stance seemed to abruptly reverse in 2015, when that congregant was reportedly told she was banned from attending a women’s retreat, and that she should “return to being a male.”

A later official post from Flatirons in 2019 declared in writing that the church would not support same-sex relationships or transgender people, saying that these people engage in “sexual misconduct.” The post likened this “misconduct” to adultery and even murder.

“Gay people are more than welcome in our church, just as greedy people are, just as adulterous people are, just as liars are, just as murderers are, etc. But, just as we will not condone the behavior of those sins, we will also not condone the behavior of homosexuality or agree that it is within God’s parameters for marriage. The same goes for transgender people and any other form of “sexual misconduct.” And we do this BECAUSE of love, not in spite of it,” the post reads.

So this is another Christian megachurch that pretends it wants to help kids when, in reality, they’re driving certain kids toward depression (or worse), because evidence shows that gender-affirming care works.

And they’re doing this because the pastor, who insists he doesn’t normally get political, has decided that cruelty against LGBTQ people is a spiritual matter and precisely what Jesus wanted. (In that sense, he’s no different from Catholic bishops who have pushed the same awful rhetoric.)

The reason he can get away with these lies is because no one in that building seems to know anything Jesus actually said. Which (spoiler!) is nothing about trans people. It’s not like the church is pressuring members to sign petitions that would benefit the poor.

It’s especially ironic they’re doing this at a time when the Epstein files are giving us more and more pieces of evidence that the Republican president was closely linked with a child sex trafficker. Even though this sermon was delivered before the bulk of those files were released, Burgen didn’t note any hypocrisy regarding how roughly 80% of white evangelicals voted for a convicted felon who was associated with Epstein.

No one should be taking moral guidance from anyone who voted for Donald Trump.

Even if the petitions get enough signatures, it doesn’t mean Colorado voters will pass them, but that’s a battle for another day. Hopefully a majority of voters, unlike the people in this church, have a heart.

It’s no wonder, though, why so many people—especially young people—are walking away from megachurches like this one. Burgen is weaponizing fear, misinformation, and religious authority to coerce a certain kind of political behavior from his congregation. By framing dissent or disagreement as a betrayal of Jesus, he’s basically promoting spiritual blackmail.

He would have been fine if he just stopped at going after convicted sex traffickers. Instead, by tying gender-affirming care and trans kids’ participation in sports to a heinous crime, he’s equating voluntary health care to involuntary cruelty. If these ballot measures pass, the consequences would be awful for those children. They wouldn’t be protected. They would just be collateral damage.

There’s nothing compassionate or honest about what this church is doing. Instead of caring for the sick and protecting the marginalized, this pastor is worshiping a Jesus whose only goal appears to be to harm those who don’t fit a traditional gender mold.

Meanwhile, you won’t hear him delivering any kind of sermon against the very real, documented abuses committed by powerful people aligned with Republicans. (There’s no shortage of those.) Burgen hoped his sermon would call out traitors when the reality is that he accidentally revealed he’s part of the problem. He’s the one children need protection against. And anyone who still attends this church is complicit in his quest to harm all the trans kids in the state.

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