Last week, David Barton, the Religious Right pseudo-historian and GOP operative who is currently running a major super PAC in support of Ted Cruz’s candidacy, spoke at a conference organized by the North Carolina Pastors Network, where he asserted that despite the success in evangelizing other nations, Christian converts are still engaging in unbiblical behavior as demonstrated by the fact that they are still getting AIDS and electing gays to public office.
In audio kindly provided to us by Freedom for All Americans, Barton can be heard explaining that “America is the single biggest influence in helping Christianize the rest of the world” but lamenting that the success in winning people to Christ has not necessarily translated into changes in behavior as these Christian converts continue to largely live by “secular values.”
“If you look at places in Africa,” he said, “there are several nations in Africa that are 90 percent professing Christians, they call themselves a Christian nation, 90 percent of the population is Christian. In the last 25 years, in those 90 percent Christian nations, the AIDS rate has gone up, government corruption has soared through the roof, mistreatment of women is skyrocketing and poverty is increasing. Now tell me how, in a 90 percent Christian nation, you get this much bad fruit?”
“If you live by the Bible, you’re not going to have the sexual misbehavior that leads to AIDS,” he continued. “If you practice sex within marriage between a man and woman, AIDS is an impossibility, [other than through] a blood transfusion and now that we’ve checked that, we haven’t had blood transfusion problems for about the last 15 years. So the way you get AIDS now is you have to violate God’s standard of sexuality.”
To further illustrate his point, Barton pointed to some unnamed nation in Central America that is also supposedly a 90 percent Christian nation but which “just had an election [where] they elected open homosexuals as their national leaders.”
“Now how do you do that in a 90 percent Christian nation?” he asked. “1 Corinthians says that homosexuals will not enter the kingdom of heaven; you’re a 90 percent Christian nation and you elect open homosexuals to elect the 90 percent that are Christian?”
In the past, Barton, who currently runs a pro-Ted Cruz super PAC, has repeatedly asserted that God will never allow us to find a cure for AIDS because the disease is His punishment for sin.
