(CNN) — As season 5 of “Duck Dynasty” wraps up, co-star Willie Robertson is not backing down from either his faith or the controversy those beliefs helped stir.
His father, Phil Robertson, was suspended from the family’s hit A&E reality show in December amid the uproar over remarks he made about race and sexuality in a GQ magazine interview.
Willie Robertson and his wife, Korie, spoke to CNN’s Kyra Phillips in an interview that aired Wednesday on “New Day.”
“(Phil) made Christmas very interesting for us,” the younger Robertson joked.
Robertson said he believed the GQ interviewer already “had what he wanted to put, and he was specifically asking this and that.”
“Phil just said what he thought, what was on his heart,” his son said. “He did some paraphrasing there.”
The “Duck Dynasty” patriarch paraphrased a verse from Corinthians and said, “Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers — they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.”
The younger Robertson told CNN, “I believe what the Bible says.
“You have to read the Bible and make up your own mind,” he said. “You have to decide, and God will ultimately decide then. We don’t profess to be God, and we certainly don’t profess to be perfect. Because we have our own sins that we deal with.”
“Anybody who knows (Phil) … any gay, straight, black, white, anybody who knows Phil knows that he is about love and his message is about God’s love, God’s grace and his forgiveness, ultimately,” Korie Robertson added.
The couple appear in the new film “God’s Not Dead,” which, according to Entertainment Weekly, was a surprise hit with its recent opening weekend. It earned $8.6 million in only 780 theaters.
The Robertson family is halfway through filming season 6 of the show, which has brought in millions beyond the success of its duck call business.
But “Duck Dynasty” ratings have slipped since the controversy. And if it all ended tomorrow, both the fame and the TV show, the couple says, the family would be just fine.
“We were able to use that platform to get out God’s message, and if it ended right there, it ended right there,” Willie Robertson said. “I felt like that was pretty much what God prepared us to do.”
