On yesterday’s broadcast of “WallBuilders Live,” David Barton and Rick Green were discussing a column by right-wing blogger John Hawkins titled “5 Ways Liberalism Destroys Virtue” and it prompted Barton to lay out a rambling and rather incoherent theory about how hate is a virtue while tolerance is a sin, eventually culminating in the declaration that Christians have got to be “intolerant of liberalism”:
I wrote this down recently and I’m thinking about it as a name for a book; if not the name for a book, this is definitely something that we have to at least get in our thinking. So let me throw out the thought that I had here, this is just throwing out the title for a book:
When tolerance is a sin and hate is a virtue.
I throw that out because we’re getting to the point where tolerance is a bad thing and hate is a good thing. And let me define that: we’re told in, I believe it’s Proverbs 4:13, it says “the fear of the Lord is to hate evil.” Which means that if I’m going to stand for what God stands for, there’s some certain things I have to hate: I have to hate evil, I have to hate murder – well no, you can’t hate, that’s a bad thing … no, hate is a good thing!
I mean hating Nazis, that’s a good thing. And people say “well, you hate their philosophy, you don’t hate the people.” No, I hate people who want to kill other people and I’m sorry that they’re killing others but the guys who were on the Nazi trials at the end, I’m sorry, I just hate what they did. Alright, I love them as a person, yes Jesus died for them, I understand, but I hate certain things.
So we’ve got to get to the point where tolerance is seen as a sin because we’re tolerating a lot stuff that destroys our families, that destroys our own character and we can’t tolerate that stuff. We have to get back to the point where hate is a virtue, at least certain kinds of hate. The fear of the Lord is to hate evil and we need to have a hatred of things and get off this fence of having no passion about anything. You know, I tolerate anything, I’m not going to have a passion good or bad, I’m not going to hate anything … We just can’t do that and we’ve got to get back to that same type of intolerance, that we’re going to be intolerant of liberalism.
