Good morning. My name is Ernest Hancock. I'm the publisher of FreedomsPhoenix.com.
Now we're down here at the workshop because we had an opportunity to bring to you a special interview.
It was Pastor Steven Anderson that had just been beaten by the Border Patrol and DPS and he wanted to tell his story.
Now what happened was he had his camera confiscated and we're not going to get into the case too much
because I'm really more interested in what led this person to be able to confidently resist the questions of a federal agent.
Well, we're going to talk about it.
Pastor Anderson has lived here in Tempe, Arizona. He has his own congregation here and his own business that operates from here.
When we found out what had happened, we contacted him, made sure that he had good quality representation in the courts
and that he was going to be supported by us as individuals. What can we do to make sure that the truth got out?
Well, that's what we're going to be doing. Today we're not going to talk about the case in specifics,
but what we can do is talk about the man, the family, and the reasons why he has done what he's done.
Pastor Anderson, thanks for coming in.
Thank you.
This is something that's of great interest to me and a lot of other people, so I'm just going to be asking you a lot of questions.
You're how old?
Twenty-seven.
Twenty-seven years old and you're married.
Right, I got married when I was nineteen.
Okay, so eight years you've been married.
Right.
You have how many children?
Five children. We had our first child just a year after we were married.
So here's a young man that is a man of God, more than willing to share his opinion, has the ability to share his opinion,
and what's of interest also is that your wife speaks other languages.
Tell us a little bit about your wife and how that's benefited you.
Well, my wife was actually born in communist Germany before the wall came down,
and then when she was six months old, she moved to communist Hungary, grew up there until she was seven,
and then grew up the rest of her life basically in West Germany, and so she's been exposed to communism.
She's definitely seen what an oppressive government is, and so she really values her freedoms in America,
just like I love and value my freedoms in the United States of America, which I believe are unique to this country and the entire world.
I don't think that there are other countries necessarily that enjoy the same freedoms that we enjoy.
So now you have a wife that's not only supportive, I would imagine, of you taking a stance against this type of oppression,
but does she recognize it for what it is, maybe more than most of us do?
She might even recognize it more than I do, and to be honest with you, I actually had her on the phone with me during part of this whole ordeal.
We were on the phone. Thank God she wasn't on the phone to hear them attack me because that would have been very disturbing,
I'm sure, to hear me screaming for mercy and being beaten and tased and so forth,
but I did have her on the phone throughout this ordeal, and she definitely wasn't telling me that I needed to give up my liberties
because she loves this country, as I do, and she understands that we need to stand up for the Bill of Rights.
How old is your oldest child?
He is seven years old.
Does he have any concept of what's going on? You know, arrest the real bad guys, daddy good guy?
Absolutely. I mean, they're very precocious children, and so they understand probably a lot more than people think.
Building up to this, here's a man of God. Tell us about your church. Where is it? How long have you had it? How large, small is it?
Well, it's on the corner of 48th and Southern in Tempe, and I basically moved to Phoenix with the purpose of starting a church.
I'm originally from Sacramento, California, and I moved to Phoenix. This is my life's work.
My vision was to start a Baptist church and pass through this church,
so I was sent out of a church from an independent Baptist church in Sacramento, California,
and I basically just started this church from scratch, just from nothing, really. It started in my house, even.
Now, this is one thing, and a lot of it is probably from your teachings in the past.
We started watching your sermons just last night. A lot of the guys were in there watching some of the things.
Now, I tell you what's going to happen. The big bad guys, they're going to watch them all, too.
I hope they do, and I can't wait for them to play the clips that they don't like.
And that's exactly what's going to happen. There is going to be an effort to defame you at whatever, you know,
fundamentalist Christian position, because they just had this. This will be a perfect opportunity for them,
because they have few choices in this. It's not going to go well for them.
What happened to you is an individual that insisted on maintaining his constitutionally guaranteed rights,
and there was nothing that could have justified what they did to you.
I never even told them that I was a pastor. I mean, throughout this whole ordeal, from the time that this started,
from the time that I was released from jail, I never told them, I never told any of them in the jail that I was a Baptist pastor,
because I don't think that the fact that I'm a Baptist pastor is the issue at all.
And, you know, people are going to try to make that the issue, as you said, but really, this was just a fire alarm business owner.
That's all that they, that's all I told them. And so this is a fire alarm business owner that was abused,
and this could happen to any American, regardless of religion, because I was not being persecuted for being a Baptist.
I was persecuted for standing up for America.
There has to be someone that's the poster child, whether you're this week, this month, this year's poster child.
As long as we can drag that out, man, I'm all for it.
Now, so that's the question, one of the first questions I had for you.
Are you and your family ready to see this through?
Because it's not going, they're just not going to let you get away with, you know, putting a finger in the eye of the man.
Well, think about this. If I'm willing to take this kind of beating, if I'm willing to have put myself in danger of these people who were trying to scare me,
I mean, you know, obviously at the end is where it really got ugly.
But obviously throughout that hour or so that I was just in my car, standing my ground, that was an intimidating time as well,
being surrounded, having my car surrounded, you know, and people are menacing me and so forth.
And obviously we know that they weren't giving me any idle threats because this is what they did to me.
And so am I ready to see this through? Absolutely.
You know, I'm used to criticism. Being a pastor, being behind the pulpit, my sermons are on the internet, my videos are on YouTube.
I know what criticism is. There's nothing new to being attacked to me and criticized and maligned and even lied about in many cases.
And so, you know, I'm ready to see justice served and I'm ready to see this thing through, as you called it.
So in the end, when you have a government agent is going to, a judge will render a decision or hopefully a jury.
Jury, right.
We go through this process. But, you know, here in Arizona, even though our state constitution guarantees in all criminal matters a jury, you don't get one.
Really?
They don't. We have cases on that saying, what does the constitution say? They go, well, you know, we changed our mind.
Right.
So this is a whole nother battle that you're going to have too. So these are different things that we can bring up in this.
You need to be prepared for losing. But the loss from what a judge says or a court does has absolutely nothing to do with the benefit that we all get from the fight.
Right.
And the education. Now let's talk about, you know, what's motivated you to take this position.
You know, do you really think there's a terrorist threat that would justify these constitutional violations or, you know, what is it that you think is really going on?
I have to ask myself when I hear all this talk about terror threat and terrorist attacks, you know, who is the fear monger?
Who is the one who's trying to terrify the American people? Is it, you know, the who they say it is or is it a government who's trying to scare us into giving up our rights at the airport,
at the border patrol checkpoint, behind the pulpit of a church, wherever it is that they're infringing upon our rights.
They're trying to use fear to say, hey, obey or this is what's going to happen if you don't obey.
To what end? Why do they want us to obey? Why are they corralling us?
Because I think that there's something wicked in the heart of man throughout human history that just a government wants to oppress.
I mean, look at history. Look at the nations of this world. Look at the kingdoms of this world.
How many of them have truly enjoyed freedom over the past six thousand years? Think that through.
I mean, throughout history, governments are oppressive because there's, you know, a wicked tyrant or a group of wicked people get in power that just want the control.
They just want to oppress and dominate. Look at the countries in this world.
Look at Red China. Look at the countries in Africa. Look at the dictatorships.
The question is why? And I say that the answer is power.
There's another power that we have, and it's the power of the individual.
It's the power of us acting in our own self-interest, and it's the power of our faith in something that expects us to do better.
Pastor Anderson has been a good example for all of us. We'll keep following this story.
And I wanted to give you a little bit of the background of the type of a person that would take on the man because he answers to the real man.
We'll see you next time on Freedom's Phoenix real soon.