At Trump rally, pastor calls for Bernie Sanders to ‘meet Jesus’

At a Monday rally for Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump, a North Carolina pastor called on the lone Jewish candidate in the primaries to “get saved” and “meet Jesus.”

Pastor Mark Burns was speaking to rally-goers while waiting for Trump to arrive at the event in Hickory, North Carolina. Trump was running late after landing outside the city due to fog, and Burns used the time to praise “our great leader” and rail against his critics and opponents, especially Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders.

After calling for Clinton to “go to jail,” he turned to Sanders, the Jewish, independent, self-described “socialist” senator from Vermont.

“Bernie Sanders who doesn’t believe in God, how in the world we gonna let Bernie — I mean, really?” Burns began.

“Listen, Bernie gotta get saved. He gotta meet Jesus. He gotta have a comin’ to Jesus meeting.”

Burns also criticized Sanders’s economic proposals. “Well, we’re not a socialist country. We’re a democratic country. And we believe in small business and we believe in small government. And we believe in big states and local rights.”

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The comments soon drew criticism.

“It is profoundly un-American to use a campaign platform to denigrate and demean the faith of a candidate for president, it is unbecoming of a member of the clergy to do so when these rallies have increasingly resulted in violence toward religious and racial minorities,” Rabbi Jack Moline, head of the Washington-based Interfaith Alliance and a former director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, said in a statement.

“Like almost no other campaign in recent memory, this election cycle has demonstrated just how easily rhetoric that abuses Americans of all kinds can turn into incitement and violence,” Moline added.