A recent article written by Chris Moody and posted on Yahoo News details some of the efforts by GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul to convince evangelicals that his libertarian views are consistent with those held by Christian conservatives. For Christians across the country, this is a moment of truth. The article mentioned states that in stark contrast to how he campaigned four years ago, Paul has made a concerted push during his presidential campaign to emphasize how religion has shaped his policy ideas, and that Ron Paul has brought several Christian conservatives into his campaign in an ambitious effort to reach believers for his cause. Some of these staff members have been specifically tasked with organizing church outreach programs and meeting with pastors and congregations in a concerted effort to try to persuade them that his views are in keeping with the teachings of the Bible. Many evangelicals remain suspicious, noting that Paul seems to be committed to individual and state rights rather than the rights endowed by the Creator. They are also uncomfortable with his earnest defense of drug and prostitution legalization. Despite the evangelical skepticism about Ron Paul, David Lane, an evangelical political activist who organizes policy briefings with pastors across the country, recently allowed Paul to address a group of pastors in Des Moines, Iowa. But Paul's presentation received mixed reviews. Many pastors remain unconvinced of the connection between Paul's libertarian views and the Bible. I recently attended one of those policy briefings held right here in Greenville, South Carolina, and I spoke with historian David Barton. Barton plays a leading role in those briefings, and I asked him about the difference between libertarianism and Christian conservatism. uh... on another candidate uh... ron paul has gotten some uh... has some appeal within the evangelical community on a broad basis a couple of things his limited government speaking of limited government and his uh... focus on financial aspects on cutting spending but other christians say uh... many seems uh... reckless in this and when you get into the details it you know could lead to anarchy uh... seems that everybody doing that which is right in their own eyes supposedly wants to legalize uh... uh... drug use and and uh... home or i'm sorry a prostitution these types of things What is, I haven't really heard somebody really speak about a definition between true conservative Christianity from a political perspective versus libertarianism. So would you take a moment to just speak to the listening audience, what is the difference between those two things? There's some appeal in libertarianism to Christians, as you acknowledge, and a lot of it is over limited government. Instead of the government running your life, you get to run your life and the government exists for And that's a biblical approach in many ways. Now, I'm going to qualify that. I'm going to say there are some aspects of libertarianism that are biblical. One example, let me just read a passage out of 1 Timothy. In 1 Timothy chapter 1, verses 8 through 10, this is what the scripture says. It says, we know the law is good if it's used as it should be used. And first point is, you know, law is a good thing when it's used right. And here's the right way to use it. It says, it must be remembered, of course, that laws are made not for good people, but for lawbreakers and criminals. And that's a libertarian appeal. Because the government right now is making laws to regulate the good guys, not the bad guys. And so, quite frankly, when you look at where we are with laws today, if you go to the U.S. Federal Code annotated at any county law library, if you will commit to read 700 pages a week of the U.S. Federal Code, you can finish the entire Federal Code in only 25,000 years. Now, that's just a few too many laws. So God governed the world with 10 commandments, you know, and federal government's got how many millions of commandments. So that's why the appeal to libertarianism, because it's a biblical thing. So going back to the scriptures, it said, it must be remembered, of course, that laws are made not for good people, but for lawbreakers and criminals, for murderers, for the immoral, for sexual perverts, for prostitutes, for homosexuals, for slave traders, for kidnappers, for perjurers, or for those who do anything contrary to sound teaching. Now, that's the purpose of law, and that is what the Founding Fathers called the Common Law. That's what you find in the Seventh Amendment of the Constitution. The Common Law, they said Christianity is part of the Common Law, and the Common Law is what defines rights and wrongs. Arson, murder, burglary, robbery, theft, man-stealing or kidnapping, all of that, that's what government's supposed to regulate. They're not supposed to regulate day-to-day concerns of our life. They're not supposed to regulate what goes on inside our house, inside our property, unless it causes injury to others. So one of the best articulations of limited government was actually done by Thomas Jefferson in his first inaugural address. He says there's five points of limited government. Number one, you have to start with acknowledging and adoring God. Now, Jefferson says the number one point of government is to acknowledge and adore God. He said the number two point is to be wise and frugal. And then he went to the number three point, it's supposed to restrain the infliction of injury. We don't regulate you, we just keep you from hurting somebody else. And he goes through these points. The fourth was to encourage entrepreneurship and free enterprise. And the fifth was to protect private property. Now, that's a libertarian type of approach. The difference with libertarians is they think the government should be hands-off in every area, including moral areas. That's where you cannot, as the biblical Christians say, no, no, no. drew moral lines. That's what the common law is all about. So this is where that libertarianism has an appeal because of limited government, but Christians have to remember that for libertarians, they want government to have hands off even on moral issues. And you can't do that as a Christian. God has established a moral law. Way back in the Reformation, Calvin and his institutes wrote about the different types of law. There's a ceremonial law. That's the way we become righteous. That went out with the Old Testament, New Testament. That's gone. But there is also what's called the moral law. That's where God establishes something is right or wrong, and until He says it's otherwise, it stays right or wrong. And by the way, I have Christians a lot of time that say, hey, you know, you quote so many things from the Old Testament. We're New Testament people. And I say, well, that's true. Do you think that arson is wrong? Oh, yeah. Do you think that having sex with animals is wrong? Oh, yeah. Do you think that killing infants after they're born? Oh, yeah. I said, show me where that is in the New Testament. All that's Old Testament condemned because it's the moral law. The morals of God don't change. He tells you what's right and wrong. It stays that way across both testaments. What does change is what's called the judicial law. That's the third type of law. For example, adultery used to be caught in adultery, stoned. They bring the woman in adultery to Jesus. He condemned the adultery, but he didn't stone her. Now the moral law stood. It's still wrong. The penalty changes. I'm from Texas. We used to hang horse thieves. Today, it's still wrong to steal horses, but we don't hang anymore. So that's judicial law. It'll change across time. The fourth is social compact law. Social compact are laws that are not governed by what the scripture says, but they're things we decide to do. We create a speed limit. We say, we don't want you to double parking. We say, we want a sidewalk to be four feet wide. That's what we agree to in a community. We want a notary seal when you do a contract. Since the scripture doesn't say there's a problem, we're allowed to decide that. So that's the types of law you have. Now, what happens is libertarians say there's no moral law. We become our own morals. We decide what's right and wrong. From a constitutional standpoint, that's also a problem. When you read the first 155 words of the Declaration, they set forth six principles of government. The first principle is there is a creator. Second principle is the creator gives us rights. Third principle is government exists to protect those rights. So you take those first three and you say, all right, what are the rights he gave us? The Founding Fathers and Declaration said, among others, are life and liberty and property. Then they came back in the Bill of Rights and said, let us give you some others. The rights of conscience, the right of self-defense, the right to sanctity of the home, the right to due process. All these were other God-given inalienable rights. What happens is libertarians say, well, abortion's your own choice. No. If there's a creator who gives a right to life, the purpose of government is to protect the rights that he gave you. So that's where Ron Paul and others miss it is, well, it needs to be a state-by-state decision. No, it doesn't. Under the Declaration and the Constitution, That's a God-given right to life. And by the way, the Founding Fathers wrote explicitly about abortion. We think this is a Roe v. Wade. It's not. Jefferson passed pro-life laws in Virginia back in the 1770s. In Pennsylvania, James Wilson, Supreme Court Justice, signed our Constitution pro-life laws. I mean, all these guys dealt with this. So what happens is they say the right to be born is a right that comes from God, not from government. Government has to protect that right. So for someone to say, oh, marriage, that's a state issue. No, it's not. That's a God-given moral issue. That's where Christians cannot be libertarian. You can't say that morals is up to you, and we decide individually what we want, and it needs to be done state by state. Now, what can be done state by state is what we want to do with health care or something else, because that's not a moral mandate from the Bible. But when it comes to things like life or property or rights of conscience or anything else, The government has to protect that 100% of the time, and whether you're a libertarian or not, that's the right view. Ron Paul's been running ads in South Carolina talking about his pro-life views. Is that being inconsistent, and would a libertarian view generally tend to, towards something like we see in the book of Judges, everybody doing that which is right in their own eyes? And could it possibly lead to something even worse than we have now, an intrusive government, overbearing government? Could anarchy actually come out of something like this, which I think would be even worse? Well, there's a couple things there. Ron Paul is personally pro-life. There's no question about it. But he's not pro-life when it comes to the role of the federal government as protecting life. He wants that to be left state by state. So if California says, we don't want to protect life, he says, that's great. My reading of the Constitution and the Founding Fathers is if I take an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States, I've taken an oath to uphold every inalienable right that's out there. That's the role of government. And I mean, that's in the Declaration. To secure these rights, governments are entooted among men. So if it's a moral mandate from God, I will secure it. I'm going to make sure you don't get murdered. You know, I'm going to make sure government doesn't take your property through eminent domain. That's what Ahab and Jezebel did with Naboth. It was eminent domain. That's wrong. The government's got to stop that, whether it's at a state level or whether it's at a federal level, because you have a right to property. I'm going to protect your right to defend yourself, the right to keep and bear arms, whether it's a state or federal. Well, it's the same thing with life. It's the same thing with marriage. Now, there's a ton of – and this is where I think Rick Perry has the right view of the Tenth Amendment. If it's not specifically one of those inalienable rights, it belongs to the – well, as he says, not one of the inalienable rights or one of the 18 enumerated powers in Article 1 of the Constitution, then the states get to do everything else. And he's exactly right. Energy, agriculture, everything else belong to the states. They're neither inalienable rights, nor are they specifically enumerated in Article 1 of the Constitution. So while Ron Paul, and I know him well, and I've worked with him for years, he is personally pro-life, but he's not willing to protect those inalienable rights across the nation, and that's a difficulty for me personally. So, when I see that kind of stuff, that's something that does have an impact on how I think as a Christian and as a Constitutionalist. And, you know, Paul is right on the Constitution related to the Federal Reserve and so many other things. He's right on those issues. But in my opinion, he is wrong on the moral issues because you cannot be morally abstract in the government. That's why the Founding Fathers, the very first federal law they ever passed, called the Northwest Ordinance, says religion, morality, and knowledge be necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind. You cannot divorce morality from government and have good government. If you do, you get, as you mentioned in two passages in the Book of Judges, Acts 17 and Acts 21, where everyone did that which was right in their own eyes. You can no longer even secure the right to protect others if I get to decide what my own rights and wrongs are. I'll intrude in your rights. There's no definition except what I myself define. That's called post-structuralism. That's where we are and have been in America since the 60s. Everybody defines their own moral view. That's why marriage is anything you want it to be, any combination. That's why sexual relations, as long as the Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas said if it's consensual, it's constitutional. Really? If it's consensual, if I agree, if a 12-year-old agrees to have sex with a 45-year-old, it's consensual, they both agree, that's where the Supreme Court went. You cannot do that. You have to have a moral base. And that's the problem with the libertarians, is they will not recognize a common morality. And that's what the nation was built on, and that's where, again, Libertarianism has a lot of appeal for Christians because of the limited government side. I'm a limited government libertarian because I'm a constitutionalist, but I'm not a moral libertarian, and again, because I'm a constitutionalist. The Constitution and the common law of the Seventh Amendment establishes Christianity as the basis of those rights and wrongs, and I can't get away from that. Well, David, thank you very much for making that distinction. That was very helpful here this morning, and thank you for taking time out to visit with us. We really appreciate it. My pleasure, Kevin. Thanks for having me, bro. It was David Burton from Wall Builders. Again, their website is www.wallbuilders.com. We'll put that on our website. You can go out there and check it out. Thanks for being with us today. You've been listening to A Moment of Truth with Pastor Kevin Bowling. A Moment of Truth is a cultural commentary provided by the Knowing the Truth radio program. For more information, check us out on the web at www.knowingthetruth.org.