January 4, 2021 Show with Norman Horn, Doug Stuart, Kerry Baldwin, & Dick Clark on “Faith Seeking Freedom: Libertarian Christian Answers to Tough Questions”

Live from the historic parsonage of the 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors,

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Chris Arnzin. Good afternoon,

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

This is Chris Arnzin, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Monday.

On this fourth day of January 2020, our first live broadcast of 2021,

I'm sorry, started off the new year by getting the wrong date, but this is

January 4th, 2021, and I hope I get used to saying that every day quickly.

Today we have what should be a fascinating interview. It's one of those interviews where I am not 100 % sure how much in agreement

I will be with my guests, but it is a subject that has intrigued me for quite some time.

That is the issue of Christian libertarianism or libertarian

Christianity, and we have four guests to discuss this issue today, and specifically we're going to be addressing a new book that these four individuals have contributed to.

The book is Faith Seeking Freedom, Libertarian Christian Answers to Tough Questions, and our guests today to discuss this will be

Doug Stewart, Kerry Baldwin, and Dick Clark, and we will be joined in just a bit,

God willing, by Norman Horne, and Norman Horne is the founder of the

Libertarian Christian Institute, which is the premier website exploring libertarian theory from a

Christian point of view, and the main organizer of the Christians for Liberty Conference.

But first, let me have each of my guests introduce themselves one by one.

Doug Stewart, if you could let us know what your position and role is at the

Libertarian Christian Institute. Hi Chris, thanks for having me on, having us all on.

And so I am the CEO at LCI, the Libertarian Christian Institute. My responsibility is to make sure we keep producing great content that helps

Christians be equipped with the message of liberty. We want Christians to be able to make the

Christian case for a free society, not just a libertarian case, although obviously it incorporates that a little bit.

And so that's my role, I've been in this role for about three years now, and so Norman and I are partners in crime and keeping the organization rolling fast and equipping the church.

Great. And we have returning as a guest on this program, Keri Baldwin.

And Keri, if you could let our listeners know what your role and position is at the

Libertarian Christian Institute. Hi Chris. Yeah, thanks. I'm one of the contributing writers for LCI, I'm sort of the token reformed libertarian there.

But yeah, that's my contribution is more articles. I have been very accustomed to being a token reformed person in many spheres of life, including where I worked for 15 years for a

Salem media affiliate, WMCA, which is now returned to the place of its birth,

New York City, where it started in the early 1900s. But I worked for them when they were in Rutherford, New Jersey, and Hasbrook Heights, New Jersey.

And I was the only reformed person on staff there for 15 years. And that's still,

I might have been the last reformed person there as far as I know. And Dick Clark, tell us about your role and your position there at the

Libertarian Christian Institute. Sure. Well, I was invited to join

Kerry and others as a staff contributor at LCI last year, in part because Norman and Doug and Kerry thought

I might be a good fit for this book project. I've known Norman for, oh, 15 years, we've sort of traveled in some of the same libertarian circles, but knew each other as fellow believers, and really have talked just about every other day, at least, for the past 15 years, so a good pre -existing relationship with Norman before I had the pleasure of coming on with LCI.

And then besides my work with LCI, I'm also an attorney practicing here in Nebraska, mostly in firearms law, in my private practice.

And then I also work with the Nebraska legislature, actually helping to write the laws here in the state of Nebraska.

Great. And if anybody wants to find out more about the

Libertarian Christian Institute, you can go to their website, and that website is libertarianchristians .com,

libertarianchristians .com. Doug, if you wouldn't mind giving us a working definition of Christian libertarianism and distinguish it, compare and contrast it with more mainstream libertarianism, because I think that there are extremely significant differences from what

I have heard from those that are Christian, and it is also a matter of great concern and apprehension and even fear when many

Christians hear libertarian, they automatically may think of those that have worn that title proudly, who are in favor of abortion, or as I prefer to phrase it, the murder of unborn children.

They have even, some libertarians have stood for the freedom of people to own and purchase and sell child pornography.

You could go on and on with things that horrify your average Christian and may cause them to immediately dismiss what you folks have to say who are

Christian libertarians before you even have a chance to say it. So if you could, Doug, let our listeners know what is a

Christian libertarian and compare and contrast it with the more mainstream form of it.

Yeah, I'd be happy to do that. I am alerted that Norman is on with us right now. Did you want him to introduce himself as well?

Oh, sure. Norman, thanks for joining us and tell us about your role and function there at the

Christian Libertarian Institute. Sure, Chris, and thank you for having us on your program once again.

I very much appreciate it. I presume you can hear me okay. Is that all right? Yeah, I hear you perfectly. Excellent.

Well, again, I'm just really appreciative to be on your program once again. We've known you for a couple of years now, and it's been really cool to see your show grow and then to see our folks like Kerry be on in the past, and it's very much a pleasure.

So as you mentioned earlier, yes, I was the founder and president of the

Libertarian Christian Institute. It was originally founded as libertarianchristian .com

back in 2008 in the wake of the Obama election during November and December of 2008, and it's just grown by leaps and bounds to such an extent that eventually we wanted to incorporate it as a nonprofit institution so that we could organize in a more cohesive way around the type of message that we wanted to promote, which is that Christians have every ability to understand the world in such a way that they can see that individual liberty matters and that it works within theological circles in a similar way that we would evaluate the natural law as well.

And so the convergence of this idea of natural law and theological thought is something that we would like to call

Christian libertarianism, but I know that there's so much more to talk about there, and so I want to throw it back to Doug here and have him address the question that you previously had once again.

Yeah, so if I can remember every bit of your question, the first thing that I thought of as you were asking was, well, just like with Christians who seem a little frustrated when people assume things about us that we don't actually believe, the

Christian libertarian or even just the libertarian or any human being that sort of picks a label or category for themselves to align with, there's a lot of misunderstanding that people tend to have about what that means.

So not all libertarians are in favor of abortion. Not all libertarians are in favor of what we would kind of commonly call libertinism, which is anything goes, it doesn't matter what your lifestyle is, it doesn't matter what your personal choices are or your biases or whatever, but the core of it is that libertarianism is all about the non -aggression principle.

It basically means that without being provoked, I can't initiate force against you.

And I think that's a perfectly Christian thing to say, and I also think that it's a perfectly loving thing to say to other human beings is that I can't force you to do something that I want or prefer that you do.

And unless you come at me or harm me, I'm ethically unable to come at you in that sort of way.

So for Christians, it's like abstaining from compulsion is a really great way to reflect

Christ's love in sort of a public policy kind of sense, like how do I approach, or when you ask the question or when

I think of the question, how do I think about my relationship to the broader world? Not telling them they have to do what

I think they should do is a really, really good start. And so there was probably more to your question that I'm blanking on.

If you want to follow up with that, that'd be fine. Well, perhaps, Norman, if you have anything to add to what

Doug has said as far as not only a definition of Christian libertarianism, but comparing and contrasting it with the more mainstream idea of it.

In fact, what has puzzled me personally is not long ago when a candidate for the

Libertarian Party was running for president, he was even in favor of what seemed to be leftist gun control policies, which made no sense to me.

So if you could give your own two cents in this before we move on.

Sure. Let me expand upon what Doug said and then answer this follow -on to that. I mentioned earlier this idea of natural law, that we can observe from creation in what might be called general revelation, from a theological point of view as well, certain principles about how we are to live, and that one of these things is simply that initiating violence against one another is wrong.

And that's where we come up with this idea of the non -aggression principle. We recognize that we have an inherent right to own ourselves relative to other human beings, and that it is inappropriate for us as fellow human beings to execute force against one another in order to get what we want.

That instead, the moral way of acting and treating each other humanely is to act voluntarily with one another.

Now, what Christians can recognize is that this is concordant with our theological principles about how

God created the earth that is revealed in the Bible. So in other words, we have a general revelation that tells us how to behave.

We have a special revelation that tells us how to behave as well. Now, this is not to exclude the fact that God may put other demands upon us as pertains to our behavior.

You know, that is certainly true, but that the baseline level of activity that we can observe directly from nature is evident to us.

And so that's why we would say, and I'll say it again, that libertarianism is concordant with general theological principles that we learn from the

Bible and through Christian history, through historical theology, if you will. And this is recognized in a variety of different ways throughout

Christian history. Obviously, it has not been known under the name of libertarianism per se, but we even recognize in the early

Church Fathers their abstention from violence, their reluctance to use physical force to try and get what they want, to realize things like voluntary action and charity are the ways that we can organize amongst each other and create a better world.

And so this is really, when we say Christian libertarianism, we're kind of trying to coalesce around all these ideas synthetically together and realizing that this is a good way of explaining it all together.

And it also becomes an interesting witness to the world out there. While there are so many libertarians out there who have recognized these general ethical principles, they may not necessarily be

Christian and realize that this is something that we value as well. So we can harmonize our own activities with other non -believers in a similar way.

This is a way that general society comes together and acts in order to create peaceful solutions to our problems.

This is a way that we see that as working together. So to distinguish this from other variants of libertarianism,

I think there's kind of two points there that are of note. On the one hand, there's kind of like a baseline or a plumb line libertarianism that we're upholding that is pretty much the same.

Most all libertarians kind of agree upon a general set of principles together.

But it's also notable that in a similar sense that there are subsets of different people in any type of political philosophy that have slightly different views upon one another.

That's, I guess, where the Christian part comes in, in that we have a particular bent towards seeing

Christian principles as being that concordant part of libertarian theory in a way.

And so that's kind of where we've come down on it. There are certainly people out there in libertarian circles who we do not agree with their certain standards of personal behavior.

But that's okay. We don't have to agree on everything. What we agree upon is the core.

What we agree upon is that we shouldn't be executing violence against one another in order to try and get what we want.

And if we can do that together, then that sets a baseline of values that we can interact, we can trade together, and we can exchange ideas together as well.

That becomes a perfect opportunity to even witness to them the goodness of the gospel. And I'll tell you the truth, that has actually been something that LCI has both valued and seen work amongst fellow libertarians.

And there are many Christians now who weren't originally, but they started off as a libertarian, became exposed even to our material, and have since welcomed the gospel into their life.

And so that's a beautiful thing too. And while our primary mission is to talk to the church, we want to equip the church to defend a free society, we also see the spread of the gospel as being a secondary effect of all that we're doing.

And it should be in any Christian's life, doing whatever they're doing. And by the way, one or more of you, even though you all sound, as far as your voices, crystal clear, there is some echo back of what everybody is saying, and I don't know if you have a computer with a speaker on, or something like that, but if whoever has their speakers on or it's echoing back, that'd be great if you could mute that, or if you don't need it to conduct the interview, that'd be helpful.

Dick Clark, since you are a part of this organization with a specific knowledge on firearms law, going back to a question

I had, and perhaps you could correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to recall a recent candidate for President of the

United States who was representing the Libertarian Party, he very much surprised me in what appeared to be affirming leftist gun control restrictions, leftist gun control laws, and number one, am

I right on that? And how on earth is that remotely compatible with Libertarianism?

I think that you are recalling, actually it was our Vice Presidential candidate in 2016, it was former

Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld, and he has since left the Libertarian Party, and I think that's in part because he realized that perhaps his mushiness on this and other topics was not in alignment with the

Libertarian values. There were a lot of Libertarians very upset when he sort of offhandedly, back in the 2016 election cycle, seemed to give a pass to the sort of gun control that, frankly, he had been one of the villains in setting up in the

Bay State there. So I would say absolutely a violation of the right to keep and bear arms, which

I think is a God -given right that we happen to live in a country where that's also recognized in our man -made laws.

But yeah, departing from that idea that we each have a right to defend ourselves against aggressors is very much a departure from what we would call plumb line or orthodox, if you will,

Libertarianism. And, frankly, the Libertarian Party has been a little bit of a controversial project since its inception back in the early 70s.

There were a lot of Libertarians who kind of thought that was like setting up an army to fight for peace, right?

I mean, if you think that the political experiments are themselves unrighteous or themselves unjust, it sort of prompts the question of why you would want to then undertake such a project.

So I think that the 2016 ticket, you know, for some of the good things they did, unfortunately, was a little bit mushy on principle.

Another area of mushiness from that cycle was when Gary Johnson, who was the top of the ticket, standard -bearer, said something to the effect of bake the cake, which of course refers to essentially supporting compulsion of private entrepreneurs who for religious reasons don't want to participate in what they view as sinful conduct, participating in a homosexual marriage union.

And so don't judge the philosophy by the people who occasionally bear the standard for it.

I think it's not just something where people have bent to the left on occasion. Bob Barr was a standard -bearer for the

Libertarian Party back in 2008, and, of course, most Libertarians would say he had some deviations to the right.

So the plumb line is where it's at, and hopefully we can disabuse folks of some of these notions about what

Libertarianism is not in this show. Yeah, so perhaps if you could, and perhaps let's have

Kerry, since we haven't heard much from her yet, Kerry, if you could distinguish between pacifism and the principles of non -aggression.

My friend, the late William Norman Grigg, I don't know how many of you are familiar with Will.

Great man. Yes, he was a guest on the old Iron Sherpa and Zion Radio quite a number of times.

A former Mormon who converted to Christianity and was at one time the editor of the

New American Magazine. Brilliant man with an enormous vocabulary, which is why he was nicknamed

Thesaurus Rex by his friends. But he made a clear distinction between pacifism and the principles of non -aggression.

If you could, Kerry, give us your thoughts on that. Sure, so pacifism is sort of the idea that no matter how much aggression is committed against you, that you can't use force in order to stop it.

So the non -aggression principle says that it's illegitimate to initiate force against another person, but that if that happens, you can respond with force in a proportional response in order to stop that aggression.

So we do emphasize the proportional aspect of that response, like it would be wrong for you to go too far and use too much violence.

We don't want to say that it's okay to kill somebody just because they pushed you or something like that.

But there is a very real sense that we're able to draw that line between what is illegitimate, which is initiating violence, and what is legitimate, which is defending yourself against violence.

And that's all summed up in the non -aggression principle. And by the way, folks, if you ever have something that you'd like to add, please, you don't have to wait for me to call upon you.

Just chime in whenever you sense a break in the discussion. And also, please identify yourself.

Obviously, Kerry doesn't need to do that since she's the only woman involved in the conversation. But anybody else, if you could, identify who you are when you chime in.

And we are going to our first station break. If anybody would like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

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USA. Please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

Perhaps you have World War III going on in your own household because of a position you have taken either pro or con when it comes to libertarianism or something of that nature.

We could understand why you would want to remain anonymous. But if it's just a basic question on Christianity and politics and how the two merge, and if it's just a general question on Christian libertarianism, please identify yourself with at least your first name, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the

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Thank you Welcome back, this is Chris Arnzen, if you just tuned us in our guests today for the entire two hours of the program are

Norman Horn, Doug Stewart, Kerry Baldwin and Dick Clark who are all co -authors of the book

Faith Seeking Freedom, Libertarian Christian Answers to Tough Questions Our email address is

ChrisArnzen at gmail .com C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com

Give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence and your country of residence if you live outside the USA and I usually only give the first name of a listener and their city, state and country of residence, but when a pastor that I happen to know writes in,

I like to identify them in full, especially if they appear to have given me permission to do so in their email

We have Gordon Runyon, who is pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Tucumcari, New Mexico, who has two questions for you, and perhaps we'll have

Doug Stewart first start off with a reply, and anybody else that wants to chime in afterwards, and then we'll move on to the second question from Pastor Gordon, he asks would you please respond to the charge that libertarianism is an inherently atheistic position

Doug? Well, we we get that, you know,

I've heard that argument a number of times inherently atheistic, I'm not really sure that there's any historical warrant for that there are plenty of atheists, or I should say there are plenty of libertarians who claim to believe there's no

God, and that maybe some of their rationale for believing in libertarianism has to do with you know, naturalistic explanation for things

I mean, I don't really know where that sort of accusation even has a whole lot of grip on people, because clearly, people like us from the

Libertarian Christian Institute, we have a lot to say that libertarianism is based on Christian foundations as well,

I mean, you can, I don't know it's kind of funny to me to hear that, at the same time, there's a big strain of the liberty movement, or I should say it this way, the history of the liberty movement is, in many ways, very much a

Christian endeavor, or it's been taken up by Christians so, especially the modern libertarian movement, there's a lot of, you know, well -known

Christians going back as promoting it, so there's, you know, that in and of itself is evidence that it's not inherently atheistic, but I'm sure anybody could come to a belief about libertarianism, or a political philosophy that includes believing, or sort of is founded on the belief in, you know, there is no

God, or something like that it does seem like, and I know a lot of people believe that Objectivism which is a philosophy espoused by Ayn Rand, or founded by Ayn Rand who was an atheist, is very similar to Libertarianism, and there's certainly some overlap when it comes to the way in which we see politics but, that in and of itself is a completely different philosophy, that's not the same as Libertarianism If I could just jump in, you know,

God was the creator of property rights, and who is this? I'm sorry,

Dick Clark here, so God was the creator of property rights, he affirmed that in things just as straightforward as, thou shalt not steal, right?

Stealing, there's no context to say stealing is wrong unless property is an institution, right?

And so, God is the creator of property rights, God is the creator of justice, and in fact it's the

Libertarians more so than any other group of political thinkers who say that justice is unchanging, and that is the most compatible position for those of us who believe that there is this eternal creator of the universe, whose standard is the eternal, unchanging immutable standard.

I think it's actually the atheists who are more often subjective in how they analyze justice questions, who think that positivism, you know, whatever the majority says goes, or whatever is enforced goes, and is the right thing

No, those are atheistic standards in my opinion, and the Christian standard is the standard of unchanging justice as instituted by God And so,

I became a Christian Libertarian or that is to say, I became a Libertarian because I was first a

Christian and I looked at the standard that was held up as the standard for human justice before God, in order to be held blameless and I see that what we call governments, states, do not live up to that standard.

And so, to me, that's what started me searching for what the right political philosophy is. I saw that my

Christian beliefs were not being upheld by states anywhere I looked. And I think I interrupted

Carrie there, so I'll give her the mic. Yeah, thanks Dick. I think the accusation does come from the

Objectivists There's lots of Christians who talk about Libertarianism as though it's only

Ayn Rand's ideas, and I mean, Ayn Rand herself rejected

Libertarianism, but Libertarianism is based on principles that are from classical liberalism, from the

French Revolution and those were born out of the Protestant Reformation.

So I think that there is very good grounding that these principles that we adhere to are not only not founded in any sort of atheistic worldview, but they are most definitely founded in a biblical worldview, and the fact that atheists can see that, this lends itself well to what

Norman had said earlier about general revelation and the fact that you don't have to be regenerate in order to see the truth of these things.

Since you mentioned classical liberalism, I guess it would be wise for us to make clear that your, that this philosophy of classical liberalism is not identical or in many ways it's not even remotely close to what would be more accurately categorized as leftism today.

For instance Thomas Sowell, who is someone who is greatly loved and embraced by many very conservative thinkers, he would consider himself a classical liberal.

Right, so what I would call today as progressive liberalism, and I would even use the word liberalism very loosely in that regard, classical liberalism comes from John Locke and the ideas that founded this nation, the ideas that we have inherent rights given to us by God, that we have property rights, that the

Bill of Rights is even founded on classical liberal ideas. So yes, there is a huge distinction to be made between what we consider leftism or progressivism today and the classical liberal views that this country was founded on.

And Pastor Gordon has a second question and perhaps we'll have

Norman start off with an answer. Please comment on the idea that non -aggression principle or NAP is simply an application of the golden rule to political theory.

That is an excellent question, or at least an excellent kind of comment. I would slightly modify it.

It's important to realize that what the non -aggression principle does is it defines what one is not to do.

That is we are not to initiate force against others except in the act of self -defense which is not even initiation at that point.

We are not to initiate force against others except in self -defense. What the golden rule says, on the other hand, is it is more of a positive bent on what we are to do to other people.

That we are to treat others the way we would want to be treated. So I like to say that instead of it being, you know, the golden rule being a modification of the

NAP per se, I'd like to say it's kind of like the other side of the coin. You know, on the one side we have the

NAP. It is what we are not to do. The golden rule is perhaps an even greater standard of what we want to be doing to other people.

We want to be treating them the way we would want to be treated. With respect. With dignity. With voluntary action.

Now that would in a way is also subsumed with the non -aggression principle that one of the ways

I want to be treated is not to be initiated with force against me. I don't want you to come at me and abuse me and things like that.

That's of course, you know, perhaps we could define it that way as well. But I like to put it as kind of like two halves of a coin.

Two sides of a coin. And that perhaps is a good way to think about it. I hope that answers the pastor's question.

I'd really appreciate his comment on that. In formal logic, I would say... And who is this? Who is this?

Non -aggression principle is the contrapositive of the golden rule if you're familiar with logical relationships.

One is the affirmative statement of what you ought to do as Norman said. And the other is what we should abstain from.

And I want to point out libertarianism is not a theory that is all -inclusive about how to live a righteous life.

Libertarianism is a theory of justice. And justice is the question of what can force be used to compel others not to do.

Libertarianism concerns itself with the question of how can I be a non -aggressor?

Which is a different question from how can I be a righteous man? So being a non -aggressor is certainly an important part of being a righteous man.

But righteousness, certainly we know this as Christians, goes beyond merely following the minimum standard.

In fact, we're supposed to go that extra mile, as Jesus explained. And another thing here is that it has to do with means.

What means are most appropriate for Christians? And Christian libertarians would say that go and sin no more if we look to the passage where Jesus is confronted by this woman who's been captured in sin and is going to be executed.

When he tells her to go and sin no more, he's clearly not endorsing her sin. She engaged in wrongful conduct and he told her to stop it.

But he told the men who were going to condemn her and execute her basically that they didn't have the right to use this particular means to respond to her sin.

So it was not an endorsement of her sin to say that violence was not the way to answer that sin.

And so for Christian libertarians, we're not endorsing sins by saying that violence shouldn't be used against them.

We're just saying that there's a better, higher way to deal with this that we as Christians are called to use.

And you know, I'm teaching right now in my Sunday school class about the life of David. And we're reading in towards the end of 1

Samuel and we just read the second episode where David sneaks up in the night and takes something of Saul's, right?

And the second episode is where he takes the spear and the jug of water from his head. And you know, his battle buddy wants to put an end to this whole thing and kill

Saul. And David I think would have been justified as far as man's law, as far as lex talionis, you know, the law of retribution, eye for an eye, he would have been justified in using that violent reprisal to end the conflict.

But he chose a higher path that even though he might have been justified in another response, it didn't accomplish for the kingdom what his peaceful response did accomplish.

And so that's what we as Christian libertarians are saying. It's not that the baseline of justice is the only thing to look at, but if we don't even affirm justice, if we don't affirm that we have to respect the rights of others we're polluting and diluting the

Christian gospel that is so important that we spread accurately and without any error. And by the way,

Pastor Gordon, you have won a free copy of Faith Seeking Freedom, Libertarian Christian Answers to Tough Questions, so make sure that you give us your full mailing address in Tucumcari, New Mexico, so that our friends at CVBBS, Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, CVBBS .com

can ship that out to you and we want to thank our friends at the

Christian Libertarian Institute, or the Libertarian Christian Institute for providing us with these free books and we also want to thank

CVBBS .com for shipping them out to our winners.

And one of the things that I'd like to make sure that we address, one of the primary things that seems to separate the philosophies and ideologies of many who would claim to be libertarian or even

Christian libertarians, and those that would claim to be conservative or patriotic or other labels, there are those that might be considered on the right who have become weary of using the term conservative because they think that there is such little to conserve in the 21st century that is left here in our political framework here in the

United States. But one of these areas that gives great concern to Christians, conservatives and others is the area of the war on drugs.

They are dismayed, they are apprehensive, they are fearful or just radically opposed to the libertarian idea that drugs should be legal and I'm obviously not speaking of pharmaceuticals that are taken for medical reasons

I'm talking about recreational drugs and perhaps we can hear from Norman on this and anybody else that wants to chime in after that.

Sure Chris, let me begin with a few points to reference

I think it's important to realize that prohibition doesn't really work we know this for a fact based on what prohibition did in the alcohol prohibition era and that was the rise of organized crime and it resulted in a lot of evils coming up, both executed by the government and by other private individuals and organizations the rise of organized crime in particular is indicative of such.

Now, that being said it doesn't mean that by opposing prohibition to begin with as a libertarian that we are condoning the use of any substance whatsoever.

We do believe that it's important for individuals to be able to make their choices about such things without necessarily involving government reprisal against it but nonetheless it is up to them and it is up to us as Christians to be able to comment on such things as well so we can say, look, taking drugs such as methamphetamine or something like that is an evil it is something you should not do but it is not something that the government needs to be involved in.

If the government is to have any activity at all in such an area, it would be to initiate a reprisal if they, if the perpetrator has done something criminal in the activity that is, by them participating in some type of activity that hurts someone else then they can be, you know, they can have the law brought against them.

But just because they do something to themselves does not mean that the government should come down upon them and there's a variety of ways to think about this, of course but it's important to just realize that individual liberty means being able to make wrong choices.

In fact, Norman, if we could pick up where you left off because we have to go to our midway break right now and if anybody would like to join us on the air our email address is chrisarmson at gmail .com

and remember folks, this is our longer than normal break in the middle of the show so we ask for your patience.

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So thank you all of you who have helped Iron Sharpens Iron Radio remain on the air. And I hope that you prayerfully will help us to continue to do so.

Also, folks, if you are not a member of a local Bible -believing church, I have lists of biblically faithful churches all over the planet

Earth, and I may be able to help you find a church no matter where you live. I have already helped people in all parts of the world find churches, sometimes within just a few minutes of their own homes, that they didn't even know exist, or at least they didn't know that the churches that I recommended them, they didn't know that they were biblically faithful and solid.

So if you are in that position of not knowing of a good, solid church home where you live, or near where you live, no matter where on the planet

Earth you live, send me an email to chrisarnson at gmail .com. chrisarnson at gmail .com.

But I need a church in the subject line. Whether it's for yourself or someone you love, or whether you're just going on vacation somewhere and are not familiar with the good churches in that area,

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That's also the email address where you can send in a question for Norman Horn, Doug Stewart, Kerry Baldwin, and Dick Clark, the co -authors of Faith Seeking Freedom, Libertarian Christian Answers to Tough Questions.

That's chrisarnson at gmail .com. And before I have Norman Horn finish his thought, when we were talking about the libertarian opposition to the war on drugs,

I just wanted to read a commendation for this book by someone who is probably very recognizable to the vast majority of listeners in the

Iron Sherpins Iron Radio audience. And that's the Honorable Andrew P. Napolitano, Senior Judicial Analyst at the

Fox News Channel. Honorable Andrew P. Napolitano says,

Faith Seeking Freedom is a basic primer on serious libertarianism seen through the informed intellects of serious

Christians. Its Q &A format is easy to read, utterly faithful to Christian doctrine and libertarian beliefs, and leaves you fulfilled, yet asking for more.

I strongly recommend it. So that should whet your appetite to explore this book, whatever your position may be on the issue.

And Norman Horn, if you could pick up where you left off, and anyone else, if you feel the interest in adding to what

Norman has said, and please always identify who you are when you're chiming in. But Norman, we begin with you.

We were talking about the libertarian opposition to the war on drugs. Right on, and I'll review very briefly.

There are at least four reasons for why we should oppose the war on drugs, as Christians alone, not even mentioning libertarianism for that matter.

Number one is the intensely bad negative repercussions of prohibition in the first place, which we've mentioned already.

Things like organized crime, massive criminal activity as a result of this, is actually a very big problem.

Second, it is an abrogation of personal liberty. There are plenty of sinful activities out there that we do not necessarily think need to be opposed to the force of law.

And if that is the case, then that brings us to a third reason we should oppose the war on drugs, which is that it increases the power of the government.

And conservatives everywhere should hate this, because increasing the power of the government is supposed to be something that conservatives should be against.

But what we know is that the war on drugs intensely increases the power of the government.

Reason number four would be that it is a backwards way of thinking and inhibits progress.

We are at least 100 years behind schedule when it comes to medical innovations that could have been achieved through the use of these types of materials in a safe and reasonable manner.

There are certain drugs out there that because they are on the schedule one list do not get researched, do not get addressed by scientists in any reasonable way possible.

And that puts us a long stretch behind in development of good and reasonable ways of using these types of chemicals that would help people.

Just because they have a negative usage doesn't mean that we cannot come up with a positive usage somehow.

The final reason is that it is a mistreatment of the issue itself. By turning drug use into a criminal activity rather than a health issue as it is properly understood, we are doing anybody who is actually participating in such activities and having negative problems with it, we're doing them a disservice.

By treating them as criminals rather than as people who have a health problem, it is a far cry from doing them justice.

So that is, I've been thinking about this the entire time we've been on that break, that is the summation of the argument against the war on drugs.

And I defy anybody to come at me against that. Just don't use aggression.

Let me pile on a little bit on top of what Norman said. And who is this? And I'll quote from what

I suspect. And who is this? This is Dick Clark. Okay. Quoting from the

Bible, you know, rules like drug prohibition,

I look to Colossians 2. And, you know, rules like do not handle, do not taste, do not touch, these have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self -made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.

So understand when we say that we oppose prohibition, that is to say violence, to stop the sin of idolatry and drug abuse, it's not because we want people to idolize drugs, that we want people to be drug addicts.

It's because it's the wrong tool to address the sin problem. And to address indulgence of the flesh, the correct response is not to become a

Pharisee to try to promote some very complicated array of rules that we have to follow, right?

That's just the wrong tool to address the idolatry problem in that drug abuser's life.

And so, again, we're not commending to people that they take up a drug habit or go sell drugs or get little kids hooked on drugs or any of that stuff.

It's just that we don't think that the state is the right mechanism to respond to this particular variety of sin or, frankly, to other varieties of sin either.

And it's a very limited scope of problems where we, as libertarians, and really all

Christians, should say that violence is the answer. We believe in self -defense, but we don't believe in going and using violence against people who are merely engaged in vices, which really are offenses against themselves and against God alone, not violations of the rights of others.

Well, actually, people will bring up how those in the communities where drugs are prevalent are having their lives endangered through the increase of crime.

And I'm not saying, of course, that I agree that heavy -handed legal restrictions or law enforcement activity against those purchasing and selling illegal drugs is the answer.

I'm just saying that those that are opposed to the legalization of recreational, serious, dangerous recreational drugs are very often very much thinking about the lives and safety of those in their own community, including the young.

So perhaps if you want to just respond to that, and anybody else that wants to chime in about that.

Can I actually? You know, I give seminars on the laws of self -defense, and there is an essential element to any self -defense claim that's going to be successful.

And that element is the element of eminence. The fact that a threat has to actually be proximate in nature.

It can't be a more remote threat. So do I agree that drug abuse tends to have a deleterious effect on communities?

Absolutely. But what we have to understand is there's a limitation on when violence is justified, and it is limited to those circumstances where the threat is proximate.

It's about to happen. It's imminent in nature. These more remote threats about deleterious effects on the community over years or even months, those are too remote to say that they justify an immediate forceful response.

And certainly that kind of argument about, hey, he said he was going to come and get me a week from Thursday, so I had to shoot him,

Judge. I had to shoot him, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. That wouldn't hold water in a self -defense context, and making that defensive argument about the more remote threats of drug abuse doesn't hold water either.

Now, with that said, we do not say that a person ought to be able to use intoxication as a defense, right, that, hey, you know,

I killed the guy, but I was so intoxicated I didn't know any better. That's no defense, right, because you shouldn't have been so irresponsible as to make yourself that intoxicated.

So certainly we do not excuse actual crimes against others because of, you know, an intoxicating factor there that came into play in causing that effect.

But neither do we try to engage in these sort of pre -crime analyses where we want to go and restrain people before they've actually engaged in something that amounts to an injustice.

And I think I talked over Carrie, so. Yeah, I want to point out something because, and Dick, you alluded to this, which is a causation problem.

You know, and even back during the time of alcohol prohibition, right, one of the reasons why we prohibited alcohol was because of the argument that alcohol was causing problems in the family.

You had a lot of women who were out there who were protesting the use of alcohol.

They were advocating for its prohibition, saying, hey, alcohol is causing problems. And, you know, we certainly don't deny that.

The problem is how we are handling it, how we use the state in order to respond to these problems.

And I think COVID gives us an excellent perspective for understanding why libertarians are so opposed to drug prohibition.

If you look at COVID and the fact that we have, that the state has clamped down on us using the force of violence against us in the name of safety and our health, we can actually see how they've created a problem.

You have an increase in suicide. You have an increase in drug and alcohol abuse right now because of the lockdown.

Okay, in New Mexico alone, we've had the highest suicide rate. And the kind of violence that we're dealing with here is domestic violence.

And it's so high, in fact, that they're having to triage cases so that only the most violent are going to court.

And there's a lot of victims who are being left by the wayside. So when we talk about drug prohibition, we're not saying that there isn't a problem with using drugs and that that doesn't facilitate other crimes against people.

We're saying that using the violence of the state in order to respond to drug addiction and alcohol addiction is actually making the problem even bigger.

And we want to stop that. Okay, we have a question. I don't know if we have any experts on this subject from the fiscal area of libertarianism.

But we have Linda in Hilltop Lakes, Texas, who says,

How does Christian libertarianism see Bitcoin? Does anybody have an answer to that?

Does anybody have an answer? This is Norman. And that's a fun question, especially in light of our current situation with Bitcoin, you might add.

I'm a big fan of Bitcoin myself. And I think that the most relevant thing we can say about it is very simply that Bitcoin is a way out of the fiat money system, which is something libertarianism opposes.

We oppose the government control of currency. The government does not have the right to set what the values of weights and measures are like this.

And thus, Bitcoin being completely divorced from the idea that the state has the right and ability to regulate currency is a great thing.

In the same way that we would advocate for a gold standard overall, which is something that prior to Bitcoin, of course, since it's only been around since 2009, you, of course, will see the advocation for a gold standard.

As we've had in the past in the United States and what the world has used for eons, we would say that there is another option.

We're seeing the rapid monetization of Bitcoin and having the potential in the long term to perhaps be the new standard of currency in the long run.

So what that looks like, we cannot necessarily predict. And we are not certainly inviting anyone to make any type of investment decision based on such an assessment.

But it is important to realize that government fiat ought not to control currency and therefore the gold standard or some type of alternative is important.

Dick Clark again, if I could just unpack that a little more. Norman used that familiar phrase, honest weights and measures.

And of course, that's a phrase that we draw from scripture. It's something that's important to God. It's one of God's standards for human justice.

And so it's something that ought to be important for Christians. We do address this in the book, Faith Seeking Freedom. And of course, this honest weights and measures issue is a justice standard that's set out in Proverbs 20, verse 23, in Micah 611, and a number of other places.

And the reason that's relevant to money is actually to do with a problem that libertarians raise as an objection to socialism, the fact that socialists can't calculate, can't engage in economic calculation, because money is the measure that we use for value, the way that we literally compare apples to oranges.

And when government or anybody else monkeys around with our monetary system, it disrupts these very important information signals that are transmitted through money prices.

And so it actually causes us to not properly be able to measure value, economic value.

So when we say that we want to protect honest weights and measures through honest money, it's because money is this important tool that we use to measure things with respect to other things, right?

It's the common denominator. And unfortunately, we also see not only is there a problem of the business cycle, as the

Austrian School of Economists talked about, going into monetary manipulation, fiat currency is also used to fund all sorts of wicked projects, all sorts of government spending that's not only wasteful, but in fact an affirmative injustice, right?

Whether it is monopolizing the education system or monopolizing charity and turning it into an entitlement welfare state, you know, that's based on legal entitlement rather than blessing others through voluntary, cheerful giving, which is what we

Christians ought to build a model around, right? That's the place the church engages in this ministry of benevolence.

And so it's really all tied in and it does come back to these lessons in Scripture about how

God expects us to act with respect to each other. Okay, well, thank you,

Linda. And make sure we have your full mailing address in Hilltop Lakes, Texas, because you have also won a free copy of the book we are addressing,

Faith Seeking Freedom, Libertarian Christian Answers to Tough Questions by our guests today.

And that's compliments of our friends at the Libertarian Christian Institute and also our friends at cvbbs .com,

Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, who will actually be shipping the book out to you at no charge to you or to Iron Trupman's Iron Radio.

Thank you, Linda, and keep spreading the word in Hilltop Lakes, Texas, and beyond about Iron Trupman's Iron Radio.

We have an anonymous listener who says, I'm remaining anonymous because of the fact that I seem to routinely get into arguments with my brothers and sisters in Christ at my own church over libertarianism.

My question involves something I heard Chris Arnson, the host of this program, say a few times, where he said that he has libertarian leanings in some areas, but also believes in very strong border control.

I happen to be in that category myself, and I was wondering where each of the participants fall on the issue of border control.

It seems to be a suicidal libertarianism to let anyone into our nation when they could jeopardize the safety, well -being, and even the political freedoms we cherish in doing so.

Why don't we start with Doug this time, since I don't think we heard from Doug in the very recent history of the program.

Yeah, I mean, I understand the question, and I understand the concern. The sort of go -to book outside of our book to sort of introduce this topic, because I realize this is very important to a lot of Christians.

Many Christians are very concerned with cultural and sort of like the way in which people behave in society.

They feel like those cultural values that we sort of cherish can be eroded. And even if it's not necessarily

Christian, they're really worried that political values such as individuality and autonomy and the ability to sort of worship as we want to can be threatened.

We do see those real threats from the left, from the left of the political spectrum and progressivism.

And so that threat is very real. And I do know that there are a lot of progressives,

Bernie Sanders excluded, who are in favor of something like open borders, but for very different reasons than somebody like I would espouse.

So at its base, I'll just answer it from here's what a libertarian believes. Libertarian believes that other people should not exclude you from free movement and offering of your labor, your services, trade, all of that is off the table from excluding other people because we're all created equal in the image of God.

Americans are not the only ones that are created in God's image, contrary to some people's beliefs, but everybody is.

And there is no reason why we should not afford every single person the freedom to move and peacefully act within what we would call our country's borders.

So the baseline, what I would say, is if you're able to live and act peacefully, like you're not a criminal, you're not running from the law, you behave while you're here, you are welcome here in my country.

And that, I think, is an attitude of Christian. I think that's a Christian attitude. Now, whether or not you vote a certain way is one thing.

The thing that concerns me most about people who are sort of anti -immigration or anti -

I know they would say they're anti -illegal immigration, but they're whatever. People who are sort of about more for closed borders than they are for open borders,

I lament that more Christians don't have a more welcoming attitude. I can't read the

Bible without seeing that God has a heart for the stranger and the foreigner. And especially a heart for those who are on the margin.

So I get the concern, and I know that my co -authors are also going to chime in here with their sort of angle on it.

But the libertarian answer and the Christian answer is we should welcome people for the sake of the gospel to reach them, for the sake of a political ethic that says,

I have no right to tell you where to live. It wasn't your fault that you were born in Mexico, and you want to live in Texas because you can make your life better.

I don't know anything more aligned with conservative values that says, hey,

I want to make my life better and improve the lives of my family. I'm going to move and risk everything to do that.

And then you've got other people standing across an arbitrary line that says, oh, no, no, no, no, you can't because you weren't born here or because you whatever.

We can come up with a hundred different reasons. So I'll let my other co -authors chime in here. But you can see

I'm kind of getting passionate about it because I think it's very important that we have a welcoming attitude toward those who are seeking to make a life better for themselves.

So, yeah, that's kind of my answer. And anybody, if you could identify yourself.

Chris, this is Dick Clark. I helped write one of the answers on the topic of immigration in the book.

And if I can just quote a little bit from our book, the Bible tells immigrant story after immigrant story.

Adam and Eve, Joseph, Jesus as a refugee child fleeing for safety from Herod, the great master of the innocents, and later as an adult,

Jesus identified with the immigrant and he included the stranger as one of the groups whom he called the least of these.

So I believe in self -defense. I believe in provincial provision for the safety of my family, not just myself, but for my children because I have a duty as their father to do that.

But I also challenge you to consider where we ought to try to distinguish the line between prudence, which is a righteous character trait, and fear of something other than God, right?

At some point, our radical faith in Jesus and in the message that is committed to the

Holy Scriptures, we have to be willing to operate without any net other than our

Lord, right? And to say, you know what, God said this is the way to go. I have to go there no matter how scary it seems.

And when I look in Scripture, I see that it says we have to treat the native born and the stranger under the same law.

A law that is different because of the fact that you were born in a foreign land is unrighteous, according to passages like Leviticus 19, 34, many other passages in Scripture, dozens of passages in Scripture all speak with one accord, one message, and that is that we must not legally discriminate or mistreat the immigrant.

With that said, should we repel violent invaders? Should we repel aggressors of all varieties?

I think it is just to do that. But the fact that somebody is crossing a government line doesn't mean that they're violating anybody's property rights.

And in fact, I would argue that it violates my property rights for the government to say who I may or may not employ with my own dollars or whoever

I may or may not rent a hotel room to or buy goods or services from, right? There are all these things that the government imposes on me as a natural born citizen of the

United States by interfering with my freedom of contract with these other people who, again, aren't trespassers at all for the most part, right?

Except if you believe that the government is the rightful owner of the property. Because, again, most people who are here, even unlawfully, entered lawfully.

They didn't come over the fence and cross somebody's back 40. They came on a roadway or an airplane and overstayed a visa.

So there isn't a trespassing element to the vast majority of these illegal immigrant cases that we're talking about.

And at the end of the day, I think that the most high form of patriotism, the only form of patriotism that's of principle concern to a believer, is the one described in Philippians 3 .20.

Our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a savior, the Lord Jesus. And we know that when we open that door to the stranger, we're literally opening the door to Jesus Christ who identified with the stranger.

I challenge you to consider that. And I would ask of you, perhaps

I could, at some point, give each of you a copy of this book so that you can read it, and perhaps we could have you respond to it at some point.

But years ago, a book was written, actually by a friend of mine, David Dykstra.

He wrote a book called Yearning to Breathe Free, Thoughts on Immigration, Islam, and Freedom.

And he describes in detail the laws of the Old Testament when it came to immigration, and how we are to respond to different kinds of strangers.

And, of course, this was specifically speaking about the nation of Israel, was to respond to different kinds of strangers that were coming into their midst, and obviously welcoming to many of them is a part of Christian hospitality, but that does not mean necessarily that you, just like you wouldn't necessarily let anybody onto your own property where you live, or through the doors of your home, there are reasons to have restrictions.

In fact, let me just ask one more question before we go to our final break. Do you, and I believe it was

Dick Clark that was responding last, do you believe in borders?

Do you believe that nations have the right, and is it a good and wise thing for nations to have borders?

Yes, so this is Dick again, and what I would say is the most important borders are the ones that are around private property.

And when we see the meets and bounds definition of the different borders in the

Promised Land, as the children of Israel are venturing out of Egypt and into this land where they're going to have to purge it of the equal idol worshippers and so on, we don't even see that described in terms of a nation, right?

We see the individual boundaries described as it relates to family groups, and people who can inherit and pass property in a familial line.

And so while nations were an invention of God, and by the way, a punishment for sin, a power of Babel, and nations were separated by language, not by ethnicity or gene pool or anything else like that, but we see that's a consequence of sin, and we do see that we're all adopted into the royal family when we become regenerated by the watching of the blood of Jesus Christ.

And so what I would say is that the most important nation that I can be a member of as a Christian is the kingdom of God.

And other competing loyalties should not ever cause me to question my fundamental duties to the kingdom of God as an adopted child of that royal family.

And of course there are immigrants who have established very lucrative and happy lives and careers here in this nation who want people to legally go through the process to immigrate here and not violate laws, and who are not in favor of everybody just strolling across the border who wants to be here no matter what their motive.

And so obviously there is that opinion out there, and perhaps one time we could have a debate in the future over this, because I think it's something where Christians who are no less

Christians or no less loving, caring, and hateful towards racism and bigotry who are on the other side of the issue when it comes to that.

Chris, if I could just, I think part of what makes it such a hard issue is that we do have this very destructive welfare state that creates these perverse incentives, and I mentioned it in an earlier response about this perverse transition from cheerful, voluntary, benevolent ministry, which the church ought to be engaged in, and deacons in particular have a duty to do at that local congregational level, and we've transitioned to this entitlement mentality, and I really think that that has poisoned our culture in such a powerful way that I think a lot of people who are very concerned about rapid immigration and growth of populations that we think might be more likely to rely on that welfare state, we can understand why there's that concern, and I do think that that exacerbates a real problem, but I think that the aggressors, the wrongdoers, are the people who are perpetrating the welfare state policies, not these people who are refugees or moving because they want to promote the betterment of their family and future opportunity and so on.

So I do think that there's room for a conversation there, though. Great. We have to go to our final break. It's going to be a lot more brief than the other breaks that you've heard.

If you have any intention or desire to send in a question, I would urge you to do so immediately because we're rapidly running out of time.

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Welcome back. And I'd like each of our participants now to have about a minute to summarize what they want most etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners regarding libertarian

Christianity. And let's start with Kerry Baldwin, and I'll announce each of the participants who

I'd like to chime in with their final thoughts. And I already know that I'd like to have you all back again, because there are a lot of things we haven't even touched the surface, haven't even scratched the surface on.

So if you could, Kerry, summarize your thoughts in about a minute's time. Thank you,

Chris. You know, we've talked a lot about drugs and immigration, and we didn't get to touch on abortion, but I do think that the common thread there is a question of how do we as Christians, as a society, as culture, how do we respond to people in crisis?

Do we respond to them with violence, or is there a better way to respond to those things so that they aren't that they are both resolved and also not prevalent parts of our culture and society?

And so it seems to me abundantly clear that a libertarian view of civil governance and Austrian economic theory of how the economy functions actually produces the best way that we can resolve these problems in a peaceful way, in a peaceable way, in a just way, where we don't have an expansive government and we don't have illegitimate uses of force and violence, which has just caused turmoil in our country.

Okay, and if Dick Clark will put in his minute? Yeah, thank you.

No, I just want people to remember that as Christians, we trust God as a good

God, as a God who is wholly righteous, and He can teach us how to be righteous, chiefly through the example of His Son, our

Savior, Jesus Christ. And I hope that people will take a look at our book, Faith -Seeking

Freedom, to understand how we as Christians came to be libertarians and have a strong conviction that that is the correct

Christian position when it comes to social doctrine. But let me just, in closing, quote a different book by Frederick Bastiat.

And he said, After having vainly inflicted upon the social body so many systems, let them end where they ought to have begun.

Reject all systems and try liberty. Liberty is an acknowledgement of faith in God and in His work.

And that's where I would leave it. I think that believing that we should allow freedom to bloom is about trusting in God, and I hope my fellow believers will trust in that fully.

And Doug Stewart? Yeah, I mean, I would say to every listener, you belong to God.

Other humans don't own you, and you don't own other humans. So because we are gods, we are to live as Christ and to love others, extend grace, and live peaceably with all people, as the

Apostle Paul said. So this is one of the biggest reasons why I think libertarianism is the most consistent political philosophy with Christian faith, is because we are owned by God, and that is kind of non -negotiable for me.

And Norman Horne? To paraphrase something in our book, when you consider the world at large, which is often characterized by so many individual acts of violence, and we think that those are heinous, but then when we see those same types of things being perpetrated by large groups of people, such as states, armies, even police officers at times, and we say, well that's justified, because it's being done by the government,

I think we have a problem. And our message as Christian libertarians is that the state is not the kingdom of God.

It is against God. And it is appropriate for us as Christians to oppose these types of activities that are against God.

And if you would want to learn more about that, or why that might be the case, take a look at our book. It doesn't cost you very much.

It doesn't cost you very much in your time or your dollar. It's very easily available on Amazon .com.

You can get it in a Kindle. You can get it in a paperback. We invite you to come check us out at LibertarianChristians .com

and learn more. It is an utterly important thing for us to figure this out as a society, as we are getting broken up more and more through political divisiveness.

If we as Christians are going to make an impact on this earth, and we will continue to do so, it will be not through the force of weapons, not through the force of war, but through the ever -present love through the gospel.

Amen. And we're out of time, and I just want to repeat your website, LibertarianChristians .com. LibertarianChristians .com.

I want to thank all of you for being excellent guests today. I want to thank all of you who listened, and especially those who took the time to write.

I hope you all always remember that Jesus Christ is a far greater Savior than you are a sinner.