An Open Letter to America’s Pastors and Church Leaders in Support of Ron Paul for Presidentby
Bill Barnwell
Dear Pastors and Church Leaders, From a Christian perspective, who would be the best candidate for President of the United States in 2008? This is a serious question you must grapple with as leaders in the Christian community. While you cannot endorse from the pulpit, you have considerable sway over those you encounter. Your opinions matter. I believe without a doubt that the most effective Christian President would be Congressman Ron Paul. Unfortunately, many of you who are my fellow co-workers in ministry and church leadership have failed thus far to catch this vision. Right now, Dr. Ron Paul is receiving the majority of his support from Christian moderates and those outside the Christian fold. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee appears to be the current flavor of the season for Christian conservatives, including many of you reading this letter, due to his status as a former pastor and denominational leader. Let me say this – I believe you are making a serious mistake supporting Huckabee or one of the other establishment approved candidates such as Giuliani or Romney. No other candidate in the race, including Mike Huckabee, can best support a proper Biblical worldview as President. Let’s first clear the air up front. Congressman Paul is a committed Evangelical Christian. His faith certainly guides his positions. He does not lock it in a closet. Nor does he, however, use his faith to politically grandstand. In Paul’s statement of faith on his campaign website he states, "I freely confess Jesus Christ as my personal Savior" and gives an extended discourse on his Christian worldview and how it affects his politics. Life On the issue that most of you hold most dear, the question of life, Ron Paul is undoubtedly the most pro-life candidate in this race. His legislative record of ten terms in Congress is impeccably pro-life. As an OB/GYN for many years, Paul delivered over 4,000 babies. He has stated that as a physician he has never seen a reason for a medically necessary abortion. Unlike at least one other "top-tier" candidate in this race, Paul has a long record supporting life and didn’t suddenly become pro-life when it became politically expedient for a Republican primary. Military and Foreign Policy On those issues, you say amen. But Dr. Paul is also consistently pro-life and here is where many of you, my fellow-workers, strangely denounce his views. Paul opposes the war in Iraq and all unnecessary foreign entanglements. Pastors, many of you, subtly and directly supported this invasion out of fear of offending your politically "conservative" congregations, and/or because you sincerely thought it was the right thing to do at the time. But the facts soon proved that it was Ron Paul, not President Bush, who more accurately assessed the situation in Iraq. It was Ron Paul, not the neoconservative establishmentarian pundits who was correct about Iraq’s "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and how the war would play out. It was Ron Paul, not Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, John Hagee, Franklin Graham, or any other of the political and theological icons of the Religious Right who accurately understood the situation. Today many of these same people are arguing for more of the same bad policy that got us here in the first place. As Dr. Paul has said many times, in medicine when you misdiagnose a problem you don’t continue to give the patient bad treatment. You change course. I’m asking you, pastors and church leaders, to unwrap your theology from the flag of pseudo-patriotism that has made America more vulnerable, not less. I believe many of you are very sincere in your convictions that American and even global Christianity is at risk from radical Islam and that the only way to combat it is with more of the same interventionist (or even more interventionist) foreign policy. But I believe you are sincerely wrong and that the facts of the past five years do not support your conclusions. Yes, we are indeed threatened by Islamic radicalism, but spawning more Islamic radicalism through costly foreign interventionism is not the answer. America is not the world’s Messiah. Also, Ron Paul is not an "isolationist" as many of you have been led to believe. He is indeed an internationalist. It’s the current foreign policy and the foreign policy of Rudy Giuliani (and every other Republican contender) that greater contributes to "isolationism." Ron Paul’s foreign policy would actually involve more foreign trade, more foreign goodwill, and less foreign military entanglements than all the other candidates. Thus, Paul’s foreign policy is pro-life in that it respects the lives of American soldiers and foreign innocents (civilians caught in the cross-fire usually suffer the greatest abroad). It is practical in that it is a repudiation of the failed foreign policy of the current "conservative" conventional thinking. It is conservative in the true sense in that it is rooted in the constitution itself and in the philosophy of George Washington and others of our nation’s founders. And yet, it is modern in that it best understands current geopolitical arrangements and offers the most likely chance of containing and combating Islamic terror. You may also be interested to know, pastors and Christians, that Congressman Ron Paul is a military veteran himself and receives amongst the highest level of financial support from retired and active military individuals. See this astonishing and telling graph of the facts. Considering the above facts and not just emotional reasoning so common in foreign policy discussions, it is clear that Ron Paul’s foreign policy is Christian, pro-American, pro-military, and practical. Financial Stewardship Pastors, many of you know the pressures of meeting your monthly and yearly church budgets. Many of you preach and teach the wisdom and prudence of financial stewardship. If you are engaging in Biblical preaching, you should be exhorting your people to avoid exorbitant debt and financially reckless lifestyle patterns. Why then, would many of you want to support candidates for President who support federal policies that continue to plunge America further into debt – a national debt that now exceeds $9 trillion and grows by the second? Do you know that any church or business that had the spending philosophy of almost every person running for President would bankrupt their establishments in months if not days? It simply is not possible, prudent, or Biblically responsible to run an empire abroad while spending more and more money at home – money that the government really does not have. To make up for this the money is created magically through the "private" Federal Reserve. But the more the money supply is increased the more inflation increases. Inflation is nothing more than a hidden tax and is most destructive to the most vulnerable across America and in your pews – the elderly and all others on fixed incomes. But all middle-class Americans are affected by a stagnated and even falling standard of living. Current monetary and fiscal policy also allows the Fed to infuse more credit into the economy by artificially lowering interest rates and intervening in the free market. Conventional-wisdom economists are telling people to spend, spend, spend to spur the economy, even with money they do not have through taking on more debt obligations. Hardly any emphasis is put on national and personal savings. Let me ask you pastors and church leaders, is this Biblical? Is this good stewardship? How can you Biblically stand for this? If you agree that this sounds troubling and runs contrary to all Scriptures dealing with financial wisdom, why put a man or woman in the White House (or any other political position) who wants to further plunge the nation into debt and support policies that further weaken the dollar? Again, it was Ron Paul – not Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke or other conventional establishmentarian economists and politicians – who correctly predicted the housing and dollar crisis our nation and many other nations are currently experiencing. When the Fed continued lowering interest rates several years back, and many gimmicky banking products were produced that spurred both the false appreciation in housing prices and the subprime market, most people cheered. But for years Ron Paul and many others warned that people were borrowing more than they could handle and that prices did not reflect true values. Eventually the chickens were going to come home to roost. And that’s exactly what happened. Yet what does Washington, the business establishment and the Fed want to do? Just as in foreign affairs, continue with the same bad policies that led to the problem to begin with. Go do some research. Only Congressman Paul has been talking about this issue. The Democrats want to completely ignore basic economic laws and spend more and more on domestic programs (which cost much and produce little). They want to further separate the church from its historical charitable mission. They want to stick their heads in the sand in regards to social security and Medicare even though all statistics point to these programs bankrupting us in the not-too-distant future. Republicans are little better on domestic spending and support big government in the extreme when it comes to foreign spending. Both parties ignore the question of a sound dollar. Only Ron Paul is talking about Biblical economics and proposing nationally what you are teaching on the local church level. Philosophy of Government Many religious conservatives do not support Dr. Paul because they do not think he is sufficiently big government enough. That includes many pastors. While they complain about big government, it’s really only the other side’s big government they do not like. If left up to all too many religious conservatives, every moral issue would be federalized and the federal government would enact something akin to a secular Law of Moses to punish all moral transgressors. It understandably bothers you, my fellow religious conservatives, that Dr. Paul wants to end the War on Drugs. You think that means he supports drug use and that this non-aggressive approach to government philosophy would lead to more moral decay in America. But on these issues I believe you are again mistaken. In fact, the War on Drugs has not helped the drug crisis in America. It has cost a lot of money and filled our prisons and strengthened a bloody underground economy, but it has not helped solve the problem. On the contrary, this policy has exacerbated the difficulties. Have we not learned our lesson from alcohol prohibition? Many of you are understandably opposed to drunkenness, as am I. Some of you are even opposed to any form of alcohol consumption. But you realize that prohibition from the early part of the 20th century did not do anything to resolve the issue, it simply made it worse. The proper role of the federal government is not to be the morality police. The freedom you and I enjoy may lead to others making choices you do not agree with and are even sinful by Biblical standards. But it is up to God to deal with such individuals, not the State, which has always miserably failed. In fact, when the State inserts itself into lifestyle preference issues it always leads to bigger government, more spending, and crackdowns on freedom and liberty. Also, do we really want an America that is a Christian version of an Islamic theocracy? I do not like smoking, gambling, drug addiction or drunkenness. In fact, I’ve never smoked a cigarette, used a drug or gambled recreationally in my life. I think the world would be a better place without all that, as does Ron Paul who shares in this view. But he realizes freedom cuts both ways. As an aside, church leaders, if you wanted to be truly consistent on these issues you would support federal bans against obesity and put federal and state restrictions on calorie consumption, but that would lead to many of our congregation members and many of our pastors being in big, big trouble. Ron Paul totally opposes aggression on another human being, which is why he wants to overturn Roe vs. Wade and supports pro-life legislation at the state level. But on other issues where people are hurting themselves and not others, the best way to reach such individuals is not through legal and legislative coercion, but through the gospel itself. Thus, the burden is on you and I to do a better job in this respect. It’s our job, not the President’s, to make these changes. And neither the President nor us have any business using force or coercion to change people’s beliefs and habits. It is not Christ-like, not Biblical, nor is it practical. But Can He Win? Many of you, my fellow pastors and church leaders, like what you’ve heard from Ron Paul. Articles like this one have at least made you think. But you’ve been told by the media that he is a "longshot" candidate and/or not in the "top tier." Thus, while you might agree with much of what his candidacy is about, you do not want to "waste your vote" or those of your parishioners. Perhaps you’ve missed all the straw polls that Ron Paul has been winning in states across America. Maybe you have overlooked the fact that he broke a one-day fundraising record in one day just several weeks ago and out-raised every other Republican in the race in the fourth quarter. Maybe you have not seen the enthusiasm of supporters around the country campaigning for their candidate on their own dime – many of whom are young first-time voters or older adults who have felt totally shut out of the process in years past. You might not have taken cognizance of the claim that the polls are biased: they ignore people with cell phones, those who have not voted in previous Republican primaries, and sometimes do not even include Ron Paul as an alternative. And just watch, if Ron Paul beats some of the "top-tier" candidates in early states, as he almost certainly will, and does much better than expected, the campaign will receive even more momentum going into later primary contests, despite the continued efforts of the mainstream media to the contrary. Also keep in mind that Paul has the financial resources to compete to the end, whereas candidates like McCain and Huckabee do not. Finally, since when, fellow pastors and Christians, do you take your marching orders from the media or secular establishment? As Christian leaders we must not be afraid to go against the grain and do what’s right even when it’s not popular with the elites. But as far as enthusiasm and passion, no candidate can match the grassroots fervor and support that Paul has generated around the country from ordinary Americans. In sum, if you are a pastor or Christian who supports the welfare-warfare state, with its perpetual war for perpetual peace, and never-ending domestic and foreign spending sprees that are bankrupting America and also go against Biblical principals, then Congressman Paul is not your guy. By all means, vote for Huckabee or Romney.
January 3, 2008 Bill Barnwell [send him mail] is a pastor and writer from Michigan. He holds both a Master of Ministry degree and a Master of Arts in Theological Studies degree from Bethel College in Mishawaka, Indiana. Visit his blog. Bill is also a Mortgage Consultant and Loan Originator who can serve clients throughout the country. Copyright © 2008 LewRockwell.com |
But
if you are ready to vote for a candidate who actually supports Biblical
principles and will offer real change to America, then I implore
you to support Congressman Ron Paul for the office of the next President
of the United States.