50°
Enyart, 62, who lived in Prospect Park, attended St. Anthony grade school in Hawthorne and was graduated from Manchester Regional High School, was a polarizing figure over more than two decades on the air from his adopted Colorado.
Enyart's radio co-host, Fred Williams, called the Denver Bible Church pastor "one of the smartest and without question the wisest person I’ve known," a man who he said was "exceedingly kind and humble, and always, always willing to listen and discuss anything you wanted."
Others saw Enyart differently.
For one thing, he mocked people who died of AIDS, reading their obituaries on his show, calling them "sodomites," before playing Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust."
“Listen to the words of the song and you’ll understand why I did it,” he once said.
Enyart also maintained a macabre list of serial killers whom he claimed were gay -- among them, "many of those running Nazi Germany, including Hitler." He believed that male homosexuality -- and abortions, by the way -- should be treated as capital crimes.
"I was born this way. I am homophobic,” he once said. “For example, if I eat a big meal and then see one man glance romantically into another man’s eyes and then they kiss, I will lose my lunch. I will vomit. It grosses me out.”
Enyart also called himself “America’s most popular self-proclaimed right-wing, religious fanatic, homophobic, anti-choice talk show host.”
He made headlines last year by suing the state of Colorado -- and winning -- over its mask mandate on behalf of his parishioners.
“Because we human beings are made in God’s image and God’s likeness, we have not only a right but an obligation to worship Our Creator, and we should be able to do that without government interference,” Enyart said at the time, blasting what he called the “control-freak bureaucrats” and “mask nazis.”
Two weeks ago, he and his wife, Cheryl Enyart, reportedly tested positive for COVID-19. Neither had been vaccinated.
The Enyarts contended that the approved vaccines were all “tested… on the cells of aborted babies....so while it is not inherently sinful to take an immorally-developed vaccine, we urge everyone to boycott Pfizer, Moderna and the Johnson to further increase social tension and put pressure on the child killers.”
Enyart said he'd worked for McDonnell Douglas Helicopter Company designing simulation software for the Army’s Apache AH-64 attack helicopter and then as a computer analyst before pursuing Christian outreach full time.
While still in New Jersey, he led a Bible study group that called itself "Agape Kingdom."
Enyart had a criminal history, as well.
He was sentenced to five years in prison for beating Cheryl Enyart’s seven-year-old son in 1994 with a belt -- after which he married her, making the victim his stepson.
Enyart returned to prison in 2009 for trespassing while protesting the Christian conservative organization Focus on the Family for not being strongly-enough opposed to abortion.
Enyart became the fifth conservative radio host -- including Marc Bernier, Dick Farrel and Phil Valentine -- to die of COVID in the last month and a half. His show aired more than 6,000 radio and TV shows across 80 cities from Honolulu to Orlando, FL, according to Enyart's website.
Enyart had been Denver Bible Church’s pastor since 2000. He was also a spokesman for American Right to Life and organized what he said was the creation and display of the world's largest protest sign on the side of the Rocky Mountains during the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver.
He was nothing if not controversial -- dubbed "Denver's own Rush Limbaugh" by the Denver Post, the "Christian Cowboy" by Newsweek and an "evangelical Dirty Harry" by the London Times.
Enyart wore the sobriquets proudly.
"We were deplorable before deplorable was cool," he once said.
Click here to follow Daily Voice West Milford and receive free news updates.
