Ep. 106: Has the US Ever Fought a Just War? R.T. Hadley
===
[00:00:00] Jacob Winograd: War destroys, and not just nations, but souls. My guest today knows that better than anyone. A 20 year Air Force veteran who once embraced neo-conservatism. RT Hadley now writes about faith, liberty, and the church’s entanglement with empire. His journey from the control towers in Iraq to then coming back home and wrestling with just war theory is a story of wrestling with not just politics and philosophy, but just what it means to be a patriot and what that, how that relates to our faith and the call of Christ.
[00:00:38] Jacob Winograd: So today we’re going to have a conversation that faces one important question head on. Has a single American war ever been truly just. Or is justice, just one more casualty that no one counts.
[00:00:56] Narrator: If Christ is king, how should the Christian consider the kingdoms of this world? What does the Bible teach us about human authority and what it means to love our neighbors and our enemies before we render unto Caesar?
[00:01:11] Narrator: What is Caesar’s? Let’s know what it means to render unto God. What is God’s? This is the Biblical Anarchy Podcast, the modern, prophetic voice against war and empire.
[00:01:27] Jacob Winograd: Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Biblical Anarchy Podcast, a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute, part of the Christian for Liberty network.
[00:01:35] Jacob Winograd: I am joined today in this episode by writer and veteran RT Hadley. So RT served, as I said, 20 years in the US Air Force, and then when he came home, his focus from his experience switched to questions of faith and liberty and the dangers of empire. Very much influenced by the things that he witnessed and participated in.
[00:01:56] Jacob Winograd: He’s written for both the Libertarian Christian Institute and the Libertarian Institute, and he publishes weekly at his own site, render and resist.com. His new book Wrestles with the uneasy tension between patriotism, just War Theory and the Christian faith. And so obviously as these are all things that I’ve always talked about and talked about in recent episodes of the Biblical Anarchy Podcast, I wanted to have RT on so that we could explore his journey, talk about the things he wrote in his book, and just answer these questions about how the church should respond to and relate to American foreign policy.
[00:02:33] Jacob Winograd: And just broadly speaking, the questions of what role does force and violence and defense play for a Christian? And what is Caesar owed? We’re told to render unto Caesar, what does that mean? What are the implications of that? So this is a very good conversation I had with rt. I am going to switch over to that now, and I hope you enjoy it.
[00:02:54] Jacob Winograd: Well, hello everyone. I am here with RT Hadley, and we’re here to have a conversation about, something that I only talk about once in a great while, the topic of war and foreign policy and US military intervention and all of that from the Christian perspective. But RT is a writer. He’s written for the Libertarian Christian Institute as well as the Libertarian Institute.
[00:03:18] Jacob Winograd: And then I believe you have your own substack as well. But what prompted this conversation is the ebook that you recently wrote titled Render Unto Caesar Unless He Taxes Your Tea. So we’re gonna dive into this ebook and things that, that come up in there. But before that, because it’s your first time on the show, I wanted to give you a chance to just introduce yourself to the audience, your general background, the things that you.
[00:03:44] Jacob Winograd: Write on that you’re passionate about and sort of what your libertarian, origin story is and your 62nd testimonial if you will.
[00:03:51] R.T. Hadley: Alright, so my background is 20 year a US Air Force veteran. And I’ve since retired, but that took me all over the United States to many different churches.
[00:04:02] R.T. Hadley: So, and a lot of people tend to be in one kind of camp reformed or Calvinist or whichever I’ve been to them all. And so I’m like this hodgepodge of Christianity. And, I started writing here because, what was it, a couple years ago, they, the movie came out about Chuck Smith and the Lord started working something in my heart then about revival, and recently started a book.
[00:04:29] R.T. Hadley: I found out that, well, you can’t just write a book anymore. You gotta get an online presence and you have to get some cred. So I started writing towards, a libertarian and Christian goal with the LCI. And then recently I launched my website, render and resist.com, where that’s where I do, I’ve been doing most of my writing now.
[00:04:46] R.T. Hadley: I publish there once a week and that’s where you can get the ebook for free if you subscribe. I learned that from good old Tom Woods, and
[00:04:53] Jacob Winograd: he’s got that down
[00:04:54] R.T. Hadley: to a formula, right? It
[00:04:55] Jacob Winograd: does.
[00:04:55] R.T. Hadley: Yeah. And so there I’m trying to take on issues in the church that have entwined us with politics, just especially Christian nationalism.
[00:05:06] R.T. Hadley: Calling it out directly because, I don’t wanna alienate. But even my most recent thing that I posted there is about how, fat diets are ruining our potlucks. It’s quite a lot that’s there. So then my libertarian, so I didn’t follow the normal path, I didn’t follow the Ron Paul path.
[00:05:23] R.T. Hadley: I, as I mentioned in the ebook and a few things I’ve written, I, to my shame, I was in NeoCon and, when we get into some of the questions I’ll talk about that maybe a little more. ’cause if my military time, and so when Ron Paul came on. I bought hook, line and sinker into it was, the argument was that, oh, Ron Paul’s great on a lot of things, but is he’s an anti interventionalist and never really engaged with it.
[00:05:48] R.T. Hadley: And, I lost out for that. But I think around the time of Obama’s first and second presidency and the conservative candidates that we were getting, McCain and Ney, I was like, wait a second. This isn’t even what I know of conservatism. And then we got, Donald Trump that first time and like, maybe I’m not a conservative anymore.
[00:06:05] R.T. Hadley: And I saw a video.
[00:06:08] R.T. Hadley: And
[00:06:08] R.T. Hadley: it’s the weirdest part, please, to start your libertarian like beginning. But it got me reading Frederick Hayak and, then I started listening to more. I actually, one of the first podcasts I started listening to was a Libertarian Christian podcast, and then Tom Woods and Bob Murphy and Scott Horton.
[00:06:25] R.T. Hadley: And now I listen to Dave Smith way too much, which explains my my anti-war leanings. But yeah that’s kind of my libertarian journey.
[00:06:33] Jacob Winograd: There’s no world where you can listen to Dave Smith too much, in my opinion. I didn’t come the Ron Paul route exactly, but I was introduced to libertarianism mostly by Dave Smith, who was introduced to them by Ron Paul.
[00:06:48] Jacob Winograd: So you could say I’m like a second generation Ron Pollan in that sense, but no good. So that’s a pretty good introduction and background. We’re not here to talk about our Christian upbringings, but I too have a very eclectic experience in my, my my childhood, even young adulthood with different Christian denominations.
[00:07:06] Jacob Winograd: Although I’ve settled on lowercase r Reformed ish Baptist. So, but we’re here to talk about your book Render under Caesar, unless he taxes your tea. Now, as you mentioned in your little bio there [00:07:20] and in your forward to the book as well, war carries a heavy moral weight and you mentioned there.
[00:07:25] Jacob Winograd: And also later in the book towards the end, that your experiences in the military are part of what drove you to try and reconcile what felt like dissonance in your views on the subject of war share As much as you are comfortable sharing of what have your experience and journey influenced your views on war Christian pacifism and the theory of just war and your decision to write this book?
[00:07:50] R.T. Hadley: Right. So, we gotta go back to about 2005. It was about three months after my my son was born. I was deployed to Iraq in the Air Force and I’m an air traffic controller, so it’s not like I was on the front lines but we took. We took rocket attacks pretty regularly. I, it was 20 years ago and I still have very vivid memories of, I was in the tower there, but we had a radar facility between the runways where close friends were working and, we watched as a rocket landed, like right next to the building.
[00:08:21] R.T. Hadley: I can remember driving home after a night shift once in the back of the truck and hearing the rocket whistle as it’s coming over top of us. And even, one event I was at a, in a building, that rocket came in, it landed a few yards away from one side of the building, malfunctioned and flew over the other side and exploded.
[00:08:39] R.T. Hadley: And you just, you don’t forget Those kind of things. And even then, I was a Christian. I wasn’t afraid. Maybe gave me my first real understanding of what it meant to have the peace of the Lord, and I wrote about this a little at one of the articles at LCI, but our response on the basis response, the Army would return fire with artillery and that would just, it would river bait into your chest.
[00:09:01] R.T. Hadley: You’d feel it when they’re firing. And I don’t know, it, it was just a hollow echo that there’s just more death and more destruction coming. It wasn’t like you see in the movies. It wasn’t, we weren’t cheering, we weren’t excited. I remember one specific day I was in our common room off work in our building where we sleep and finished up something on the computer, and I thought one of the guys was just playing solitaire over on the table, walked by him to leave the room, and he’s just smacking cards into random piles and just chanting.
[00:09:29] R.T. Hadley: I hate this place. I hate this place. As the, as our artillery is firing and, war destroys. In trying to reconcile that politically. That was, at the time I said I was a NeoCon. Thought we were there liberating the Iraqi people. We were liberating and oppressed people, and I truly believe that, but started to get to me spiritually, like how can we be here and do this and how do I love my enemies that, are seeking my death and I’m seeking their death?
[00:09:56] R.T. Hadley: Maybe not directly, I’m helping planes land that they’re bringing munitions that are going off and fighting this war. And, we destroyed a country is what we did. And I didn’t know that then I thought, like I said, I thought we were doing the right thing, but then went through in my libertarian journey, like I just said, and Tom Woods, Dave Smith, Scott Horton.
[00:10:15] R.T. Hadley: Well, I started to get exposed to the lies. You know what, we were really there for the I’m not gonna try and be Scott Horton. He’s got all the details and I, I’m sure you’ve been through his books, so
[00:10:26] Jacob Winograd: Yeah. There’s somewhere behind me on the, I have provoked right, right there. And I know enough already is a, yeah.
[00:10:32] Jacob Winograd: Prominently displayed. Oh yeah, it’s right. Yeah, it’s right. It’s literally right behind me. Yeah. I’m covering it up with my big head.
[00:10:37] R.T. Hadley: Yeah. Scripture calls us to mourn evil. And at the time, like neocons who even, I don’t know, profess Christian, or at least I thought it was a Christian political ideology they wrote columns that celebrated the collapse of Baghdad as magnificent.
[00:10:51] R.T. Hadley: They framed the destruction of civilian buildings as moral clarity. It was a celebration of suffering. Masing masquerading its righteousness. I think that’s, I mean, that’s it. That’s, I mean, war is awful and it’s destructive. And even if we were there for that just reason of liberating and oppressed people it’s a tough thing to carry.
[00:11:13] Jacob Winograd: Yeah. Unfortunately your story is, I mean, there’s some unique elements to your story just from what your position is, and yet there’s also. A familiar ring to it. ’cause I’ve listened to and talked to a lot of Iraq war veterans and there, there is just it’s tough to talk about these things because as Ron Paul knows Well, and those who were in the Ron Paul political campaigns know, well, it’s easy to get accused of hating the troops just as much as people will say, you, you hate America, you must love the terrorists.
[00:11:43] Jacob Winograd: And I don’t hate the troops. Like, I think a lot of people signed up because they had this, sort of like noble passion to serve their nation, to defend people to, you, like, there’s something I think knowable about people who say, I have a specific skillset or a specific strength that I can use to, fight for people and defend people who perhaps can’t defend themselves.
[00:12:09] Jacob Winograd: Or even if they could, like I, I want to be the person who. Stands between the innocent and evil, and it’s like, why would I demonize people for having that desired? I’m sure there’s people who perhaps joined for less noble reasons, but I think like for the most part, when I think about like young people at my church who, graduate and join the military, I mean, they’re not doing it because they’re hoping to go overseas and, participate in evil.
[00:12:33] Jacob Winograd: They don’t know what they’re, if they’re gonna be deployed overseas, like they, they probably don’t even, if they were told you’re going to Iran or to Iraq or to Syria, or, I mean, they couldn’t point these places out on a map, let alone tell you much about these places and be able to have fully formed opinions on the geopolitics of the time.
[00:12:51] Jacob Winograd: But those who command our military, both the politicians in DC and the generals and whatnot, and in the highest places of command. Those I have a little bit more, I guess, contempt or, yeah. Or ire for, because they’re the ones who are selling these, these lies that, I mean, when you, when I did an episode recently, I think this was episode 101 or 102, entitled is America the Bad Guy?
[00:13:15] Jacob Winograd: And I, in this one section I tallied up the deaths of each one of the terror wars, of the wars that we fought after nine 11. And I mean, there’s, and with each one, you have to calculate not only the direct, combatant, and skirmish deaths, but you have to consider those who died from, starvation or disease or the secondary, impacts of occupation and war.
[00:13:38] Jacob Winograd: And, I mean, and the for, for the entirety of the entire terror wars. I mean, I think the death count is. And, there’s ranges, right? But I think the low end, it’s in like the mid hundreds of thousands and on the high end it’s in, up over a billion in terms of just total amount of deaths that can be directly and indirectly attributed to American intervention since 2000 September 11th, 2001.
[00:14:02] Jacob Winograd: And that’s an arbitrary cutoff line because we’ve been in the Middle East since even before 2001. Long time. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:14:09] R.T. Hadley: So yeah, that and so, my struggle with just war theory, it comes from that time of being there and being, so the ebook was actually kind of, it was me working that out.
[00:14:20] R.T. Hadley: It was my own project of wrestling with patriotism, faith, and war. I was, even when I was NeoCon, I. The biggest patriot. I mean, I did join the military, but let’s be honest, that started out for the money for college. It was a great incentive. And, as flawed as our country is, I do love it.
[00:14:37] R.T. Hadley: And I was willing to defend the country [00:14:40] and
[00:14:40] Jacob Winograd: yeah. So, one of the things you do in your book, which makes sense, I’m doing this in my own way in, in a book that I’m writing, but, it, I think anyone who goes through some sort of like, libertarian or libertarian adjacent or anti-war, anything where you question the official narrative on, on, on war and the American presence on the foreign stage, you end up going back to the early church and studying, as close to the source of the apostles as you can and the time Jesus was walking the earth.
[00:15:09] Jacob Winograd: And there, there’s certainly this. In the first 300 years. This, I don’t know that, I don’t always like going back into antiquity and taking modern labels and attributing them to groups of people. And so, I tend to say, not that they were pacifists, but they were certainly by modern standards, pacifistic and their writings and in their lifestyles.
[00:15:29] Jacob Winograd: This was somewhat, you could argue perhaps like a by necessity, because they were just so heavily persecuted and they had no hope of winning against the Roman Empire by conventional means. But they were winning by just the persecution not working. And the church just grew and spread across all the, nations and ethnicities within the Roman Empire.
[00:15:49] Jacob Winograd: But then after Christianity, was no longer actively persecuted by Rome, some Christians began to justify. Some d different types of state violence or military action on and just government in general on behalf of Christian interests. And this of course included war Now, Augustine, or, my God, I just combine the two different pronunciations.
[00:16:10] Jacob Winograd: Augustine, yes I sometimes I do it both ways ’cause I don’t actually know if there’s one right way. So sometimes I say Augustine and sometimes I say Augustine just depends on how I feel that day. But Augustine then comes in and I think most scholars who read and study Augustine would agree that he’s kind of trying to find a way to resolve this tension where perhaps we can say yes to the use of force and including war, but that there needs to be a restraining to this and that we can’t just fully trans, transform Christianity into a religion of empire, but rather there have to be.
[00:16:44] Jacob Winograd: There has to be a distinction for when we use war, that war should be used to restrain violence rather than unleash it. He wrote about this, of course, in City of God most prominently. So can you explain, Augustine’s writings here regarding war and just war and, sort of what the distinctions he made were?
[00:17:04] R.T. Hadley: So, from the research that, that I did, like, Augustine, he found his faith and the time frame about when Rome was being attacked and, well, I mean, it wasn’t that far from Christianity being legalized and recognized and those who weren’t Christians wanted to blame the.
[00:17:22] R.T. Hadley: The Christians, these, and again, like you said, we’re using a modern term, but the pacifist and didn’t wanna fight, and we’re gonna put the blame on these Christians. And so he wrote to try and, determine from scripture, determine from God’s war how Christians could justly fight in defense of their country.
[00:17:41] R.T. Hadley: The city of God was a struggle between understanding the two kingdoms and how they work the city of man and the city of God. Living in the world, but not being of it, and what he laid out was good, he gave us a starting point and later, and we’ll talk about it more, where Aquinas expanded, just, gave us framework.
[00:17:59] R.T. Hadley: Just war theory was still used to justify things like the crusades and persecute heretics. And we know that’s not from God, but it’s valuable to us. Even I think outside of war. I think it, it helps us in the culture war, in our politics like Augustine struggle, cause we have a voice here in, in the United States in our democracy.
[00:18:19] R.T. Hadley: And that’s unique. We can vote, we can advocate, we can write lobby, we can even campaign or run for office. And that civic voice it’s not a, it’s not a bad thing. I know six of one, half dozen of the other libertarians are completely abstain from voting or, it’s okay to vote, but.
[00:18:36] R.T. Hadley: But with that voice, we know from scripture that a voice without love is a clanging symbol. So, so we can learn, from Augustine how we can be a part in the world and not trade our submission to Jesus for control or, without love. That’s really how we get to Christian nationalism and it damages our Christian witness.
[00:18:57] R.T. Hadley: And we see that, in the article that I wrote on LCI about the White House Face Office, faith office, I talk about where there’s an incident where White House Faith office directives or influence or however you wanna look at it, led to the death of a Lebanese man, a military strike in Lebanon in defense of Christians and I dunno is that what we want as our witness?
[00:19:21] R.T. Hadley: And you look at our history, Christians with probably with good intentions, we, they brought us prohibition at a Catholic immigration laws, native American assimilation programs which are just gross. And so when we let the gospel get drafted into domestic and for foreign policy, we forget, Jesus’s savior in the church and we treat our national flourish.
[00:19:41] R.T. Hadley: Flourishing is spiritual victory.
[00:19:43] Jacob Winograd: Yeah. I mean, one of John MacArthur recently passed and he’s someone, so because I come from a reformed influenced position, there are certain times more often than not, where I think MacArthur did not. Represent the best of reformed faith and philosophy and things like that.
[00:20:02] Jacob Winograd: And he sometimes had, I think it’s like a referred to as like an antinomianism sort of view of grace, which I think is not the reformed position. But that doesn’t mean to, John MacArthur was also, I mean, he was like one of the most famous Christian pastors. He was really good during the lockdowns.
[00:20:19] Jacob Winograd: And he has this quote, which I’ve been, in honor of his passing, I’ve been trying to re popularize, which is he said, when the church gets political, sinners become the enemy instead of the mission field. Which I think is kind of what you’re alluding to, that when we pull love out of it, and when we’re guided solely by, political interests and, national interests and not.
[00:20:42] Jacob Winograd: Kingdom interests. Right. Christ in his kingdom and bringing that down on earth we tend to get things backwards, kind of like Paul alluded to, and I know it’s one Corinthians I think it’s 12 or 13, I forget where the, it’s somewhere in those two chapters because I know that the end of 12 rolls into 13 there.
[00:20:59] Jacob Winograd: But yeah, no, I think there, there’s certainly, and you, so you brought up Aquinas then, who then takes a lot of what Augustine is writing and then develops this more. And I also recently, well not to say recently, a few months ago, wrote an article responding to James Lindsay and I kind of went through this much, much more.
[00:21:19] Jacob Winograd: Briefly than you do in your ebook the different principles of just war, which kind of start with Augustine, but then Aquinas then comes along and sort of, takes that and then bolsters it and adds a little bit more to it. So, what do you think of both of their contributions in terms of the theory of just war, are the most relevant or perhaps the most overlooked for Christians today when they’re evaluating military conflicts?
[00:21:46] R.T. Hadley: So I think from Augustus that the main thing that we wanna take away from him is that he didn’t seek to empower the church like for Holy War. He was trying to protect justice while lamenting its [00:22:00] necessity.
[00:22:00] R.T. Hadley: As our Christian witness in the United States at the Evangelical Church. If we can do better to embrace that, we can, like the early church was looked upon as like, what, why do you hope, against all this persecution, maybe we can bring people to ask us that question.
[00:22:15] R.T. Hadley: And for Aquinas, there’s two pillars that I think are really relevant for the modern wars that, that we’ve been through. And it’s gonna be last resort and discrimination. And I’ll try and pronounce the Latin, but I found like so many different pronunciations online, I, I don’t know if it’s Yu Beum or but is less resort and we should only be.
[00:22:40] R.T. Hadley: Going to war fighting, being defensive when all peaceful avenues have been exhausted. The idea is that violence is a sourful last measure, not a political convenience. And again, I don’t know the state of every modern war, I’m not gonna pretend, but oftentimes, if not always I think we’re really getting that wrong.
[00:23:00] R.T. Hadley: You look at, preemptive strikes as a defense instead of diplomacy. We saw that recently in Iran, not even for the defense of our country, for defense of another country. And
[00:23:11] Jacob Winograd: yeah. Well, I think, to add to that, one of the things that, that Augustine has is a, the war to be just, has to be also waged by like a competent or just authority, right?
[00:23:23] Jacob Winograd: Yes. And, part of that, part of what that would look like would mean. That even if, because I kind of struggle with the whole preemptive war thing. Like if I wanna scale it down to the individual, like I don’t know that you, there are things that people might call preemptive that I don’t know, that I would call preemptive.
[00:23:38] Jacob Winograd: I think you are, you’re not always necessarily, I think in matters of defense forced to wait until the other person literally lands below on you. I think if there’s a credible threat of force that has been issued that seems imminent and that you don’t have a, you, you’ve exhausted like realistic means of deescalating or avoiding the conflict, then I think, like, like, you could, a real clear cut example would be, if you start to pull your firearm out while you’re hurling, threats at me. I don’t need to wait until you’ve actually pulled the trigger to then pull my firearm out and defend myself. But that’s different than like preemptively, like a lot of times the analogy isn’t that when we’re talking about modern warfare, like what happened with Iran was more like, if I saw that you had like, so I’m gonna be really technical here, which you’ll probably get it, but people who don’t know firearms might go over their head, but it’d be like, if I saw you had gun powder and shells and I saw that you had like a lower, and I was like, well, you know what?
[00:24:41] Jacob Winograd: In a few weeks time, he could go get an upper and he could get the primers and the actual bullets and put them together and he would have a weapon. And, he has said before that he really doesn’t like me, and all that. So. I’m now justified to go drop bombs on his house.
[00:24:58] Jacob Winograd: That’s literally what this amounts to. I mean, I, oh, it really is. Yeah. It’s like, because Iran might have had the capability at one point, which really all they had was that a latent nuclear capability, which they were willing to negotiate away. Yeah. Now, if anyone’s going to argue at all that, like the threat was imminent, then that’s part of, I think of what being a just authority means, right.
[00:25:21] Jacob Winograd: Would mean that you go to the international community and go, we acted somewhat swiftly because we had this evidence, and here is the evidence that shows that we had to act now. But that’s not what happened. Like, the opposite of that happened. Like there no evidence has come forth to be like, here’s the evidence that we had to act now.
[00:25:41] Jacob Winograd: In fact, it was like what happened was in the lead up and during this Netanyahu was like, they were. I forget the exact language he used, but like the implication of like they either had or they were about to have. And then immediately afterwards they’re like, oh, they were, back to his never ending cycling through three months to three years away from being able to have,
[00:26:00] R.T. Hadley: yeah.
[00:26:00] R.T. Hadley: I can remember since what, 95, back when I was in high school, hearing how close Iran was to Right. It’s almost silly that they keep using the same argument, and what’s the other one that I would get thrown at me was, well, they chant death to America. It’s like, man, when I was in NeoCon back in my military time, I’d hear things like Newcomb till they glow and hunt them in the dark.
[00:26:19] R.T. Hadley: Like Yeah, turn the, that’s just as bad as turn the Middle East in the glass.
[00:26:23] Jacob Winograd: Yeah, exactly. It’s like, what? Like if we’re like the. The sword that they want to use is one that you’d have to fall on yourself. Yes. When they do that, right. It’s just like the same with the, well, they sponsor terrorists.
[00:26:37] Jacob Winograd: It’s like, okay. So if is the standard that any government that sponsors terrorism is illegitimate and you can justify regime change. ’cause that doesn’t bode well for America or for Israel for that matter. So there’s just a lot of double standards and inconsistency. And so that, that’s why that whole idea of like a just authority as well as Yeah, that just cause Yeah.
[00:27:00] Jacob Winograd: Is really,
[00:27:01] R.T. Hadley: important. Important. Yeah. Yeah. And if, we look at like the other conflicts like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. Look at how quickly we got into them and, we exited them on absolute mess. Like you, you’re telling me there wasn’t more room for diplomacy? I can’t remember for certain.
[00:27:16] R.T. Hadley: So, I’m sure the internet will crucify me if I get this wrong, but I believe at one point Afghanistan was willing to turn over bin Laden to the United States and we still invaded them. Is that. Is that exhausting all possible peaceful outcomes? No. And the other one that I was talking about was with discrimination, juice and bellow moral clarity and targets.
[00:27:38] R.T. Hadley: That we’re only hitting combatants immunity for civilians and like counting the civilian death is collateral damage. It’s, I mean, it’s unnecessary and it’s kind of cool that, like, I didn’t even realize that today that we’re recording is the anniversary date of us dropping the bombs on Yes.
[00:27:56] R.T. Hadley: Oshima and Nagasaki. And I’m sure you probably saw Scott Horton’s quote on that and like, or his tweet on there that he put out. It’s just a quote after quote from Dwight d Eisenhower. Herbert Hoover, Norman Cousins like. All talking about how we didn’t need to drop those bombs that Japan was getting ready to talk and, so we violated the first pillar that, that I was talking about last resort, and then discrimination.
[00:28:22] R.T. Hadley: I mean, we destroyed tens of thousands of lives, homes, schools, temples aren’t military targets, and when we fall into these things as Christians and we support these wars I think our witness suffers. Like I talked about in the ebook, the, and I’m probably saying it wrong, but the Moravian missionaries, like during the Revolutionary War in the United States, feared that the revolution was gonna harm their witness.
[00:28:46] R.T. Hadley: And so they wanted to remain neutral in it. And the real credibility is to our pro-life argument here, we’re willing to. It what is fine if we kill babies as long as they don’t look like us. I mean, I know that’s a harsh way to put it, but
[00:29:00] Jacob Winograd: Yeah. Well, I mean, it’s like the pro-life argument consistently is that a baby is a baby no matter if it’s in the womb of a woman or if it’s in the Gaza Strip.
[00:29:12] Jacob Winograd: Yeah. That’s just what I’ve been saying lately. Like we don’t, like a baby is a baby, whether it’s, three inches to the, to one direction or [00:29:20] another of a woman’s womb or the border between Israel and Gaza. It’s a human life. Absolutely.
[00:29:25] R.T. Hadley: And so, and like, so taking both Augustus and Aquinas, just for theories, like, like where I come to my position from having been through war and stuff is that I, I think that theory is useful but it’s incomplete.
[00:29:38] R.T. Hadley: We also need. To pair that with revival and just crucified love so that we’re not justifying violence but protecting a sacred ground. Having the right posture, a posture of mourning.
[00:29:49] Jacob Winograd: Yeah. I mean, so you brought up the American Revolution there, which is also talked about in your book.
[00:29:54] Jacob Winograd: And this is something I, in, in my episode I did recently on this, I sort of punted on it because I was just, I didn’t have enough time and but I cited the one person I know who most famously who’s talked about this is Brian Kaplan makes a case for, he, he goes the whole way as to say that the American Revolution was not necessary or justified.
[00:30:12] Jacob Winograd: Now, you quote Jonathan Mayo claim that, resistance to tyrants is obedience to God. So there’s, just like many things, right? There are Christians on both sides of this argument. So, what are your thoughts about what was truly. Motivating the American Revolution, because I think, and again, this is like, I guess like maybe kind of a third rail of sorts to talk about.
[00:30:36] Jacob Winograd: Yes. I’m hoping my audience is, those who aren’t libertarian, or at least like, not totally caught off guard by this kind of question at this point, over a hundred episodes in. But if you’re new here, I mean, like neither one of us are, anti-American leftists who are going around like burning flags or anything weird like that.
[00:30:56] Jacob Winograd: There are things, the way I put it is that, my, my citizenship, my identity is in Christ, but that doesn’t mean that I have to hate America. It just means that I have to judge America, by not through some kind of. Lens that I’ve just been given to interpret America by.
[00:31:12] Jacob Winograd: I like if we’re gonna have something called patriotism, like I think part of being a patriot means that you want your country, especially if you’re a Christian, right? Like you want your country, your nation, to be a force for good that honors God. Yes. Right. That reflects the character of Christ.
[00:31:29] Jacob Winograd: And we, to be a patriot means that like, just like I think anyone listening to this would agree that we have to go and do reckoning, hard reckoning with America’s history, with slavery and the Native Americans. Heck during World War ii there was the Japanese internment camps. Like there are dark marks in the American history books that are already mainstream in terms of like, we’re allowed to talk about these and realize that like America in these instances was far from perfect and in some cases was.
[00:32:00] Jacob Winograd: Progenitor of evil and, anti-Christian values. Yes. So when we talk about the American Revolution, and I’ll hand this over to you ’cause I think you do a really good job in your book as far as you, you go talking about it at laying out how it’s very nuanced in terms of how there were perhaps justifications for the revolution, but that those justifications weren’t necessarily all that was at play there.
[00:32:25] Jacob Winograd: So if you wanna go ahead and speak to that, I think that would be really informative.
[00:32:29] R.T. Hadley: Yeah. And so, I, in the chapter that, that where I talk about the revolution, I talk about a little bit at the beginning of the book, but then I come back to it, circle back to it. I wasn’t trying to argue one way or the other.
[00:32:40] R.T. Hadley: Well, whether the war was just, or not just or whether the. It meets the standard of Romans 13 or, but I wanted to wrestle with it and I wanted to help other people to wrestle with it. I wanted to steal, man, each side of that debate. And, even from people at the time not just looking back on it, but what were the churches at the time saying about it?
[00:33:02] R.T. Hadley: And yeah, a lot of where we get, or where maybe groups like wall builders or whichever get the the idea that this was Sacred Rebellion is from May Hughes sermon, a discourse concerning unlimited submission and non-resistance to the higher powers. I,
[00:33:19] R.T. Hadley: You try to take Romans 13 and like you mentioned, that tyrants are not ministers of God, but agents of injustice. If they’re not doing their God ordained role to punish evil, then they need to be overthrown, that it’s divine justice for us to overthrow them. And in the book I compare King George to Herod, when, Paul wrote Romans 13, like you, if someone can argue that King George is worse than Herod, I’d like to hear that argument.
[00:33:45] R.T. Hadley: Yeah.
[00:33:45] Jacob Winograd: You have these really, just for those who are you? I don’t I probably won’t have time to do this but for anyone watching or listening, if you go into the book, he actually has graphs at several points in the ebook that kind of like go point by point. Like just comparing on multiple issues, the, the Roman or Jewish leaders to the apostles lived under to.
[00:34:04] Jacob Winograd: King George and it, you could also, I think, do a similar comparison to now, but
[00:34:09] R.T. Hadley: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think when I I got your questions ahead of time, like, like that was one of the things I was like, well, how do I bring up that? What we’re under today? Like, is this far worse than what the college is like?
[00:34:22] R.T. Hadley: Right. We’re under Yeah. But
[00:34:24] Jacob Winograd: now that can cut both ways because I could cut in the direction of people saying like, well, we definitely need to just do 1776 all over again. But that’s not actually the attitude of even your most, like, general, like, free market, conservative Republican voter is generally like, maybe they might say it in jest, but like, they’re not really like, are like, like even the people who were, like, even the people that were there.
[00:34:47] Jacob Winograd: The infamous insurrection of January 6th. They weren’t like legitimately looking to like, rage some insurrection and overthrow the government and install a new one. I mean, it’s just,
[00:34:57] R.T. Hadley: if that was an insurrection, it was the saddest insurrection in the history of, but yeah, so, so you kind of asked about the motivations of the war and Patriots in the colonies saw themselves as like the new Israel escaping Pharaoh’s tyranny.
[00:35:13] R.T. Hadley: Some of the other church leaders instead using Romans 13 would speak from Exodus or Gideon, and even Revelation to stir resistance and frame war as a sacred calling, but, economics were a real thing too, like. Like we’ve all read like about taxation without representation, the trade restrictions, the centralized imperial control.
[00:35:34] R.T. Hadley: Those are very real things. But I think that those economic things were the spark and then the church leaders of the time came along and kind of blessed that, that spark that fire with moral absolution, absolving people of just, of their I’m missing the word here, but they, the violent the stuff that went on was, he went.
[00:35:54] R.T. Hadley: There were British soldiers or not, sorry, not soldiers, but British loyalists who were tarred and feathered. They persecuted, yeah. Not who wanted to remain neutral, not even support the crown. Just, I examples of
[00:36:07] Jacob Winograd: not good examples of loving your neighbor or your enemy to tar and feather them as much as I know, like the libertarians listening, might have some kind of, like affinity to tar and feathering tax collectors.
[00:36:18] Jacob Winograd: But as Christians, we could agree that an authority is unjust in what they’re doing, but it’s at least like, I don’t know if that’s the right way to resist them. Yeah. If you even have a right to like you, sure. You might have a right to resist them, but I don’t know that tar and feathering is the justified response.
[00:36:33] Jacob Winograd: Yeah.
[00:36:33] R.T. Hadley: And either way how you look at the revolution. Even if it was flawed, what was birth thought of? It is [00:36:40] definitely, it’s something unique that allowed the gospel message to flourish. We have open pulpits, we have choice over coercion, the idea of no king, but Christ exists in our country.
[00:36:50] R.T. Hadley: We can preach, we can gather, we can serve and it, but it’s different from, Constantine’s Rome where Imperial favor laid that out. It’s through liberty and, wrong or right. The revolution is led to something that’s, it’s pretty cool. It’s not our perfect libertarian utopia, but we’re doing okay.
[00:37:08] Jacob Winograd: Yeah. I think it’s it’s possible to have a nuanced conversation about the founding of America and point out, parts of it that were probably, justifiable and understandable and maybe other ones where. There’s some question marks about, how consistent the, the application of some of those principles were and what other motivations might have been at hand.
[00:37:27] Jacob Winograd: But you can do that and not, like hate America throughout its history and or even today. Yeah. So I think that’s possible. So, I, I wanna ask about, we sketched through some different times of history in a rather rapid fashion here.
[00:37:42] Jacob Winograd: Romans 13 ends with, after the famous, first seven verses about submitting to governing authorities for their ministers of God. It says that, after it says to to pay all to whom that you owe them, it says to owe no one anything but to love them. It says that love is the fulfillment of the law.
[00:37:59] Jacob Winograd: We can ask, at a d. Points of history, and even today, what that means in terms of how we look at war and how we look at government, but how do we as Christians today, like faithfully navigate political engagement in general in your view without, compromising spiritual integrity?
[00:38:15] Jacob Winograd: Because it feels like throughout church history, there’s often been, kind of this like flip flop flopping back and forth between, more like retreats. Like you have the early church and then you have later like the Anabaptist who, who kind of just seem to do this like se separation and you can almost say like a version of a two kingdoms approach.
[00:38:35] Jacob Winograd: Then you have others that, see a role for. Faithful political engagement, which I’m sympathetic to, but it seems that’s a hard line to walk without compromising, and I often think like, well, if you can only serve two masters, is it possible to faithfully serve in, in government and be a Christian?
[00:38:53] Jacob Winograd: I, that’s one of those, as you’ve wrestled with war that I have as well, I continue to wrestle with this subject and I’ve spent time in politics and the Libertarian Party and the Mees Caucus and other organizations. But what are your thoughts on that in terms of how we, how we kind of like reconcile or balance this sort of tension?
[00:39:09] R.T. Hadley: So, that’s, it’s a really hard question and I think it’s gonna look a lot different to each individual person. And that’s, I think you’ll probably find even in the ebook or in some of my other writing where. I don’t often offer a call to action because I wanna be really careful not to be the Holy Spirit and in what I say or what I write.
[00:39:30] R.T. Hadley: But I wanna illuminate the situation with the word of God. And like, like I do know that God has called me to write, to address the need for the church to pray, prepare for revival and examine our political entanglements. I think one of the first places that it really starts is, as Paul said, determining to know Christ in him crucified.
[00:39:51] R.T. Hadley: That’s something I’ve come to recently, probably in the last three to four months. But, we get all these adjectives onto our Christianity. I’m a conservative Christian, progressive. I’m a Calvin. For a long time I called myself a libertarian Christian and I’ve tried to make it a point to separate that I’m a Christian and I’m a libertarian as two separate things.
[00:40:11] R.T. Hadley: I,
[00:40:11] Jacob Winograd: I agree.
[00:40:12] R.T. Hadley: And I think that’s part of our first step. And then, there’s always the argument, does culture flow from politics or politics flow from culture? For us as Christians it doesn’t really matter. Our interactions with culture and politics need the flow from the word of God. And, in some of the, my writing I’m very honest about how as a conservative I was taking my conservative ideals and writing them onto the word of God instead of taking the word of God and examining my politics.
[00:40:40] R.T. Hadley: And so that’s a big step because it’s, when we do that, we, we damage our witness. So, with that I’ll throw another shameless plug for my website render in resist.com or like, I’m trying to address some of those things like idols, estate power. I’m trying to hit on some of the areas in Christian nationalism just from a biblical perspective.
[00:41:00] R.T. Hadley: And I try to steal man the other side as best I can whenever I write.
[00:41:04] Jacob Winograd: Yeah. Well I think my last question here is gonna echo the last question that I just asked you because, in, in the end of your book you kind of hint that perhaps no war, like after we’ve kind of gone through the history and all the principles of just war, that perhaps it’s impossible for any war to actually be perfectly just.
[00:41:24] Jacob Winograd: But does that mean then that we default to pacifism or can there be a sort of like grace for the best attempts that. Humans make towards these things, and we can sort of, at least, we hold up wars and conflicts to those standards and push for, getting as close to them as we can, understanding that human efforts are, fallible on this side of eternity.
[00:41:47] Jacob Winograd: And so I, if you could speak a little bit of to that in terms of your thoughts on that, ’cause I think that’s kind of what you might be indicating in terms of government too, which is that perhaps there is no perfect way to, with any of this, whether we’re navigating a lot of stuff that my my pastor and I talk a lot about this, and he uses this term that it’s just, it gets too muddy.
[00:42:06] Jacob Winograd: Like, we’ll get to a point in our conversations where we just hit a point where he’s just like, it’s just like he agrees with the principles that, like I talk about, but then when it comes to application and modern conflicts, he’s like, it’s just so muddy. And I don’t know how to give a definitive stance, which I, I guess I understand that.
[00:42:21] Jacob Winograd: But I, I feel like even in the, instances where it can be, tumultuous and there’s a lot of conflicting narratives or whatnot, we have to press on and just sort of do our best and hope to be guided by the Holy Spirit to some extent. And also I think to, defer to, I guess like the experts to, so to speak in terms of like the, the Scott Hortons of the world, the Dave Smith, the Tom Woods, like yeah.
[00:42:45] Jacob Winograd: There’s a specialized knowledge here, right? Like where there’s people who do a lot of work to study these particular conflicts and then give us more insight. But what are your thoughts in terms of all this, in, in terms of the, if, can any war be perfectly just, and if not, where does that leave us?
[00:43:01] R.T. Hadley: So. I’ll start by saying I think it’s possible. And then I’m not a pacifist. I know that, but after my wife finished reading the book, she put it down and she said, are you a pacifist? So I’m not surprised by the question, but like, I do always say that, like, I think I would certainly lose any argument.
[00:43:19] R.T. Hadley: I, I wouldn’t be able to debate a Christian pacifist very well. I mean, they have a strong case just for Yeah, it’s possible. I mean, we know that, that.
[00:43:28] R.T. Hadley: Sent them to deal with spiritual corruption that was threatening the covenant witness of Israel, and Joshua and judges. The point of God sending Israel a war wasn’t conquest or genocide, it was consecration. It was keeping worship pure for him, so that Israel could show us through the history of the Old Testament that we need something more than the law and bear the Messiah.
[00:43:53] R.T. Hadley: So, yeah. So it’s possible. I think the important part for us as Christians is when we talk about war, when we’re [00:44:00] discussing it, when it comes up and just in our lives is that posture matters. In the last chapter, I argue that a war may be just by principle, but unjust by posture.
[00:44:10] R.T. Hadley: We need that. That revival attitude of something powerful, reawakening the church of that covenant humility and love for our enemies. Otherwise, even a just war to defend our country is gonna become an idol.
[00:44:23] Jacob Winograd: Yeah. Well, and the like, one, one of those principle who were talking about earlier, the the juice there, there was the ad beum, the in bellow, but then there’s also postbellum, and I think that’s part of this too, like the posture, like I think regardless of the lead up of what led to October 7th, that technically Israel would be just as a nation, as a go, as a government, as a military to go after the, the Hamas militants who killed innocent people.
[00:44:51] Jacob Winograd: Certainly. Yeah. But if, I think what’s been clear though is that their posture isn’t just, well, there. Some evil people from this area called Gaza came across and killed innocent people, and we’re going to deliver justice to them and get the hostages out, and then work towards a long-term peace with our Palestinian neighbors and Gaza and, resolve this ongoing conflict.
[00:45:12] Jacob Winograd: It’s been the opposite. It’s been to use October 7th and the hostages as an ongoing justification for more war and to expand that war to more neighbors, including Syria and Iran. And so, and I think even Jordan, again, there’s a couple others caught the little skirmishes as well. So it’s not, like I, I think that’s part of the problem with all this is that like, it’s possible, but just like once government gets a little bit beyond that night watchman state, it quickly goes downhill.
[00:45:42] Jacob Winograd: It’s like. The longer a war goes on, the less likely. I think it’s just, you know what I mean? Like for me, it seemed like it, like, not to say that Short wars are always just because I don’t think the Gulf War is a good example of a just war either, but at least like, when you’re ranking, like what’s bad about the Gulf War is really the the subsequent sanctions and bombings that came afterwards.
[00:46:04] Jacob Winograd: Not, like the small operation in which not many people died. Like after nine 11, America could have gone in quickly and taken out Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden and then, pulled out that, that would’ve been, that would’ve been better. Right? Like, even if it’s not perfect, like we just like say like, small efforts to proportionally deal with things is better than what we have in the status quo.
[00:46:26] Jacob Winograd: But yeah, and it’s funny you brought up the pacifist debate thing. I actually debated our resident pacifist here at LCI, Cody Cook a while back, so I’ll have to send that to you to watch. You can let me know if I if you think I won or not in that debate, but I’m often confused also as a pacifist, even though I’m not a pacifist.
[00:46:43] Jacob Winograd: But I mean, I think, but part of that posture though, like, I don’t think maybe you would agree with me on this. I don’t think we as Christians should ever be happy to go to war or to use violence. Should be, it should be like the absolute last resort. And we should be looking to, as quickly and immediately and as powerfully as possible and the violence and immediately move on to healing and restoration, whether that’s like individual acts of criminality or large scale war.
[00:47:10] Jacob Winograd: I think it’s, to me, my observation is that much of the Christian Church on the west has been their thoughts and energy toward war have been co-opted by, a sort of imperial American, dominance on the world stage, American hegemony attitude and not a Christ-like attitude.
[00:47:28] Jacob Winograd: And I don’t think that if Christ is king, I think that includes being king over our political views.
[00:47:33] R.T. Hadley: Yes.
[00:47:33] Jacob Winograd: I don’t think that’s a separate category of human society and existence. So, RT, I wanna give you the last word there to respond to anything I said, or just any closing thoughts you want to give on anything we’ve talked about and your sort of closing remarks on the book, as well as maybe a final plug for people to read it once they’re done.
[00:47:53] Jacob Winograd: Done listening to this.
[00:47:54] R.T. Hadley: So I think I just wanna reinforce your last point there where you talked about, preserving the empire because when you sent me the questions like, that was kind of my my, my answer to this final question is when we as Christians are called to support war, like there’s some questions we need to ask.
[00:48:10] R.T. Hadley: Are we fighting to defend? Are we fighting to protect? Or are we fighting to preserve empire? Are we loving our neighbor, our enemy, even as we fight? And the big question is, are we prepared to lose culturally, to remain faithful spiritually? That’s kind of a question that probably started all of these projects.
[00:48:28] R.T. Hadley: And that’s the book I’m writing with a pastor friend of mine, which is called The Sky Isn’t Falling and we’re trying to. Call Christians away from that fear response to cultural changes and rein them to love to build bridges and pray and preach for revival. And that’s really, where my heart and all this is that we’re just called the church back to something greater.
[00:48:50] Jacob Winograd: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think a lot of these things can have nuance, and I don’t think that we have to be, as Christians unsympathetic to material and, to like tangible concerns that people have about safety and defense and even culture. But I 100% agree that those, as a Christian, we have to learn to.
[00:49:10] Jacob Winograd: Not make those the primary things that drive us, especially if they’re driving us in a fearful way. Like, yes, you can have questions about should we have totally open borders and allow anyone to come here. Couldn’t that affect the culture? Yeah. It very well could. What are you gonna do about it?
[00:49:26] Jacob Winograd: Yeah. Are you going to, like, are you going to respond to that fear in a Christ-like way or an unc Christ-like way? And yes. That’s kind of been where, ’cause I don’t know where you fall on that issue. ’cause like I, I have some sympathy towards the libertarians who are not for totally open borders, but I think a lot of them have, and including just Christian conservatives, a lot of them have sort of, they, they’ve left the Department of Nuance and just gone to, demonizing their neighbor because he’s an immigrant.
[00:49:53] Jacob Winograd: Oh, absolute. Or because he’s an illegal immigrant, which. I think kind of flies in the face of a lot of what we’re supposed to do as Christians, but that, that, I think that’s, the word of what this conversation was really getting at is that, what identity are we primarily operating in?
[00:50:07] Jacob Winograd: Yes. In these issues in, and as at any point that identity stops being our Christian identity and we’re operating by some other identity, then that’s an area where you’re not fully turned over and surrendered to Christ.
[00:50:19] R.T. Hadley: Yes, absolutely. I don’t see any other way around it. Yeah. That issue of immigration, I, I.
[00:50:23] R.T. Hadley: I hate to hear both sides. I, I listened Dave Smith, so obviously I know the right more closed borders argument and I can agree with both sides completely. But what I can’t abide is, Christian celebrating, what is that Alligator, alligator thing? Yeah, that’s it. Alligator Alcatraz.
[00:50:40] R.T. Hadley: Like, that’s shameful. Yeah. To celebrate that, like, like wherever you are on the issue, like those are people, Yeah. Some of them refugees, which does this Bible tell us about refugees,
[00:50:49] Jacob Winograd: Yeah.
[00:50:50] R.T. Hadley: Responsibility there.
[00:50:51] Jacob Winograd: What does Jesus say about what we’ve done to the least of these?
[00:50:54] Jacob Winograd: Yes. Right. I mean, the sheep and the goats, it’s one of my favorite passages, and I just think it, it’s too many Christians who I am, I mean. I’m very fearful they’re gonna end up on the wrong side of that division of the sheep and the goats. But that’s in God’s hands. RT, I appreciate this conversation.
[00:51:09] Jacob Winograd: It was greatly edifying to me. I hope it was to our audience, can you go ahead and just remind people where they can find you on your social medias as well as where they can find your, if you have your website [00:51:20] and stuff like that, that you wanna plug as
[00:51:21] R.T. Hadley: well. Sure. Again, it’s render and resist.com, or I write weekly.
[00:51:25] R.T. Hadley: Really easy. Subscribe, verify your email and you’ll get an email kicked out where you can download this free ebook and send it to people once you get it. I don’t care. It’s about getting the message out there. And then I’m on Substack at RT Hadley and I’m on Twitter. The real RT Hadley just social media is a little new to me, so, so forgive me if I do fa pause or whatever, if.
[00:51:48] R.T. Hadley: I shunned it about 20 years ago, and now I have to dip my toe back in that pool.
[00:51:52] Jacob Winograd: Social media is the necessary evil of the day and age. Yeah. Well, rt, again, just really enjoyed your book. Really enjoyed getting to talk to you here, get to know you more, tell, encourage you want to go check out your work as well as the stuff you’ve written for us here at LCI.
[00:52:07] Jacob Winograd: And yeah, that’s all we have for you guys today. So. Live at Peace Live for Christ. Take care.
[00:52:13] Narrator: The Biblical Anarchy Podcast is a part of the Christians for Liberty network, a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute. If you love this podcast, it helps us reach more with a message of freedom when you rate and review us on your favorite podcast apps and share with others.
[00:52:31] Narrator: If you want to support the production of the Biblical Anarchy Podcast, please consider donating to the Libertarian Christian institute@biblicalanarchypodcast.com, where you can also sign up to receive special announcements and resources for related to biblical anarchy. Thanks for tuning in.
), //libertarianchristians.com/wp-content/plugins/smartquizbuilder/includes/images/template6-latest.jpeg))
), https://libertarianchristians.com/wp-content/plugins/smartquizbuilder/includes/images/template6-latest.jpeg))
;?>/smartquizbuilder/includes/images/sqb-registration-img.jpg)
