03/27/07 – Bill Barnwell – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
I'm joined on the phone by Bill Barnwell.
He's the pastor from Faith Missionary Church up there in Michigan, and is a regular contributor to LewRockwell.com.
He holds a Master of Ministry degree and a Master of Arts in Theological Studies.
Welcome to the show, Bill.
Hi, Scott.
It's great to make your acquaintance, and I really got a kick out of your article here about Pastor John Hagee, who of the War Party ministers, I suppose, is the one who's getting the most press nowadays.
And I'm really interested in this, I don't know how new it is, this millennialist movement, or I'm not sure what you call it, a certain brand of southern, born-again Christians who believe that their role is to form a voter bloc in the Republican Party to make sure that it stays at war for Israel.
Yeah, what we have right now is the popular End Times theology represented in the Left Behind books, and in books by people like Hal Lindsey, such as the Great Late Planet Earth, which was very popular in the 70s, and a lot of books by John Hagee, who I have addressed in a couple recent columns.
They subscribe to a particular eschatology, and eschatology is the study of the last things in the End Times in Christian belief, and their belief is in something called dispensational premillennialism.
And dispensationalism is kind of this arbitrary imposition upon the biblical text, saying that God has dealt with people through different times in history, but primarily that he has two peoples right now, God has two peoples.
The Christian church and the Jews, or today the nation of Israel, that he each has separate prophetic programs for each of these two groups of people, and that their view is that the nation of Israel figures very much into the return of Christ and the last things, and they see the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 as perhaps the key sign that we are ever impending moving towards the rapture and the great tribulation and all the rest.
The important thing to note is that prior to 1830, this theology was completely unheard of.
It is now the dominant eschatology, End Times belief, in about all of your fundamentalist Baptist churches, probably most of your conservative evangelical churches today that are not from the reformed branches of Christianity.
So it has gained a major foothold, but it's basically the flavor of the last century and a half.
It doesn't have historical roots.
Pre-millennialism, the belief in a literal millennium period after the return of Christ, that goes all the way back to the first three centuries of the church, but there was not this emphasis on dispensationalism in terms of a pre-tribulational rapture and the two peoples of God and trying to form the events of Armageddon and trying to read all sorts of current events into the Bible.
This is something that's relatively new and pretty damaging, I believe.
So as a Protestant minister, you believe in the eventual return of Christ as well, right?
Yes.
Just not that you need to force him to hurry up?
Well, I think it's completely irresponsible, and if you look throughout church history, just about every generation of Christians at some point has felt like history is all culminating towards them.
We've seen different levels of that throughout church history, but it's probably never as serious as we have since 1830, really since the 20th century.
I mean, you did have, towards the year 1000 AD, you had just millennial euphoria, and you had some real escalations of those kinds of beliefs, but it's been pretty bad right now.
And again, as far as the whole pre-tribulational rapture thing, when I first became a Christian, that was the only game in town as far as I was concerned.
That's what I believe, because that's all I was really presented with, and I think that's really at issue with plenty of conservative evangelicals, is that they feel that this is the only biblical option.
There's not another one that exists, and if you don't believe in this, well then you must be a liberal, you must not really believe all the Bible, you must be anti-Semitic, you must hate the troops, and all these other assumptions.
And yet, you say in your articles that this is the worst sort of cut and paste job on the Bible, that no one who reads the actual Bible would come up with this stuff on their own.
I don't think they would if they were to just open the Bible and start reading it on their own.
What you have is a systematic theology which is imposed right on the text.
So for a new Christian, or somebody who's been a Christian a long time, there's some key texts in various parts of the Bible that have been hacked up by various theologians and mainly popular teachers.
Dispensationalism has never been a scholastic movement, first and foremost.
It's always been lay driven, out on the popular level.
So you have these books and these charts, and you cut a little bit out of Ezekiel 38 and 39, 1 Thessalonians 4, the book of Revelation, Matthew 24, Mark 13, tie all these things together in a nice, neat system and present it to the masses, and it will somewhat make sense to people who haven't really read through everything in context.
But here's what people don't understand.
I get people that write me and insinuate that I'm not really believing in the Bible.
What they need to know is it's the Bible itself which convinced me against the dispensational, pre-tribulational view.
It's because I have such high respect for the Scriptures, and take them as seriously as I do, that I no longer believe that.
And I think if someone really does look at all the evidence, and really does weigh their presuppositions and pre-understandings against the Biblical text, I think that they will come out and have their views changed.
Okay, well, what exact sect of Christianity are you a member of?
I am a part of the missionary church, and we're a conservative denomination.
We have Wesleyan, Armenian, Holiness roots by our theology.
We owe a lot to John Wesley, who was a revivalist preacher in England and America a couple centuries back, and very much into the born-again experience, and very much into pursuing holiness.
And I think if you looked at even my denomination, probably the dispensational view would be the dominant one.
But there's more and more of us who are standing up and saying, wait a minute, this isn't all panning out here, let's take a look at some other things.
So the missionary church is, and please forgive me because I'm completely ignorant about this kind of stuff, but so you're somewhere near the Methodists and the Baptists and the Presbyterians, somewhere around there?
We would have common ground mostly with some of your conservative United Methodists, your Church of the Nazarene, the Wesleyan Church, those kind of denominations that come out of revivalism and Wesleyanism and Arminianism.
The Presbyterians and groups like that would come out of a more reformed heritage, and within your reformed churches, it's very rare to find dispensational premillennialism.
They much more are in amillennialism, which they would see that the millennium period is kind of a figurative period of time that we're in now or whatever, or in postmillennialism, seeing that the world isn't getting worse and worse, but Christians are going to have more and more of a better influence on society, and that things aren't so dark and bleak, and that eventually, then Christ would return after a period of time where Christians had a positive impact on the world, not just handing the world over to Satan and thinking the world is going to hell in a handbasket.
Yeah, well, and that really is kind of the script here from the Walmart education, I guess, that people are getting out here, the left behind and all that.
The European Union takes over the United Nations and creates a new world order, and Satan comes and rules, and correct me when I go off the story, because as I said, I really am somewhat ignorant about this kind of thing, but from what I understand, what's supposed to happen here is they're supposed to force Jesus to come back sooner, and Jesus is then going to kill all of the Jews and take all of the true believing Christians up to heaven, and that this alliance with Israel is actually quite cynical.
It's odd, and first let me say that dispensationalism, you know, their prophecy charts and beliefs are always changing with current events.
You know, at first it was, you know, the rapture is probably going to come by 1988, because that's 40 years or a biblical generation after the establishment of the modern state of Israel.
Well, that didn't pan out, and a lot of people then had to revise their figures.
You know, the Soviet Union was going to be the great evil empire that was going to attack the nation of Israel and, you know, usher in the rapture, or that event would take place after the rapture, and, you know, the common market or credit cards were going to be indications of the mark of the beast.
So they're always trying to read current events into the Bible, and that is a very difficult and precarious thing to get involved with, because it's so subjective, and almost every single time where people have engaged in this type of biblical interpretation, they come out to be wrong, and they're constantly having to revise things, yet their followers still follow them, and it's really unbelievable.
I read this thing in the Prospect about Hagee, the liberal journal, where they talked about, they quoted some grandiose conclusion, and then apparently he cited his evidence for the conclusion last, and the evidence was, it says here in the Bible that Jesus folded up his shawl and left it by the side of the door.
And that proves that, you know, he's going to come back on this day and he's going to do this and that, or else why would he have folded up his shawl and left it by the door?
Yeah, that's extremely subjective, and most people who would just, you know, read whatever passage he's referring to would not get that, most of them don't.
So, you know, they accuse their critics of playing fast and loose with the biblical text and being liberal with the biblical text, but yet they're pulling things out, which I don't think the original authors ever intended.
And you had asked, you know, previously about Christians' relationship to the Jewish people.
Yeah, there's this idea that, you know, they need to support Israel, you know, it's key, because God told Abraham, I'll bless those who bless you, and I'll curse those who curse you.
So then I, you know, and he was talking to Abraham, the Hebrew singular there, and the Jewish people, obviously, are descendants from Abraham.
So today they carry this over into, well, God is still fulfilling his promise to the Jewish people, and that's why they have this land, and they need all these land boundaries that God had promised in the Old Testament and did fulfill.
There's verses in the book of Joshua, and elsewhere, that God, you know, fulfilled all his promises of the land that he gave to the Jews.
Well anyway, they say today that this is still binding, and that if you today, as a Christian, don't support basically all the political, military, you know, objectives of the nation of Israel today, modern secular Israel, that you are an anti-Semite, that, you know, you are opposing God, and God will then oppose you.
And basically it's the idea that once the Christians are all raptured and are out of the way, well then all the forces of darkness are going to come upon the Jews in Israel.
And most of them believe that two-thirds of the Jews are going to perish.
And what's going to be an even worse Holocaust than what we saw in the late 30s and early 40s.
So it is very bizarre, and you really don't hear that talked about much in the pulpits, but that's basically what they believe, and they pull that from a verse of Zechariah, that plenty of other people believe that this Holocaust, which was talked about, was already fulfilled in 70 AD, when the Roman forces sieged Jerusalem and murdered untold hundreds of thousands of Jews in that first century.
But yet they want another one, they want another Holocaust.
And I think it's, is that really supporting the Jewish people?
We really have to ask ourselves.
Yeah.
Well, and also, they're not just allied with Israel, but with the right wing in Israel.
If I remember correctly, in the 1990s, when some of the more liberal forces in Israel were working for giving up the West Bank in order to have peace with the Palestinians, that the evangelical right wing in the United States was opposed, and put all their pressure in Congress to try to oppose land for peace in Israel.
Yeah, they won't budge.
They don't believe in compromise.
They think it's, basically their idea is that Israel can do no wrong, the Arabs can do no right.
Now, I am hardly an apologist for the Arab nations.
I think, in many respects, some of the Arab nations that are conflicting with Israel are very backwards, and I'm an Arab myself.
You know, I'm of Syrian descent, and I'm, you know, hardly proud of some of the things that I'm seeing among the Arab states.
But yet, we have to be sensible.
You know, when Israeli soldiers are running over kids throwing rocks at them at their tanks, we have to say that that's excessive.
When Palestinian suicide bombers, or other Arab suicide bombers or terrorists are engaging in terrorism, we need to say that that's morally abhorrent.
It's wrong.
And the evangelicals, the ones that come from the dispensational wing, are very good at calling out the Arabs for their excesses, but they don't want to call out the Israelis because they think that they would be opposing God, and they hearken back to Genesis chapter 12.
That if I speak out against what I might think are Israeli excesses, well then I'm anti-Semitic, I don't love God's chosen people, and God's gonna, you know, rain down judgment on me.
Yeah.
Well, and again, they're the ones who are trying to set up the Jews for another Holocaust.
If, and this was something that I think Matt Bargaineer blogged about this on the antiwar.com blog.
Here's this guy Hagee at AIPAC, supposedly, you know, the Israel lobby's closest ally in America, who is trying to set them up to all be killed, and yet if the antiwar.com crowd says, hey, why don't you give up the West Bank and Gaza and try to be friends with your neighbors and coexist in peace?
Well, then we're the anti-Semitic crazies.
Most Christians don't realize the logical implications of this viewpoint of what's going to happen to the Jewish people after the supposed rapture of the church, of the Christians.
You know, a lot of them haven't put two and two together, or it's not really preached so much from the pulpit.
But I think the people, and I believe Hagee and those like him, I think they sincerely do believe that they have, you know, that they're doing God's will and they have the Jewish people's best interest in their hearts.
I think it's up for other Christians who maybe haven't made up their mind on this or are a little open-minded to take a look, first of all, take a look at the biblical evidence to see, does the Bible actually teach this?
And secondly, you know, does the dispensational crowd really have the best theology and really have the best interest of the Jewish people going on?
Right.
And now, I guess with everything else, we can just leave aside the fact that people's opinions shouldn't necessarily translate into the policy of the United States government, but that's the same way with everything, so I guess we can just leave that aside.
Well, I think it is important to say this, that look, you have some very good and sincere Christians that are dispensational, pre-trib people, but you have plenty of them, a lot of them that are not.
You know, there's many evangelicals who think just like I do, and most of our best biblical scholars from the conservative wing are not dispensationalists.
And given the fact that there's so much contention on these issues, and we're dealing with future events which have not transpired, and it's very debatable whether some of them are not going to transpire, why would we want to make something that's so contentious, try to translate that into our foreign policy?
It makes absolutely no sense.
Right, well, it's because for the people who've already chosen a side, they know they're right, and everybody else is wrong, and it's as simple as that, that's why.
And you know, I'm reminded on the Israel question again here, Jim Loeb, an expert on the neoconservatives, a man who's been writing about the neoconservatives for 30 years or something, he once told me about a conversation, I forget who was on the other side of it, but on one side was Irving Kristol.
And someone asked Irving Kristol whether it was a good idea for the Israel lobby to buy Jerry Falwell an airplane and spend a bunch of money on him so that he could travel around America preaching his right-wing message that, again, ultimately calls for all the Jews to be destroyed.
And his answer was, well, it's their theology, it's our Israel.
And I think from the point of view of someone who's partially Jewish and would very much like to see the people in Israel not all die, that's quite a gamble you're taking when you're talking about, you know, I don't think George Bush really believes in this religion, but this is a group of people in America who have more and more political power, and okay, it's just their theology, but it's their theology that calls for a nuclear war with Russia.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, again, they're trying to take very questionable theology, very debatable that, again, your best biblical scholars do not agree with, but yet it's very popular on the popular level, and they're trying to translate that into foreign policy.
You know, if we're so unsure of something, we definitely don't want to translate into things that could result in mass casualties and death.
That's number one.
Number two, I think the position of many folks in the Jewish community is they feel, and very much rightly so, that they are under a lot of irrational anti-Semitism, and they do have a lot of enemies, you know, around the world, and they're going to take their support wherever they can get it, even if it's from, you know, a group of people that might be very theologically distinct from them, but as long as, you know, they don't believe that all these things are going to happen to them in the future, so they figure, well, we might as well accept evangelicals' financial and emotional, you know, support.
But again, you know, giving the logical outcome of what those belief structures are, and you know, I wonder, how many evangelicals, if it was not for this very questionable, debatable theology, really would care about the Jewish people?
Would they care about them, you know, even if these supposed mandates weren't there?
Hopefully they would love their fellow man no matter what.
But right now what we have is that, again, the Jews can do no wrong, but the Arabs are, you know, the big bad guys and must be opposed at all costs.
When you've had so many Christian Arabs who have been driven from the Holy Land in recent decades, and it's almost, it pretty much is, American evangelicals care more about modern secular Israel than they do about their Christian brethren in these Arab lands.
And again, this is no defense and apology, you know, for Arab policies and the prevailing Arab anti-Semitism in the Middle East.
I'm not saying that, but there needs to be more balance within the evangelical community on Israeli-Arab relations.
Yeah, well, and I think the simple answer to your question is no, they wouldn't care about Israel at all if it wasn't for this theology, because Israel's a foreign country and foreigners might as well be cartoon characters to Americans.
They're not people at all.
And well, and just as you say, look at the war in Lebanon last summer where Israel's bombing Christians in Lebanon and not a peep from Christian communities in the United States about that.
You hardly heard a word, and that was something I had blogged about at the time.
And this whole situation was very unfortunate.
You had all kinds of, again, needless death and bloodshed on both sides.
But, you know, you had church signs that were putting things out there saying, go Israel, and again, because they thought, you know, people, whenever you have a flare-up in the Middle East, everyone gets real excited and thinks, oh, this could be it, Christ is coming, you know, the end of the world, we're about to get whisked up and, you know, we're not going to be in this world anymore.
And that's like the big focus amongst dispensationalists.
It wasn't about, you know, what's happening to Arab Christians.
You hardly heard anything.
It was very sad.
You maybe had a couple little pieces in Christianity today, but mostly the focus was on how does this relate to Bible prophecy and, you know, we need to support Israel.
And, you know, I'm hardly a cheerleader for Lebanon and Hezbollah, but, you know, there's a lot of forgotten people who are lost in the shuffle when we have these discussions.
Sure.
Yeah, and really, you know, there's no such thing as Lebanon.
It's just a border around individuals.
You know, some of whom believe this, some of whom believe that, some of them are guilty of a crime or are members of Hezbollah, and some of whom are not.
But now, I want to go back to a bit of, you know, what this guy Hagee is actually preaching here.
Did I get it right when I said that he's predicting or perhaps promoting a nuclear war with Russia?
He believes, based on Ezekiel chapter 38 and 39, that Russia is going to form an alliance with certain Islamic nations and that they're going to try to invade Israel and that it's going to result in some kind of nuclear conflagration of some sort.
And this event will either take place immediately before, sometime after the rapture or in the Great Tribulation, depending on what prophecy chart you're reading.
But yeah, in Hagee's book, Jerusalem Countdown, he's, you know, very much grasping on these current events.
And when he talks about Iran, you know, the Iranian Prime Minister, he's now the new Hitler.
And that's whenever we have a bad guy on the national scene, you know, we always got to compare him to Hitler and it's always going to be, you know, just like World War II, and we're going to be like Neville Chamberlain unless we get in and stop it.
And it's, you know, it's up to America, you know, to defend the nation of Israel and stop Iranian aggression.
And they can say that, but basically their whole theology has it all worked out that the world is just going to get worse and worse and there's nothing we can do about all these, you know, nuclear wars and catastrophes that are about to come upon us.
Right, well, and I think you said in your article that war is good because it shows that we're on the path toward God dropping us our golden rope to get out of here and world peace is bad because that's the sign of the Antichrist.
Exactly, and again, they get this from one verse, Daniel 9.27.
And if I had time, I would explain all these different passages that they use.
But if you go into Daniel chapter 9.24-27, we have events that are basically being fulfilled historically.
Then in between verses 26 and 27, they have to insert a massive 2,000 plus year gap and they futurize this one verse, verse 27, and based on that they say that this is a picture of the Antichrist who's going to come and make a covenant with the modern nation of Israel and break it after three and a half years.
And then they copy and paste this with a verse from 2 Thessalonians about the man of lawlessness exalting himself now in a rebuilt Jewish temple.
So we've got to knock down the Al-Aqsa Mosque that's currently standing right now and rebuild the Jewish temple, which that alone would cause a regional, if not world war, and is very theologically questionable.
But yeah, we can't do anything for peace, because they claim that people will be calling for peace, but they're just false prophets.
They're just spirits of the Antichrist.
And I have people say to me, it's not our job as Christians to try to make this world a better place.
All we should be about is saving souls, and then Jesus will take care of the rest, and the world is going to progressively deteriorate, and there's nothing we can do about it.
And the Antichrist is going to be the man of peace.
So when we start talking about peace, that's not Jesus speaking in relation to current events, it's the Antichrist.
Wonderful.
So no point in good works, huh?
Apparently not, which is ironic because so many dispensationalists are so caught up in the conservative political movement.
Yeah, trying to force their way on everyone in this society through the law.
Yeah, you know, so why put these efforts in if ultimately they're all going to fail?
Well, maybe they recognize that those are not good works.
I think they haven't realized how bipolar their theology is with their practice.
Yeah, it really doesn't make much sense.
We might as well just all sit back, remove ourselves, and wait for the rapture, which is what plenty are actually doing.
Now, how much influence do these people have as a voting bloc inside the Republican Party, inside the U.S. Congress?
Well, you know, definitely within church, within your conservative evangelical, or with your conservative catholics, whatever, you know, the majority of them would probably be voting Republican, mainly because of a couple issues.
The abortion issue, the homosexuality issue, and more and more now, the issue of the military.
You know, they see the Democrats as weak on defense, you know, they're not hawkish enough, even though the Democrats are always trying to prove how hawkish they really are and how they can, you know, hang with the Republicans.
But unfortunately, the Democrats have chased away a lot of evangelical voters who might otherwise be more receptive to their message because the Democratic Party is becoming more and more secular, and certain sectors of it are becoming more and more hostile to people of faith.
So, in evangelicals' defense, they feel like they have really no other place to go.
A lot of them aren't completely happy with the Republican Party, but they feel like, you know, this is the party that's friendly to us.
Bush, he's a Christian, he's one of our guys, we can trust him.
You know, when he says he prays, he talked to the Lord about going to war with Iraq, well then, you know, that's something we need to take seriously.
So, yeah, most of your conservative Christians are probably voting.
A Republican, I've seen different polls suggest, anywhere from 65 to 90%.
And the megachurch pastors like Hagee, and what's so dangerous about Hagee is that he does have political connections, and he is very proud of this fact.
You know, he has, or he claims to have friends in Congress and friends in high places, and it's not like John Hagee himself is going to order an attack on Iran, but him and folks like him have a large sway over, you know, the people in their churches, thousands of people, and in their political activism efforts.
Right, they're very organized.
Very organized, and what concerns me the most is, in issues of war and peace, they're so hawkish on issues of foreign policy, and I think a large part of that is because whenever they hear of things going on in the Middle East, again, they think this is prophetic.
And we need to be part of God's army, a literal army with tanks, bombs, and guns.
And we're going to be Christ's righteous warriors, and stand up for justice, and so on and so forth.
So that's where it becomes very troublesome.
Well, and you know, there's a whole other part of the right that doesn't believe in any of this stuff, and yet still is so pro-war.
Why do you think that conservatives, the ones who are not believers in this millennialist stuff, are still so ardently pro-war?
Well, Scott, I think one of the key things is, is because both religiously and politically, they feel that the only, quote, conservative option is to be more hawkish.
That somehow, if you're less of an interventionist, that you're bordering on liberalism, and that you don't support the troops, and that, you know, you're not part of God's army.
So they link these theological and political concepts to think that the only real conservative option is to be more hawkish.
So therefore, if you didn't support the war on Iraq for religious reasons, well then you must be a liberal evangelical or a liberal Catholic.
Or, you know, if you used traditional conservative political arguments, or libertarian political arguments, well then you're just a liberal, you know, a wolf in sheep's clothing.
And one of the things that conservatives are most afraid of is being called or being considered a liberal.
Yeah, it's just like what happened over at Reason magazine, I think, and the run-up to the war was because they are the so-called left libertarians.
They wanted to prove that they're not liberals, and so they moved all the way to the neo-conservative right when it comes to wage and war.
Yeah, but I always have to preface these discussions, you know, when I'm talking to other Christians, and, you know, first prove my conservative credentials, that I've been, you know, a reliable ally on, you know, the issues that we care about, but I'm trying to show them that both politically and theologically, that, you know, the Christ-like position and the more practical foreign policy position is not one of interventionism, is not one of, you know, the quote, the war party, but is one of restraint and one that is practical and one that's realistic.
Right, one that, and I always refer back to this, it sounds so naive and silly, but when I was a little kid, I imagined that the United States of America would last for another 500 years or something.
We'd have this limited constitutional republic and our Bill of Rights, and we'd be at peace, and in the 21st century, we'd all have flying cars and things would be great.
Well, we're not going to have that bright future if we continue, you know, to mortgage off our children and our grandchildren's future with spending ever more money on countless foreign wars and putting ourselves in these dangerous predicaments that are not in our nation's best interest, and I'll believe in our Christian's best interest, and I think it's time that we go back to the words of a wise man by the name of George Washington and follow his foreign policy and what he envisioned for America, rather than what some of our more bellicose, militant preachers and politicians envisioned.
Well, you know, Chris Hedges is, he's also, you know, has a master's degree from Divinity School, and I know he considers himself a liberal and not a conservative as you do, but he writes about this same movement and calls them Christofascists and says that it's not just foreign policy, it's an entire make-believe worldview.
In fact, I think his latest article for Truthdig is Where Lies Become True or something like that about, and he actually begins with a quote from Hannah Arendt about what it means to live in a totalitarian society.
The first order of business of the totalitarian rulers is to replace empiricism and observation and argument and debate and, you know, free speech and realism with a narrative, a narrative that is just beat into your head, that has to be true, that no one around here disagrees with, and so neither do you, and by golly, the earth is 6,000 years old, and we have to have a nuclear war with Russia for Israel and the rest of it, and that you're just supposed to buy it as a whole package, and the way Chris Hedges writes it, millions of people do.
It's this alternative world where you really couldn't get more honest than, I don't know, Sean Hannity explaining what's happening in the world.
Well, I think what concerns me is there is very much a, I don't know, in some circles a bloodlust or this very big focus on control and power within certain sectors of what we call the Christian right, and in fairness, I think a lot of these folks think they're doing the right thing and they're otherwise good people and responsible citizens, but their view of how we should formulate public policy a bit troubles me.
Now as a conservative with strong libertarian tendencies, I read the same Bible as them, and I believe that libertarianism and Christianity can be very compatible, or that even traditional conservatism and Christianity can be very compatible.
In fact, the neo-conservative view of foreign policy only spans back the past 50 years, and traditional conservatives were very much non-interventionists.
Traditional conservatives and traditional libertarians of faith do not believe forcing their conscience by brute force on the populace, but by demonstrating the character and spirit of Christ, and trying to love your fellow man as yourself and so on and so forth, that more and more people will voluntarily want to know more about Jesus Christ and come to the Christian faith.
And I find something like that much more productive than what we have today, with a lot of Christian rightists wanting to impose their view of the world by military force or by legislation here in the United States.
I think what Hedges is getting at here too, and again, I don't know how well you think Christianity conforms with Chris Hedges' style of liberalism, I think if we take liberalism minus all the socialism, but just from a kind of cultural point of view, somebody like Chris Hedges embraces the theory of evolution.
He very much believes in Jesus.
I know he takes his faith very seriously, but he believes in science, he's in favor of art, he doesn't want the government in your bedroom, he's a typical cultural libertarian, so to speak, in that sense.
And what he's talking about is this view, this make-believe view of the world.
Well, for example, a view of the world that would allow someone to think that the war in Iraq is hunky-dory in 2007, which 30% of the American population still does.
And I guess I wonder what I was trying to get at there was whether you agree with him that parts of this religious view that we're discussing here basically amount to just make-believe.
I don't know where to draw the line between John Hagee and the Branch Davidians.
Well, I think one of the big problems here is that evangelicals on a whole, perhaps they're not the most critical thinkers, but neither is the general public on a whole.
And evangelicals themselves don't know their own Bible that well.
There's a large problem of biblical illiteracy, and that perhaps if people truly did understand more the Bible and its ethical implications, we wouldn't see this frothing for war and what have you.
Some people say there's no difference between someone like John Hagee and a quote-unquote moderate Christian or what have you.
I think those charges are unfair, and you can have good Christians that can disagree on some of these more doctrinal or public policy issues.
Somebody who is an orthodox Christian, a small o basically believing in the central tenets of the faith, there are some key issues that unite biblical Christians together.
And some of the things you mentioned I wouldn't necessarily include in that, necessary to be a quote-Christian in good standing.
But I think really the problem is just a cultural problem, where our public intelligence has become dumbed down and is now filtered into our churches, and that's quite unfortunate.
Well, I think the more religious leaders speak out against this American Taliban kind of view of the way things ought to be, particularly conservative religious people like yourself, I know libertarian politically, but culturally conservative people like yourself, the more of you we have speaking out against these American Taliban types, the better, for sure.
Well, we need almost a second reformation when it comes to the issue of eschatology.
I think it would be great if more of our churches just said, let's talk about this issue.
We know that this is not a black and white thing, despite what the Hagee and Falwells would have us say, let's think about this, let's talk about this at least, let's have a discussion.
I think that would go a long way.
If we saw a change in this end times theology and some of the implications, I think it would affect the way Christians think and believe and their worldview.
It would help some of them become more productive, responsible citizens, and have a bit of a more productive foreign policy.
It just really troubles me again that when it came to the Iraq war, so many Christians were not thinking about the actual geopolitical arguments.
It all had to do with these cartoonish ideas that we're good, the rest of the world is bad almost, and we have to make everything right, and that also this has something to do with Bible prophecy.
Even though there's no evidence for that, this has something to do with Bible prophecy and we should all get excited about it.
I'm calling on Christians themselves, my conservative brethren, to open up the Bible.
If you go to my blog at www.billbarnwell.blogspot.com, I've written extensively about leaving behind the doctrine of the pre-tribulational rapture, and about some of the key verses that dispensationalists use to justify their biblical beliefs.
I've written extensively on lewrockwell.com and many other publications about these issues on foreign policy and cultural living and how I as a Christian formulate my decisions and my beliefs.
So I think if Christians had these discussions more, it would be very beneficial.
Absolutely.
Well, I sure appreciate your time today.
Everybody, Bill Barnwell, he's a minister at Faith Missionary Church in, I'm sorry, what town again in Michigan?
I'm in suburban Flint, Michigan.
In suburban Flint, Michigan.
That's cool.
That's where my cousins are from.
Great.
And he is a regular contributor to lewrockwell.com and you can again read his blog at billbarnwell.blogspot.com.
Thanks so much for your time today, Bill.
Thank you, Scott.