David Barton’s Astonishingly Bad Apologetic for Glenn Beck
August 30, 2010
OK, let’s start by my acknowledging this truth: in general, I like and agree with Glenn Beck. Does he say some outrageous things? Yes. Do I agree with all of his pronouncements? Heavens, no. But in general, I agree with a significant portion of the things he says…but when he starts talking about his faith and this quest God has him on, well, I get mighty antsy. Glenn, you see, is a Mormon.
But David Barton, an evangelical Christian and founder/president of an organization named WallBuilders, has appeared with Glenn on a number of occasions, not only on Glenn’s TV program, but at rallies, etc. And some Christians have (rightly) questioned Barton as to this association, just as I questioned the decision of Liberty University (my alma mater) to have Beck as graduation speaker. Now comes Barton’s apologetic, which I’ve reproduced in its entirety below. Instead of my commenting on it—other than to say that it is an underwhelming mishmash of red herrings, misappropriation of Scripture, misappropriation of history, and blending of the spiritual with the political to a frightening degree (not that I want to bias you, dear reader…ahem)—I’ll let you read it and point out the many fallacies Barton’s argument contains. I’m frankly astonished, to tell you the truth…
By Their Fruits
by David Barton/WallBuilders on Monday, 16 August 2010 at 18:49
http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Dav…01762193194695
For all those who have asked, thanks for your inquiry and for expressing your concerns about Glenn and his faith. Allow me to address those concerns first by offering some general principles that I find helpful, and then by listing some specific facts that also influence my position.
Concerning the first area, human nature frequently causes us to jump to quick (and often wrong) conclusions based on stereotypes; there is an unfortunate propensity to judge based on what is generally perceived about a particular group rather than on what we specifically know about the individuals in that group.
Jesus provided excellent guidance to help overcome this tendency:
By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit….Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them. MATTHEW 7:16-20
“Master,” said John, “we saw a man driving out demons in your name and we tried to stop him, because he is not one of us.” “Do not stop him,” Jesus said, “for whoever is not against you is for you.” LUKE 9:49-50
Whoever is not against us is for us. MARK 9:40
What simple messages are contained in these three verses?
Judge a tree based on the type of fruit it produces, not the label that it bears. For example, if a tree is labeled as an apple tree but keeps producing oranges, which is more important: the label or the fruits? Obviously, the fruits.
Don’t impede the efforts of others if they are not attacking and trying to injure us, even if those individuals are not part of our particular religious circle.
If someone is not actively fighting against us, then consider him an ally, not an enemy.
Let me now make specific application of these verses. In recent months, I have appeared numerous times on Glenn’s program to talk about historical and political issues, particularly as related to faith and Biblical values. On those programs, I have had repeated opportunity to inform Americans about (as our WallBuilders’ motto declares) “America’s forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on our moral, religious, and constitutional heritage.” I have also participated in several major arena rallies with Glenn.
As a result of these appearances, I have received numerous letters and calls from concerned Christians, some of whom respectfully inquire as to why I would appear with a Mormon, while others directly attack me for doing so. As far as I can tell, most of these concerns stem from judging Glenn based by the label of “Mormon” rather than by the fruits he produces.
For example, no one has yet been to point to any instance where Glenn has attacked or undermined Christ or Christianity on any of his programs. To the contrary, on repeated occasions it has been quite the opposite. (Recall his specific programs on individual salvation, atonement, and redemption through Christ.) Nevertheless, some of his critics refuse to take Glenn at his self-evident words but instead attempt to read into them some secret and hidden meaning, thereby judging him not by his fruits or words but rather by some conspiratorial and unseen meaning they seek to impute to him.
For Christians concerned about Glenn’s faith, I would ask the following questions:
What fruit do you see produced by Glenn? Good or bad? If you judged Glenn only by the fruits he has produced, would you still hold concerns over his faith?
If you did not know Glenn was a Mormon, how would you describe his religious beliefs?
Is God using Glenn to help recover our national strength and health, both politically and spiritually? If so, why would God be using him?
Does Glenn stir and provoke us to good works? (Hebrews 10:24)
Does he bring to light the hidden things of darkness? (1 Corinthians 4:5)
Does he talk openly about atonement, redemption, and individual salvation through Christ? (I can definitely answer this in the affirmative, for I have seen him do so on numerous occasions not only on his program but also in the rallies where I have personally participated with him.)
Christians concerned about Glenn’s faith should judge the tree by its fruits, not its labels. After all, Nancy Pelosi and Bill Clinton openly call themselves Christians, as do Evangelical Christian ministers such as Jim Wallis and Joel Hunter. Although these individuals have the right labels, they have the wrong fruits; yet many Christians have a more visceral reaction to Glenn than to Pelosi, Clinton, or Wallis. This is wrong; it is not Biblical.
(Incidentally, a recent poll on American religious affiliations and beliefs [1] shows that Mormons are more pro-life and pro-traditional sexuality than Evangelicals: 70% of Mormons oppose abortion but only 61% of Bible-believing Evangelicals do so; and 68% of Mormons believe that homosexuality should be discouraged in society but only 64% of Bible-believing Evangelicals believe this. Furthermore, in the 2008 vote on the California Marriage Amendment, it was Mormons and not the Evangelicals who gave most of the money and workers needed to protect marriage in that state.
In fact, polling affirms that if the marriage issue had been left only to Evangelicals, the marriage amendment would have failed. We Evangelicals definitely need to get our own house in order.)
Recall the incident in Acts 10 where God shattered the thinking and paradigm of the Apostles by manifesting himself to and through Cornelius. In the Apostles’ thinking, this was definitely not supposed to happen, for Cornelius was part of the wrong group. Nonetheless, God moved through Cornelius, making clear that His blessing was upon him.
Significantly, that Cornelius passage from the book of Acts became the basis for one of the most famous sermons in the remarkable American revival called the First Great Awakening (1730-1770). That sermon, known as the “Father Abraham” sermon, was delivered repeatedly by the Rev. George Whitefield over all parts of America.
The text of that sermon was recorded by John Adams (who was among the eighty percent of Americans who physically heard Whitefield preach a sermon during the Great Awakening [2] ). About that sermon, Adams recounted to Thomas Jefferson:
He [Whitefield] began: “Father Abraham,” with his hands and eyes gracefully directed to the heavens (as I have more than once seen him): “Father Abraham, whom have you there with you? Have you Catholics?” “No.” “Have you Protestants?” “No.” “Have you Churchmen?” “No.” “Have you Dissenters?” “No.” “Have you Presbyterians?” “No.” “Quakers?” “No.” “Anabaptists?” “No.” “Whom have you there? Are you alone?” “No.” “My brethren, you have the answer to all these questions in the words of my next text: ‘He who feareth God and worketh righteousness, shall be accepted of Him’” [Acts 10:35]. [3] God help us all to forget having names and to become Christians in deed and in truth. [4]
Whitefield’s “Father Abraham” sermon based on the Cornelius incident had a profound effect on Americans. In fact, the message of that sermon was directly put into practice on September 6, 1774, when a seemingly innocuous motion was proffered to open America’s first Congress with prayer. [5] Surprisingly, that apparently harmless request met unexpectedly stiff resistance – resistance by some of the most devout Christians among the delegates. As explained by John Adams:
It was opposed by Mr. [John] Jay of New York and Mr. Rutledge of South Carolina because we were so divided in religious sentiments – some Episcopalians, some Quakers, some Anabaptists, some Presbyterians, and some Congregationalists – that we could not join in the same act of worship. [6]
It was devout Christian Samuel Adams who broke through the religious objections when he “arose and said he was no bigot, and could hear a prayer from a gentleman of piety and virtue.” [7] Significantly, Samuel Adams (an ardent Congregationalist – a Puritan) supported having a clergyman from the Church of England (a denomination literally hated by Adams’ Congregationalists) deliver the original opening prayer in Congress. What Adams required was that the prayer be from a “gentleman of piety and virtue,” thus recognizing Jesus’ teachings in Luke 9:49-50, Mark 9:40, and Matthew 7:16-20.
Glenn fits well into both of those historic parameters, and hopefully, so, too, will those American Christians who might disagree with his label but find nothing to fault among his fruits.
In conclusion, I have been with Glenn in numerous settings; I have watched him up close and can heartily endorse both his public and his private life. I have witnessed his tender heart, his love for God, and his passion to keep God in America. Glenn and I have prayed together on numerous occasions; he has sought God for specific guidance on numerous situations and I have personally not only seen God answer him but have also seen Glenn completely change his plans after feeling the Lord was leading him to move in a different direction or address a different subject. I judge Glenn by his fruits, not by his labels, and I am honored to call Glenn not only an ally and a fellow warrior (and a General) in the culture war, but especially to call him a good friend.
God bless!
David Barton
Update: Russell Moore has an excellent piece on this aberration that David Barton embraces; click here.
Disingenuity from Liberals Frosts Me
August 19, 2010
Does it you?
Before I quit this blogging thing—or a la Brett Favre, say I’m going to quit, and then not quit, but maybe quit, decide to continue but then really quit, except if and when I keep on blogging—one of the things that I’ve been meaning to write about is two particularly galling examples of liberal disingenuity (or abject ignorance; I’m not qualified to determine if deceit or sheer ignorance is in play here). Here are the two examples that have frosted me in recent months (and there are variations on these themes):
Example 1: “It’s all well and good for these Tea Party types to protest big government, but I don’t see any of them lining up to return their Social Security or Medicare!”
To the simpleton minds who produce this rubbage, this is supposed to quell all arguments, brand the Tea Partiers as phonies and hypocrites, etc.
Example 2: “Tea Partiers who believe in the Constitution, who want things to be like they used to be, are apparently ignorant of the fact that blacks were discriminated against, etc., in the ‘old days’”.
Now, the first response to this tripe, to paraphrase something the great George Will wrote a few years back, is that those who have neither the inclination nor the ability to understand adult arguments shouldn’t attempt to; they might get hurt. That’s a general caveat that applies to all such silliness on the part of liberals. But there’s more.
To deal with the first one, which I’ve seen written several times, the responses are not even hard:
- Where do I line up to get out of the Ponzi Security system, and to receive a rebate of all the money I put in, along with even half the interest I’d have earned had I had the freedom to invest it myself? Show me where to go, and I’ll do it!
- Do liberals not even understand basic human nature enough to realize that we always attempt to act in our own best interests, that no one will voluntarily give up something due them (even if they believe—as do many of us—that current systems need revamping, and badly)?
- Do they not understand that one can advocate for the changing of a system while at the same time attempting to navigate the current situation to the best of one’s ability?
So no, there is nothing at all contradictory—nothing—about saying that government is broken (and it is) while at the same time attempting to do all that is legally possible to navigate well the current system until such time as it can be changed.
To answer the second red herring, liberals often either don’t understand or, just as likely, intentionally obfuscate the meaning of terms like “judicial restraint”, “Constitutionalism”, etc. Here’s the truth: a Supreme Court justice can vote 100 times in a row to overturn a previous ruling, and not be a “judicial activist” in the slightest, just as I can be a faithful Constitutionalist and advocate for any number of new amendments to the Constitution (or the repeal of some old ones). It’s categorically not about going back to some supposed Nirvana of the past (which never existed), complete with old prejudices and the like; rather, it’s about treating the Constitution with respect, amending it according to the rules (or not at all), letting the rule of law be the rule of law, etc. It’s about attempting (as best we can) to understand what the framers of the Constitution meant when they wrote what they did, and then applying that to today; it’s not about bending meaning and arriving at tortured conclusions that the framers would have never imagined and then putting it down to some tripe about the Constitution being a “living document” (actually, I think it was Robert Bork who correctly said, “I believe in a ‘living Constitution’; I just don’t believe in a mutating one.”). And so what we Tea Partiers want is not some return to some “Golden Age”, but merely a respect for the Constitution, the rule of law, and the like, rather than the judicial activism that we see that ignores the written law and replaces it with the rule of what Thomas Sowell called “The Anointed”.
OK, that’s enough about that…
Rand Paul and the Tea Party Movement
August 10, 2010
Rand Paul, Republican Senate candidate from Kentucky, has become one of the “poster children”, of sorts, for the Tea Party movement. It’s not surprising, of course, that the media paints the Tea Party as a bunch of fringe kooks—we’ve come to expect such tripe from the lapdog media over the years. Disclaimer: are there kooks in the Tea Party? Certainly. Just like there are kooks in practically every walk of life. An aside: I didn’t disagree with the NAACP’s call for the Tea Party to renounce racism among its movement; I agree with it. I would call on the NAACP, likewise, to do the very same thing.
And yeah, there are a few “birthers” among the Tea Party folks; I have little use or patience for that particular pointless speculation either. But the truth of the matter is that the Tea Party movement is where I am when it comes to American politics—and it’s where a great American like Rand Paul is as well. Today, I was perusing USA Today when I came upon this piece by Paul, and I’ll tell ya: it’s difficult for me to understand how anybody could find much disagreement with what he writes. Read it for yourself!
Why We Will Lose the “Gay Marriage” Debate
August 7, 2010
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this one, it would seem, is over. Not immediately, and maybe not even with the eventual first decision of the Supreme Court (right now, I think that the loony judge’s decision overturning Prop 8 would be overturned at the level of the Supremes; new Justice Elena Kagan has written—correctly, in this case—that the Constitution does not contain a “federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage). But eventually, we’re going to lose this one. An upcoming post will detail my intended response to such a development, but I won’t get into that here.
Here, though, is why we are going to lose:
- We’re not arguing the point correctly. I watched O’Reilly and two ladies spar over the subject; O’Reilly and one of the ladies were correct, but neither challenged the ridiculous notion that marriage discriminates unfairly against gay individuals. It patently does not; every individual in America has always had the exact same rights to marry, but it occurs to seemingly nobody to bring up what ought to be an obvious truth. If you want to call it “discrimination” that two people of the same sex cannot marry, then you have to in the next breath call it “discrimination” that I cannot marry an already-married person, three women at the same time, my sister, or a combination of six men and nine women. All of those items are equally “discriminatory” to the “discrimination” that occurs under current law. This thing, I will reiterate, has exactly nothing to do with “equal rights”, and everything to do with the very definition of marriage itself (at least in the eyes of the state). Nobody argues the point this way, though, and as long as our arguments come down to (as they did on O’Reilly) the “will of the people” versus the courts, we’re going to lose.
- Our justice system is increasingly becoming a joke. The Constitution has been so consistently abused by judicial activists that we can hardly say that we are a constitutional republic anymore; it really comes down, not to what the Constitution says, but to what nine people say it says, and as things currently stand, four of those nine people want it to say whatever comes to their minds, and a fifth seems schizophrenic.
- Liberalism (which spawns such aberrations as “gay marriage”) is a progressive disease. One of my final posts will talk about how easy it is to be a liberal—and it certainly is. Without giving too much away, it’s easy to be liberal because liberalism plays to several of our worst traits as humans: intellectual laziness, the elevation of emotions over intellect, an obsession with warped versions of such character traits as tolerance and fairness, and the like. Our media is in the tank for liberalism, and as young generations come down the pike, these factors will likely combine to create a climate in which we go beyond “live and let live” to “live and demand the state sanction”, “gay marriage” being a precursor of such a sorry turn of events.
So sorry to break the truth to you, but it seems to me that we’re whistling in the wind if we think otherwise. More later on what Christians ought to do about it…
Is America a “Christian Nation”?
August 2, 2010
Awhile back, the President made headlines—and made a lot of people irate, it would seem—when he said words to the effect that America is not a “Christian nation”. This really cheesed a lot of people, not all of whom are evenly particularly devout.
I ask, “what’s all the fuss about?”
Questions:
- Can anyone even define what it means for a nation to be a “Christian nation”?
- What practical difference does it make whether or not we consider ourselves such?
- Are people more likely to become committed followers of Jesus if we can somehow prove this to be true, that we are, in fact, a “Christian nation”?
- Will we somehow be more moral, or what-have-you, if we can prove this?
- If not, what other tangible benefits would derive from such a designation?
- If we can demonstrate none, why should we care what some politician thinks?
Talk amongst yourselves…
Crash and Burn, Pennsylvania-Style
May 19, 2010
I lived for over 13 years in NW PA, arriving there just a few months removed from a highly-contested U.S. Senate election in which Arlen Specter narrowly beat a Democrat lady who was still incensed about his rough treatment of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings (one of his few shining moments in Congress, IMHO). I lived there, then, during his two most recent Senate runs, prior to this year, and though I was a registered Republican for a good bit of that time, and though I have never voted for a Democrat in my life and have the full expectation that I never will, Arlen Specter was elected both of those times without receiving my vote.
Then last year, of course, the man I call “Arlen the Wonder Senator” switched parties, declaring in a moment of candor—and of unbridled selfish political ambition—“My change in party will allow me to be re- elected”. This proved as well to be a moment of political chutzpah, one that was played over and over again in Keystone State commercials by his relatively-unknown leftist opponent, Representative Joe Sestak. And so it was that this hubris, in part, proved to be his undoing, as Arlen the Wonder Senator, who in my estimation is the poster child for everything that is wrong with Washington, D.C., saw his rather inglorious political career end on a cold, rainy May evening in Pennsylvania.
And I, for one, simply couldn’t be happier.
The Racers are at it Again
May 6, 2010
A couple months back, I suggested that we Americans ought to reject, not only the “Truthers”, the crazies on the left who believe that the 9-11 bombings were the result of some government conspiracy, and the “Birthers”, the crazies on the right who won’t let go of the silly notion that President Obama was not born in this country, but also a third group, whom I deemed the “Racers”. These are people like Keith Olbermann and Al Sharpton, who use any imagined justification to shout “racism” with as much vigor as possible—thereby squelching dissent voiced toward whatever liberal, big government program with which they are so enamored.
Well, the Racers are at it again, of course, this time imagining racism to be the sinister, underlying impetus behind Arizona’s new reasonable law seeking to crack down on illegal immigration. Here, for instance, is Racer U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva, a Democrat, and civil rights activists spoke to thousands of people gathered at the state Capitol and called on President Barack Obama to fight the law, promising to march in the streets and invite arrest by refusing to comply.
“We’re going to overturn this unjust and racist law, and then we’re going to overturn the power structure that created this unjust, racist law,” Grijalva said. Blah blah blah.
Note again: the issue is not immigration, but illegal immigration. And the federal government has completely failed in its responsibility to police our borders, making it frustrating, and borderline deplorable, for Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Obama to voice outrage at a state doing what these have failed to do. Folks, it ain’t about race: it’s about the rule of law, a point which George Will so eloquently makes in these two must-read articles:
This phrase comes from the 1978 "Jonestown massacre" in which most members of the Peoples Temple cult, blindly following their leader Jim Jones, committed suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.
Osborne: A Contrarian's Guide to Knowing God
Schlossberg: Idols For Destruction
