Ep 374: Deep Insights into Faith & Freedom, with Jim Babka

Doug Stuart: Welcome to another episode of The Libertarian Christian Podcast, a project of The Libertarian Christian Institute and part of the Christians for Liberty Network.

Doug Stuart: I am your host, Doug Stuart.

Doug Stuart: And as you can see, if you’re watching on YouTube, I have Jim Babka with me today.

Doug Stuart: He hosts the podcast, Gracearchy, and is the editor-at-large for the Advocates for Self-Government, the executive producer at Respect America and co-creator of the Zero Aggression Project.

Doug Stuart: He is instrumental in taking a free press lawsuit all the way to the Supreme Court.

Doug Stuart: And he was the press secretary at Harry Brown for president.

Doug Stuart: Hey, Jim, thank you for joining me on this show.

Jim Babka: Glad to be here.

Jim Babka: Really excited about it, actually.

Doug Stuart: Yeah, no, I am too.

Doug Stuart: You and I had a really great conversation that when we got off, my wife was like, you were still on the phone with him for all that time.

Doug Stuart: And I was like, yeah, it was just a great conversation.

Doug Stuart: So we’re gonna hopefully continue that energy on this show.

Doug Stuart: Jim sent me a really long bio because he’s involved in a lot of things and I had to shorten it.

Doug Stuart: But we’re gonna talk a little bit about some of the things that Jim, you’re into.

Doug Stuart: And what I wanna kind of do is let our audience get to know you a little bit beyond what I just said.

Doug Stuart: What’s your origin story?

Doug Stuart: Have you always been a libertarian?

Doug Stuart: How would you describe yourself?

Doug Stuart: Is that a word you would actually use?

Doug Stuart: Give us a little bit of background.

Jim Babka: Okay, so I wasn’t always a libertarian.

Jim Babka: I was born a middle-class Republican child.

Jim Babka: My father was a Goldwater conservative.

Jim Babka: I was a fan of Reagan, although I missed being able to vote for him by just two years.

Jim Babka: And was a member of the College Republicans, ran a conservative student newspaper on campus, was active, did some other campaign work in the Republican side, but became really disgusted after the Republicans won in the House for the first time in 40 years in 1994.

Jim Babka: I realized when they nominated Bob Dole, they didn’t really mean it.

Jim Babka: And I couldn’t bring myself to vote for him.

Jim Babka: And that summer I discovered Harry Brown and that changed my life forever.

Jim Babka: Harry Brown was the 1996 and 2000 candidate.

Jim Babka: I got very involved in the Libertarian Party, became state chair.

Jim Babka: They achieved, thanks to the team that we assembled at that time, we managed to get 70 candidates running statewide, which was a record because we hadn’t had ballot access for 18 years.

Jim Babka: And it’s a record that still stands to this day.

Jim Babka: But I got called to go work on the 2000 campaign.

Jim Babka: I was Harry Brown’s press secretary in 2000.

Doug Stuart: Okay, so when you said you got kind of hooked in 1996, I guess it was, was it just the principals he was talking about that he sounds like a genuine conservative in the sort of the principled way?

Doug Stuart: Like, what was it for you?

Jim Babka: For me, it was, it starts from a position of pain.

Jim Babka: I think a lot of people think that the way to go reach out to people is that maybe they’re looking for people who are a little more centrist in their notions.

Jim Babka: I was actually really pretty conservative.

Jim Babka: I was a Rush Limbaugh ditto head.

Jim Babka: Jack Kemp, who ended up being on that ticket, was a role model of mine.

Jim Babka: I had a poster of him up in my room.

Jim Babka: I was a strange kid.

Doug Stuart: If it were like a decade ago, would it have been a Ron Paul poster?

Jim Babka: Yes, yeah, it would have been the same kind of thing.

Jim Babka: But I really, I was really into supply side economics.

Jim Babka: I really believe that that was going to be kind of a salvation, so to speak, in some ways.

Jim Babka: But I just, I was pro-gun.

Jim Babka: I was pro small government.

Jim Babka: And I recognize that when Bob Dole was picked, they didn’t mean any of it, none of it.

Jim Babka: So I told my friends and it shocked them that I wasn’t going to vote for Bob Dole.

Jim Babka: And they said things to me like, well, you’re gonna elect Bill Clinton.

Jim Babka: And I’m like, well, thank you.

Jim Babka: I didn’t realize I had that much power, but I don’t care.

Jim Babka: I didn’t end up voting for him.

Jim Babka: So I was kind of a person without a party.

Jim Babka: And then the Libertarian Convention came out and Joe Sobran was the first speaker I saw on C-SPAN.

Jim Babka: And I knew who Joe Sobran was, so I watched.

Jim Babka: And then there were a couple others that came on and spoke.

Jim Babka: And I liked everything I was hearing.

Jim Babka: And I kept tuning in right through the morning after Harry was nominated.

Jim Babka: So I don’t know if you ever see when it was cartoons where the creature gets a, suddenly understands something they didn’t know before and a light bulb pops on up over their head, right?

Jim Babka: Oh, I get it.

Jim Babka: My moment happened on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal the morning after Harry was nominated.

Jim Babka: He was asked a question about the war on drugs, which I, being a conservative, was completely in support of.

Jim Babka: And he said, something to the effect of, you don’t see Jim Beam dealers doing drive-by shootings and outlets that sell Jack Daniels.

Jim Babka: And I got it.

Jim Babka: I just instantly got it.

Jim Babka: And he was a candidate that was the best prepared candidate we ever had.

Jim Babka: He looked like he walked out of central casting.

Jim Babka: He did a good job of delivering a radical message.

Jim Babka: He put on a blue suit and a white shirt and a red tie, combed his hair, shaved his face, went out, and actually spoke in calm, rational tones to people about the benefits that they personally, as individuals, would get.

Jim Babka: Always, his language was peppered with the word you, talking about what it would mean to you to have a libertarian America.

Jim Babka: And he made a great libertarian offer.

Jim Babka: He said, would you be willing to give up your favorite federal government program if it meant never having to pay income tax again?

Jim Babka: And it was that kind of level of communication.

Jim Babka: It was the consistency with principle that I was willing to consider the libertarian party for the first time.

Jim Babka: And I became more libertarian.

Jim Babka: Being around libertarians, starting to interact with these ideas, radicalized me.

Doug Stuart: Yeah, okay.

Doug Stuart: And wasn’t it Harry Brown who wrote the, When Will We Learn on 9-12?

Doug Stuart: Or was that somebody else I’m thinking of?

Jim Babka: Yeah, so I’m actually involved in that story.

Jim Babka: So in 2001, after the campaign was over, we had an organization called the American Liberty Foundation.

Jim Babka: And the board held an emergency meeting on that Sunday to hire me to take on a job.

Jim Babka: We had TV ads that we had produced but had not gotten on the air yet.

Jim Babka: And we had no money.

Jim Babka: In fact, we were severely in debt.

Jim Babka: We should have shut our doors.

Jim Babka: My second full business day on the job was 9-11, the 9-11.

Jim Babka: And the day after Harry wrote a column that we subsequently promoted, a series of columns, starting with When Will We Learn.

Jim Babka: So he had talked about this idea that we now are familiar with as blowback.

Jim Babka: This is a term that the CIA has given for the interventions that our government does in our name across the planet that have very negative repercussions in the home places of people who are in foreign lands.

Jim Babka: And some of these people, very, very, very small portion of them, fortunately, an infinitesimal percentage, build up enough resentment that they’re willing to do something pretty dramatic and bad, even at the sacrifice of their own lives or their own fortunes.

Jim Babka: And 9-11 was, to us, an example of foreign policy.

Jim Babka: Come home to Roost.

Jim Babka: Harry had talked about this repeatedly over the years.

Jim Babka: It’s something that he had not hidden, that he believed.

Jim Babka: But it still came as a tremendous shock.

Jim Babka: And not everybody was ready to hear it.

Jim Babka: But When Will We Learn ended up being his most republished article.

Jim Babka: And it kicked off not just one, but a few different series about our foreign policy.

Jim Babka: And he began to shift and want to write a book about that subject.

Jim Babka: He never did complete that book.

Jim Babka: But it became kind of an obsession for him in the last stage of his life to talk about the impact that our foreign policy had internationally on the people in foreign lands and then back home on us, the negative things that it did to our society.

Doug Stuart: Yeah.

Doug Stuart: So in terms of what drives you, what your passion is about him, you’ve shared a handful of things with me, you know, off the air, of course.

Doug Stuart: And I want to give our audience a sense of what drives you.

Doug Stuart: You consider yourself what is called a done, is often kind of paired with the nuns and duns movement or exodus from institutional church or whatever.

Doug Stuart: There are some other foundational beliefs, you know, as a Christian that you hold.

Doug Stuart: Share with us some of the more important things that sort of drive what you do every day.

Jim Babka: So I host a podcast called Gracearchy with Jim Babka, as you mentioned in the intro.

Jim Babka: We are coming up, as I’m talking to you now, we’re just shy of our two-year anniversary.

Jim Babka: I think it will be after, by the time everybody sees this.

Jim Babka: And that’s born out of the fact that as I’ve gotten older and I’ve been involved in politics for as long as I have, I found myself that I’ve kept going deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper, trying to find what the root is of the issues that we’re dealing with.

Jim Babka: And I’m a slow learner, so I’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way trying to learn this, but increasingly I’m driven to a point that I think that what matters is Jesus Christ.

Jim Babka: So full public confession, I am a believer, Jesus is my Savior.

Jim Babka: I believe that it’s my job to imitate and model Him, but I don’t believe that that strength comes from me internally.

Jim Babka: It comes from observation and relationship with Him.

Jim Babka: And growing up as a regular Baptist, and I mean that in like the most steeped-in sense you could possibly mean it, Christian school with chapel and Bible class, Christian radio on the car, the family all the time, occasional Bible devotions at home.

Jim Babka: Every time the church door opened, any youth group activity, I was shuttled there, I was present.

Jim Babka: I mean, it was spoon-fed to me, it’s how I grew up.

Doug Stuart: Do you remember the comedian Mark Lowry?

Jim Babka: No.

Doug Stuart: He was a Christian comedian in the late 80s, early 90s, and he would talk about his parents.

Doug Stuart: He says, if my parents were so Christian, if the painter was painting the sanctuary on a Tuesday afternoon, we would go in there and watch him do it.

Jim Babka: Yes, yes, yes, watch it dry.

Doug Stuart: You and I have a very similar kind of, I mean, it wasn’t that, that’s obviously a humorous exaggeration, but you and I have a similar childhood experience in that regard.

Jim Babka: Yeah, my parents, my father came to faith when I was about four years old, but really took it very, very seriously, and we were a fundamentalist household in belief.

Jim Babka: There’s negative stigma attached to that.

Jim Babka: I’m opposed to fundamentalism.

Jim Babka: I don’t like or agree with it.

Jim Babka: I think it has a lot of bad aspects to it, but I have no regrets about my upbringing.

Jim Babka: I very much recognize, I lost my mother when I was 10, but I very much recognize what my parents were attempting to achieve, and I had an adult relationship with my dad, where I really got to know his heart and who he was as a man, and I’m actually grateful.

Jim Babka: I think he was doing the best he could with the information that he had at the time, and it was because I had that really, really solid foundation that I can leap off into the direction I go now, where I can tell you that I think that there are two things that have not been well understood or emphasized correctly that go to the root of our social issues, and they are things that are missing in Western Protestant Christianity.

Jim Babka: Not that they’re not talked about, not that people aren’t aware of them.

Jim Babka: You can find people who talk about these things.

Jim Babka: You can definitely, most believers would have some awareness of what I’m about to say, but the idea that it’s important, that it gets priority, that it gets coverage, that we go into depth about these things, these things seem very fundamental to me.

Jim Babka: The first is the imago de.

Jim Babka: The fact that we are all made in the image of God.

Jim Babka: That has tremendous, tremendous, huge ramifications.

Jim Babka: It explains an awful lot of what we find in the Scripture in terms of how we’re supposed to relate to each other.

Jim Babka: There should be a fundamental understanding that, number one, you’re a human being, so I have to look at you as an image carrier, image bearer of God.

Jim Babka: And that has certain constraints and certain directions to, gives me certain direction as to how I should interact with you.

Jim Babka: And two, I should also recognize that I’m a human being.

Jim Babka: I’m very human and I’m fallen and have issues that I’m dealing with.

Jim Babka: I’m not perfect.

Jim Babka: And so I want the kind of reciprocity that I want, that I crave, that I desire from other people, I first need to be somebody who’s bringing that kind of light to them.

Jim Babka: And then the second thing would be the Trinity, which I think has been completely overlooked.

Jim Babka: Two important aspects.

Jim Babka: First, the Son of God comes as Jesus and becomes a man.

Jim Babka: And that has anthropological implications that to me are immense and overlooked.

Jim Babka: There is too often an attempt to over-spiritualize that entire thing.

Jim Babka: But second, on a broader basis, just the existence of the Trinity itself, the fact that God is three persons, means that I think that God is relational in nature and that this entire thing is relational.

Jim Babka: And all the Greek categories that we’ve used to kind of philosophize and objectify and place God off at a very strong distance has created a gulf of separation that was not God’s intention.

Jim Babka: I think the intention all along was to create relationship with us and to invite us inside the relationship that is God.

Jim Babka: And that too has really profound implications.

Jim Babka: So I bring both of those things into the libertarian message that I share at GraceArchie.

Doug Stuart: It seems like the Trinity is one of those sort of like checkbox beliefs for a lot of Christians.

Jim Babka: Yes.

Jim Babka: It’s how we know someone’s a heretic, right?

Jim Babka: You don’t believe it, you’re a heretic, right?

Doug Stuart: Right, yeah.

Doug Stuart: So you have that.

Doug Stuart: I mean, I’ve had enough theological background to know that the Trinity sort of undergirds a whole lot of the theology, missional theology, relational theology, and all those kinds of things.

Doug Stuart: So I don’t quite see it as much as a forgotten or not much talked about in some circles, but you are right.

Doug Stuart: It’s definitely a, this is what we do is to define a heretic.

Doug Stuart: The Imago Dei thing.

Jim Babka: Can I just say one thing about that?

Doug Stuart: Oh, sure.

Jim Babka: Where my emphasis lies is on the fact that I think there are a lot of people who understand kind of the spiritual or ethereal or faith based things about God, right?

Jim Babka: They tend to push everything out of the secular realm into kind of this spiritual realm.

Jim Babka: There’s like this dualism and I’m arguing against that dualism.

Jim Babka: I actually think that our bodies matter.

Jim Babka: Our economic practices matter.

Jim Babka: I actually believe the study of economics is a spiritual discourse.

Jim Babka: I believe truth itself, as we’re trying to find it in this world, is a spiritual thing.

Jim Babka: This dichotomy shouldn’t exist.

Jim Babka: Being human is what we’re supposed to be.

Doug Stuart: No, I applaud.

Doug Stuart: I’m with you there.

Doug Stuart: The dualism, I think that we have a lot of dualism.

Doug Stuart: I mean, obviously that comes from, there’s a whole host of reasons why we can talk about why we, as Western Christians, have a dualistic mindset by default.

Doug Stuart: But anyway, I’m aligned with you on that.

Doug Stuart: I was a little surprised that that’s something you feel like the Imago Dei is something that is not often talked about, because I don’t know.

Doug Stuart: To me, it seems like maybe it’s just my church.

Doug Stuart: My church, they talk about this a lot, so maybe it’s just that.

Doug Stuart: What do you feel like is missing that many Christians just misunderstand?

Jim Babka: Okay, well, I’m going to hit a note with a specific concrete that will probably dazzle some and offend others.

Doug Stuart: We’re good with that.

Jim Babka: So, the Declaration of Independence is to me something that we are still aspiring to.

Jim Babka: We haven’t quite touched where that’s at.

Jim Babka: There’s an ideal that’s stated in there, and that is that all men are created equal.

Jim Babka: Okay, well, men persons, you know, put it in modern vernacular.

Doug Stuart: We’re not progressives here, Jim.

Doug Stuart: We understand that men meant people.

Jim Babka: So, created meaning that we are actually the product of something, some other being, and this is important because that’s the Imago Dei being expressed out loud there by a deist, by the way, and then created a specific way, equal, and then endowed with rights follows that.

Jim Babka: That means that your Americanism, your Constitution, the government, none of those things bring you your rights.

Jim Babka: Okay, so far, I’m in pretty safe territory with your audience, with every bit of your audience.

Jim Babka: Okay, nobody’s raising any objections to what I’m saying.

Jim Babka: Here’s where the objection starts to begin.

Jim Babka: That means that people should be able to cross borders freely, period, full stop.

Doug Stuart: Still no objections from me.

Jim Babka: Yeah, well, I do run into people who think, well, you know, maybe while we got welfare, we have to do this or whatever.

Jim Babka: No, full stop, you can’t do that because these people are born, created by God.

Doug Stuart: It’s not conditionally true.

Jim Babka: Yes, it transcends.

Jim Babka: I have a very dim view of the state.

Jim Babka: I see it basically as a criminal gang.

Jim Babka: And on one side of the line exists their cattle that they shear in milk and even occasionally destroy for profit.

Jim Babka: On the other side exists somebody else’s, some other state’s cattle that they shear or destroy as they see fit.

Jim Babka: And the only reason for the lines, the real reason for the lines, is to determine what kind of shearing schedule, what kind of milking schedule is going to go on and how much death is allowed to occur.

Jim Babka: I don’t really see it any different than that.

Jim Babka: So the idea that you would raise your phony baloney lines, there’s a very, very popular website in the movement that constantly confuses the difference between borders and property lines.

Jim Babka: They treat them as if they’re the same thing.

Jim Babka: They’re not.

Jim Babka: Your artificial line that was probably created as a result of some military things at some point in time where somebody successfully conquested the other is not a justification for limiting the created beings.

Jim Babka: This is the most important thing.

Jim Babka: These people are image bearers, image bearers being able to move around and pursue happiness, harmony and prosperity for themselves and their family.

Doug Stuart: Yeah, it seems like the sort of, I want to say a weak defense, like a light defense of having some sort of border, a line drawn is at best only practical in sort of certain ways as opposed to this should help us think about our morals and who to exclude and who actually does this constitution apply to and all that kind of, you know what I mean?

Doug Stuart: Like there’s a moral application of this line that we just sort of draw between you and me or between me and some person with a different skin color or whatever it is, that can only have so much practical value at that point.

Doug Stuart: Beyond that, it’s not morally indicative.

Jim Babka: Correct.

Jim Babka: So I would approach virtually any issue that we could come up with in a very similar fashion.

Jim Babka: You can run a regression on virtually every issue out there against the Imago Day.

Doug Stuart: I’m tempted to want to go down that road with you.

Doug Stuart: I’m trying to think about how much time we have.

Doug Stuart: Let’s do it with one other topic.

Doug Stuart: You okay with that?

Jim Babka: Yeah, go.

Jim Babka: It’s your show.

Doug Stuart: Well, fair, but you know.

Jim Babka: And I could come back if need be.

Jim Babka: I’m actually really honored.

Jim Babka: This is exactly the audience I want to talk to.

Jim Babka: I care about people who have faith and who understand liberty.

Doug Stuart: It would be really fun to have you and Jacob Winograd have a conversation about borders and talk some of that out, because I don’t know if you would agree with what you have to say.

Doug Stuart: I don’t want to call him out.

Doug Stuart: Well, I already did.

Doug Stuart: I just called him out on this.

Doug Stuart: You just did.

Jim Babka: You didn’t want to, but you couldn’t help it.

Doug Stuart: Jim, that’s a criticism of my wife often, Levy.

Doug Stuart: You say you didn’t want to, but you just did.

Jim Babka: You just did.

Jim Babka: It’s cool.

Doug Stuart: I think it would be a very fruitful conversation, because you’re right.

Doug Stuart: In the movement, there’s definitely a border.

Doug Stuart: In the movement, about borders.

Doug Stuart: Let’s talk about property rights.

Doug Stuart: How do you look at something with respect to property rights through the lens of Amago Dei?

Doug Stuart: How does that influence your view on property rights?

Jim Babka: The first thought that comes to my mind is that property rights, a lot of people use this as their way of deciding how to resolve a social setting.

Jim Babka: There’s a whole group of libertarians that use that as the number one tool.

Jim Babka: And I think it’s really an excellent heuristic or ruler, but it only works, let’s say, maybe 97% or 8% of the time.

Jim Babka: And where it breaks down is on issues like what we just discussed, but I’ll give you a theoretical to illustrate my point.

Jim Babka: Let’s say that you had a tic-tac-toe board in front of you and there’s property.

Jim Babka: And on the outside of that property, and all the outside squares are living on their land, are people who don’t like the person that has the center land.

Jim Babka: And they decide that they will cut off all ingress and egress across their property to the person in the middle, either excluding them from being able to get to their property or locking them in.

Jim Babka: I would say that that’s not possible, that’s not right, and there’s an application of property rights.

Jim Babka: It’s theoretical, obviously, but there’s an application of property rights where it doesn’t quite get to the place that we want to get to.

Jim Babka: And this is why I choose Imago Dei.

Doug Stuart: So I can sort of understand that, that there’s some sort of higher rule that the practicality of something like property rights will supersedes or whatever.

Doug Stuart: That is, just to put an extreme retort on it, that sounds like a leftist view of why people hate people like Elon Musk.

Doug Stuart: They’re using their property to exclude people from things.

Doug Stuart: They’re not landlocking them in the sort of illustration that you have, but that is the kind of argument I hear mostly on the left, is that those who actually have property are using it to oppress, I don’t want to use their words in their way per se, but violating the rights of others’ property in ways that are actually still within our understanding of their rights.

Jim Babka: Can you be a tad bit more specific so I can figure out which way to go with this?

Jim Babka: Because there is actually a long common law tradition for hospitality that’s very much drawn from a Judeo-Christian sense.

Jim Babka: So if you were the operator, Doug, of an inn, that you sell lodging services, and let’s say for the sake of example, because the common law actually dealt with this very question, someone’s traveling a long distance and there’s not going to be another lodging place to stay for quite some time, and they’ve arrived at your place.

Jim Babka: And let’s even add just so we can make clear the gravity of the situation, that there’s a storm either brewing or started and this person now comes and seeks lodging.

Jim Babka: But you don’t like them because of their race, their nationality, their gender, their preferences, their religion or creed.

Jim Babka: There’s something about the cut of their jib that you don’t care for.

Jim Babka: And you say, I’m not going to provide lodging to you.

Jim Babka: Well, your business is lodging.

Jim Babka: And in common law terms, that’s not an option.

Jim Babka: You have a business, you’ve hung out a shingle saying, this is what we do, we provide lodging.

Jim Babka: So there actually is a duty that you have voluntarily chosen to serve that person for that particular reason.

Jim Babka: Now you could say, look, we’re not going to make you particularly comfortable here.

Jim Babka: We hope you get back on the road quickly.

Jim Babka: There’s a number of different things you can do.

Jim Babka: But you would not deny them that lodging.

Jim Babka: Now you will notice that this issue is somewhat adjacent to the issue of whether or not you have to make a cake.

Jim Babka: Now there’s an issue here.

Jim Babka: You have a couple that is looking to get married, and they happen to be gay, and they come to a Christian baker, and they say, do you have to make the cake?

Jim Babka: Well, in that particular case, we would be able to determine very quickly that this is not the only cake baker in the area.

Jim Babka: There might be other cake bakers.

Jim Babka: So clearly, this is not a situation where some form of hospitality must be extended.

Jim Babka: Otherwise, life and limb will be harmed in some way.

Jim Babka: And so we could say, well, you know, in fact, I would think we could find a gay cake baker in many cases.

Jim Babka: Like, why wouldn’t you go to them instead?

Jim Babka: It was because they were seeking to provoke something.

Jim Babka: But as a believer, and I have a keen problem with this, if my job is to take up a cross, to love my enemy, to go the extra mile, if it’s all those things, if love is the law, what I should be doing is I should make that cake.

Jim Babka: And if I feel that there’s some kind of moral qualm on my part in participating in that activity, if that ends up being my personal view as a cake baker, then maybe I can give the cake to them for free.

Jim Babka: Maybe I refuse to take some profit off of it.

Jim Babka: Maybe that would be the ethical way to go about that.

Jim Babka: It’s a case where legally, I would have been very much on the side of the cake baker who refused to serve the cake, right?

Jim Babka: The law shouldn’t be interfering there.

Jim Babka: But spiritually, I think that they behave like hateful jerk faces instead of loving believers.

Doug Stuart: Well, I don’t even know if all those particular instances, the refusers, to simplify the word there, were actually being rude or jerks.

Doug Stuart: I read one story where they were like, well, hey, here’s a few other places that we know of that are good and reputable, because I think they had a really good reputation.

Doug Stuart: It wasn’t like they were just like, no, we don’t like your kind.

Doug Stuart: It wasn’t get off my porch kind of.

Jim Babka: It still kind of is, Doug.

Jim Babka: If you say you took your coat and you give them your shirt as well, you’re going to have to carry this burden with the Roman soldier one mile offered to do a second.

Jim Babka: What you’re being asked to do there is to actually be of service to the person that you’ve just assisted.

Jim Babka: You’re actually being asked, and the thing that you’re being asked in that instance is to do your job, the job that you said, this is what I do.

Jim Babka: This is my good in the world.

Jim Babka: And someone comes to you and says, well, this is what I want on a piece of your good in the world.

Jim Babka: And you say, well, no, I’m going to deny that to you because I don’t like how you live.

Jim Babka: That is judging where you should judge not.

Doug Stuart: What about an issue of conscience from that person’s part?

Jim Babka: Your conscience should be tuned to what would Jesus do in that situation.

Doug Stuart: Okay, so they’re not there yet, and therefore they said, well, hey, we’ll politely decline.

Doug Stuart: We’ll find you somebody else.

Jim Babka: And as a libertarian, 100% legal, they can be that person.

Doug Stuart: Sure, I guess I just wouldn’t fault them even from an issue of Christian judgment.

Doug Stuart: I wouldn’t fault them for that approach, as opposed to the, and there are, I’m sure, people out there who are kind of like, well, no, we don’t like you.

Doug Stuart: We’re just going to ignore you and not treat you well.

Doug Stuart: Middle ground in my mind would be what the example I’m using that those people did.

Doug Stuart: I wish I had the case in front of me because we didn’t plan to talk about this.

Doug Stuart: We could have actually pulled that up.

Jim Babka: No, no, we didn’t plan to talk about it.

Jim Babka: These are all edge cases, which is, I guess, the fun part.

Jim Babka: Things that maybe we can find some sense of disagreement on and stir things up.

Jim Babka: But I will go so far as to say that they’re acting in the wrong because I don’t know how much clearer you can be about what our duty is to people who don’t like what we stand for.

Jim Babka: But if you have an opportunity to share whatever it is that you do, like you hung your shingle out and you say, this is what I do to bless the world.

Jim Babka: I serve the world in the following fashion, to deny someone who comes and then says, I want those services because of something about their beliefs.

Jim Babka: You’re denying relationship that you could have.

Jim Babka: You’re denying service that you can render.

Jim Babka: You are not sharing the best of yourself in a way that can minister to the needs of another human being.

Jim Babka: And you don’t know what other opportunities lie on the other side of that door.

Jim Babka: Whether it’s a transformation of them or, and we should be open to this, it’s a transformation of you.

Doug Stuart: Sure, yeah.

Doug Stuart: Let’s do one more objection to that, just because I’m sure our listeners are now awake.

Doug Stuart: Jim, wouldn’t you be promoting sin?

Doug Stuart: Isn’t it true that if you did that, you’re endorsing and promoting either a sinful lifestyle or a sinful whatever, behavior, whatever it is.

Doug Stuart: What is said, something that offends God, something that is a violation of moral expectations?

Jim Babka: What is morality?

Jim Babka: Why does it defend God and what is morality?

Doug Stuart: I don’t know what other people would say, honestly, because I think the line, and this is what I wanted to bring up, the deciding factor in whether or not you’re right versus no, the refuser can sort of in a Christian conscience say, no, I really can’t do this, is whether or not you are seen to be participating in something as sort of an endorsement.

Doug Stuart: Like, is it an endorsement?

Doug Stuart: Are you promoting it?

Doug Stuart: Or is it just simply you are offering your service because that is what you decided to do as an entrepreneur, business owner, et cetera.

Doug Stuart: I tend to lean where you are.

Doug Stuart: I think there might be edge cases where there are types of services that are a little bit different.

Doug Stuart: You could use the example of a Christian counselor who does marriage counseling, but only does it for straight people because of religious conviction.

Doug Stuart: Well, that’s a little different from simply offering a retail service, and so you have different stuff.

Jim Babka: Okay, but the counselor in that setting might have to say something more direct about the relationship that’s there.

Jim Babka: The cake baker would not have anything to say about the relationship.

Jim Babka: It does not interfere with the normal function of their work, and they wouldn’t apply that to a whole variety of other settings.

Doug Stuart: No, I see your point there.

Doug Stuart: Do you agree, though, that the sort of deciding factor is whether or not there is an endorsement component to it?

Jim Babka: No.

Jim Babka: You know, this is where getting into the humanity of Jesus really matters, and I’m very earthy when it comes to this.

Jim Babka: So there’s a scene in Blazing Saddles where all the guys are sitting around in a circle eating beans, right?

Jim Babka: And they start passing gas, right?

Jim Babka: Start making fart noises, start up on the whole thing, right?

Jim Babka: And it’s a funny, funny scene.

Doug Stuart: Now I wish I had my soundboard at my disposal on this show.

Jim Babka: Yes, yes.

Jim Babka: Well, you know, every time I watch that scene, and I’m going to ruin this part of the movie for everybody watching now, every time I see that scene, I think of Jesus hanging out with his disciples because they’re all dudes.

Jim Babka: And we stop thinking about the fact that there’s a dude.

Jim Babka: And are you going to tell me that the entire time that they were hanging out for three years together, they didn’t have a moment like that, you know?

Doug Stuart: Yeah, right.

Jim Babka: Right, Peter, come on, you know?

Jim Babka: So this is kind of an earthy thing.

Jim Babka: Now I’m trying to remember, I brought up this thing, we start laughing and I forget your question.

Doug Stuart: I was talking about the, is the dividing line, whether or not it’s an endorsement, we talk about sin, whether or not you’re endorsing sin or promoting it.

Jim Babka: Yeah, so this dude went to parties, turned water into wine after everybody was already drunk, which is why the statement comes out afterwards, like people serve the best wine first and save the bad stuff for later, because after a while it doesn’t matter as much how it tastes, right?

Jim Babka: It’s those first sips that matter most.

Jim Babka: So this is after everybody’s already kind of, you know, a little bit schnockered.

Jim Babka: He’s hanging out with sinners.

Jim Babka: He’s hanging out with tax collectors even, who were the worst of the worst from that day’s Jewish perspective.

Jim Babka: Do you have enough sinners in your life?

Jim Babka: And do you recognize that you’re a sinner?

Jim Babka: Like, pause for a second.

Jim Babka: This again, this is where I got to recognize that I’m a human being as well.

Jim Babka: So, to me, the anthropology of our faith has not been discussed enough.

Jim Babka: Even in the things that we’re discussing now, you’re starting to see surface where people can get confused.

Doug Stuart: Well, let’s pivot there to the anthropology part, because I think that’s an important component that, and I know you believe that this is sort of a lost or forgotten or maybe neglected area of Christian theology and Christian thinking.

Doug Stuart: I know that you get a lot of anthropology through René Girard.

Doug Stuart: I don’t know if there’s any other influences you want to talk about, but how do you keep the humanity of Jesus as part of how you think beyond just applying it to what we just talked about?

Doug Stuart: Maybe get a bit higher level there and talk about the humanity of Jesus.

Jim Babka: So I’m an open fan of René Girard, and he is a heavy influence on my work, and we’ve done a couple of podcasts, one that I think is the most important one we did ever, not too long ago, talking about the scapegoat mechanism.

Jim Babka: I think René Girard has offered the best anthropological theory for the foundation of both religion and the state, the society.

Jim Babka: And I believe that these events are grounded in sacrifice, and that even a vestige that we have of this is the fact that we have something called religion, which if you break down the word is re-legion, legion is a large band, religion literally means the rebinding of the people, they’re brought back together.

Jim Babka: And the cathartic event that does that is literally the murder of any innocent or innocence, that this sacrificial system exists throughout time in all cultures.

Jim Babka: Joseph Campbell was all wet.

Jim Babka: Carl Jung didn’t quite get it right.

Jim Babka: Rene Girard did.

Jim Babka: And I think that we still are engaged in a culture that is steeped in sacrifice and bloodshed right up to the present hour.

Jim Babka: And we overlook this.

Jim Babka: What causes that?

Jim Babka: Girard had a theory about this, and the theory starts off as a literary theory.

Jim Babka: So it explains some of the greatest works of fiction and myth that exists in our culture.

Jim Babka: And that theory was that it’s triangular in nature.

Jim Babka: There’s an object that two parties desire.

Jim Babka: One has that or seems to be possessing it, and the other wants to imitate.

Jim Babka: And he called this mimesis.

Jim Babka: It was not to be confused with memes, which is a biological concept that’s been applied to putting pictures on the web that get widely shared.

Jim Babka: But mimesis is like imitation.

Jim Babka: You start imitating the other person.

Jim Babka: And this form of mimesis causes people to start to behave very much like one another.

Jim Babka: And that includes in even some of the worst ways because they enter rivalry with one another.

Jim Babka: It’s possible in some cases for the people to be so spaced out or different that only one person, the person who’s doing the imitating is aware of the rivalry.

Jim Babka: But in some cases, they’re actually is, they both are aware and there’s a war going on.

Jim Babka: And what people from the outside notice about these two parties is how much they start to look and seem alike as they escalate towards violence.

Jim Babka: When violence starts to get a little too messy for everybody else, there’s a desire on the part of multiple people, maybe even the people in the conflict themselves, but definitely all the outsiders to see this resolved.

Jim Babka: But each side has a need to save face.

Jim Babka: And the way that they save face is they choose an innocent victim.

Jim Babka: Now, when I use the term innocent, I mean not guilty, like in the court sense.

Jim Babka: They may have had some tiny bit of responsibility for what has just occurred or had played a role in some way.

Jim Babka: We may be able to find some degree of blame, but they are not existentially responsible.

Jim Babka: They are not responsible for the entire event.

Jim Babka: They are not the cause of that entire event.

Jim Babka: But they are deemed guilty and they are destroyed.

Jim Babka: The existence of myth, then, is there to basically cover that lie that this individual was murdered.

Jim Babka: We end up deifying the individuals that were involved in this.

Jim Babka: They become the gods.

Jim Babka: And in that sense, they even offer themselves up as sacrifice.

Jim Babka: They say, you know, choose me and destroy me.

Jim Babka: And we see the vestiges of this in some cultures that still exist to this day that are still very ancient or tribal in their nature.

Jim Babka: But we see these stories being repeated through time.

Jim Babka: What is different about the Bible, and it starts right at the beginning with the story of April, is that we get to hear the victim side of the story.

Jim Babka: They actually get to speak for themselves.

Jim Babka: So Abel’s blood speaks for him when Cain destroys him.

Jim Babka: But more directly and for all time, the final sacrifice was Jesus Christ himself.

Jim Babka: And this is the most heinous thing of all time, because not only was he not responsible for our troubles, he is the most innocent victim that could possibly be construed.

Jim Babka: And this unmasks and destroys this method that we have of making peace.

Jim Babka: No longer can we say, well, it’s okay if we murder others, or we even just today we destroy their characters and take away their jobs and cancel them.

Jim Babka: It’s okay if we do these things because it brought peace.

Jim Babka: And so that’s a good thing.

Jim Babka: No, we can’t do that anymore.

Jim Babka: We have to recognize the victim.

Jim Babka: Our culture then becomes so steeped in the kind of this Christian ethos.

Jim Babka: The fact that Jesus unmasked and the veil was torn from the sacrificial system were so steeped in this that we are like fish that don’t know we’re wet.

Jim Babka: So even people who don’t have any specific connection religiously to Christian practice are still trying to put themselves in the place of the victim.

Jim Babka: Because in our society, the victim actually has a certain degree of power because it is a Christianized culture.

Jim Babka: And so people are now competing in what we even call the victim Olympics to try to make themselves more victim.

Jim Babka: And they’re doing it for the reason of acquiring more power.

Jim Babka: And Girard’s system manages to display that to us too.

Jim Babka: We can see how that’s being used.

Jim Babka: I go around looking to see who is being scapegoated.

Jim Babka: That’s one way that I apply the imago day.

Jim Babka: I want to know who the scapegoat is in a given situation.

Jim Babka: And commonly we find out they’re really not as guilty as everybody’s pretending they are.

Jim Babka: And maybe we should be having a conversation with some of these people.

Doug Stuart: So does this sort of mimetic rivalry explain in some ways why, for at least to the word libertarians, we look at the Democratic and Republican parties as kind of the same thing?

Doug Stuart: Does it help explain that at all?

Jim Babka: Yeah, but it does something even more.

Jim Babka: So libertarians are kind of noted for being kind of somewhere on the spectrum, right?

Jim Babka: They’re not known for their bedside manner or their empathy.

Jim Babka: They’re not feeling.

Jim Babka: But what I’ve noticed about libertarians is they tend to root for the underdog.

Jim Babka: They tend to root for the person that’s being blamed or scapegoated.

Jim Babka: They tend to pick the losing side in an argument and fight really hard for that side.

Jim Babka: And they go against the crowd.

Jim Babka: And so in that sense, I see a tremendous harmony, libertarian being kind of an application of real Christian thought.

Doug Stuart: How do you see then this scapegoating mechanism applied, let’s just say lately, we’re in an election year.

Doug Stuart: I know people will be listening to this episode in the future, of course, but we’re in an election year.

Doug Stuart: I don’t know if it’s true or not.

Doug Stuart: I haven’t lived beyond the number of years that I’ve lived, but we’re politically polarized as much as anything.

Doug Stuart: How is this manifesting itself now?

Jim Babka: Yeah, so without defending him, let me pick the most hated goat in the land, and that’s Donald Trump.

Doug Stuart: You can’t have a conversation about scapegoating today without talking about Donald Trump.

Jim Babka: Yeah, well, and he’s guilty of a lot of things, and clearly he’s not blameless, right?

Doug Stuart: So that you even have to say that is ironic, but sure.

Jim Babka: Yeah, okay.

Jim Babka: So, and I’m not a supporter of his.

Jim Babka: I find a lot of his behavior is bad, but let’s be honest, they’ve exaggerated tremendously what it is that he’s responsible or culpable for.

Jim Babka: That culpability is not there for many of the things.

Jim Babka: So before the 2020 election, I was getting my hair cut, and I’m sitting in a barber chair, and sitting in the barber chair next to me, talking to his barber as if there’s nobody else in the room.

Jim Babka: I mean, we all had to listen to this conversation, was a guy who was on the local Democratic Central Committee for the county, and he of course wanted to talk.

Jim Babka: The election was just days away, and he was bloviating about his opinions.

Jim Babka: Everything he could possibly muster to say about Republicans is racist, racist that, Donald Trump’s a racist, everyone’s a racist, racist, racist, racist.

Jim Babka: And, you know, gosh, you get to meet Republicans, you find out this isn’t really as widespread as you thought it was, right?

Jim Babka: You have to live in a pretty serious bubble to actually believe that.

Jim Babka: But I’m just going to talk about Trump, because that’s where I was going here with this.

Jim Babka: There should have been really a race holocaust going on.

Jim Babka: If Donald Trump was even a tenth what they were claiming he was.

Jim Babka: There wasn’t.

Jim Babka: There hasn’t been.

Jim Babka: He hasn’t delivered in any of this stuff.

Jim Babka: They said he’s going to be completely out of control, and he’s going to get us into war, and he’s going to press the button.

Jim Babka: They were saying this at the beginning of his administration.

Jim Babka: There’s been repeated exaggeration.

Jim Babka: And the man is a master.

Jim Babka: I could get into how he specifically did this.

Jim Babka: It would take us way off course.

Jim Babka: But he plays into this.

SPEAKER_4: He doesn’t steer out of it.

Jim Babka: You start spinning on ice, they tell you to steer into it.

Jim Babka: He steers right into it.

Jim Babka: And they keep making him a bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger sacrifice and consequently making him more and more and more attractive in some ways by so doing.

Jim Babka: And that’s the key to his power.

Jim Babka: So this is an example where we see it happening here.

Jim Babka: Now, going back just a little bit, I was very active in 2004 in opposition.

Jim Babka: We had a website called Truth About War that we built at the time.

Jim Babka: It’s still there.

Jim Babka: It’s frozen in time, opposing the Iraq War.

Jim Babka: At that time, so we were still pretty fresh to 9-11, you were anti-American.

Jim Babka: You were anti-troop.

Jim Babka: You literally hated the troops if you didn’t support the war.

Jim Babka: Fast forward to the events that we’ve just recently experienced here in our new decade, where everybody, you know, if you didn’t want to put on a mask or you didn’t agree with the lockdowns, you wanted to kill grandma.

Jim Babka: These are all examples of exaggeration that are very much scapegoating somebody for things they’re not responsible for.

Doug Stuart: Well, it plays into the mob mentality, and that’s another piece of this, right?

Doug Stuart: Like, it’s not just that these sides are creating a scapegoat out of rationale and reason and sitting and debating.

Doug Stuart: It’s the mob mentality that eventually takes over, and then people who are incorporated into this don’t even know why they’re doing it.

Jim Babka: Right, so this is why we have a parable in the Scripture where Jesus says, let him who’s without sin throw the first stone, because the first stone is the one that matters the most.

Jim Babka: The second one is the one that matters second most.

Jim Babka: And all the rest we don’t have to pay attention to.

Jim Babka: Let me make this a little more pro-social.

Jim Babka: I don’t know if you’ve ever been to an event where they set out donuts, but the event has kind of already started, and everybody’s sitting in the room and nobody gets up to get the donuts.

Doug Stuart: Everybody wants a donut, but nobody wants to be the guy to get up and get the donut, yeah.

Jim Babka: Exactly, so somebody has to go first in that setting to give everybody else permission.

Jim Babka: And mobs run, we know this, they run exactly that way.

Jim Babka: You need the first brick thrower to break glass on the shop.

Jim Babka: You need somebody to follow up to them.

Jim Babka: And then pretty soon, you’ve got lots of people participating.

Jim Babka: And there’s a whole dynamic that goes with this, because there’s a flip side of it where nobody wants to be seen as being outside the mob.

Jim Babka: They feel that that’s a dangerous place to be.

Jim Babka: So they start to go along to get along.

Jim Babka: Even if they think what’s happening isn’t quite right, they’ll get quiet or they won’t speak up because they’re scared, or they’ll just go along.

Jim Babka: They’ll participate for their own safety.

Doug Stuart: That’s why there’s a poll, I think it was in the last year or so, I read that there’s like, what is it?

Doug Stuart: 70% of Americans have opinions they believe others would find offensive.

Doug Stuart: But we don’t know it because they’re not going to talk about it.

Doug Stuart: We’re all afraid to talk about the radical idea.

Jim Babka: We just had a recent experience as a planet, almost every human being was caught up in this, where we got on social media and that stuff came out.

Jim Babka: And we’ve largely made a decision that we don’t, as a general population, that we don’t like the experience.

Jim Babka: Lots of people either aesthetically didn’t enjoy it or they literally felt that people needed to be banned from being able to speak.

Jim Babka: So what was happening was a case of real revealing of who a true human being was.

Jim Babka: You know, I go back to Skokie now.

Jim Babka: You’ve got the Nazis walking down the street.

Jim Babka: We didn’t want to find out what was really underneath.

Jim Babka: We didn’t really want to discover and have that conversation.

Jim Babka: But I believe as a believer, I’m kind of uniquely invited to that kind of conversation.

Jim Babka: And I don’t want to hold myself up as some exemplar who does this perfectly, because I don’t.

Jim Babka: But I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, Doug, but as you’ve been doing this show or working on this particular ministry, the work itself begins to transform you.

Jim Babka: You start to have an awareness or a tuning in to a certain type of thing that you didn’t notice before.

Jim Babka: You become aware of it.

Jim Babka: I don’t know if people can relate to this.

Jim Babka: If you bought a specific model, a car, you get reticular activation mode.

Jim Babka: You start seeing that car or that model all over the road.

Jim Babka: Well, doing Gracearchy and talking about the subjects of grace has turned on a emotional, mental, spiritual activation mode that causes me to start seeing all of this and increasingly more vividly in ways that I didn’t see it before I was focusing on this.

Doug Stuart: Yeah, well, no, you’re right.

Doug Stuart: It’s definitely eye-opening and it does tune you into frequencies, if we could use that analogy further, into frequencies that you just were kind of oblivious to in the past.

Doug Stuart: So I agree with that for sure.

Doug Stuart: So there was one other thing that you mentioned that we could have some fun with in this conversation.

Doug Stuart: Maybe we can wrap up with that because you teased it enough.

Doug Stuart: I was like, no, this will be good.

Doug Stuart: Can somebody believe this ex-libertarian thing can still be a Christian?

Doug Stuart: And you’re sort of questioning the premise.

Doug Stuart: Am I posing this right?

Doug Stuart: That you question the premise of that sort of approach to the question.

Jim Babka: Yeah, I’m aware of people who have gotten into positions like yours where they maybe they have a show or they have a blog or something, and they raise issues like this.

Jim Babka: And libertarianism is very simply a social theory.

Jim Babka: It says that you’re going to reject coercion, and to get things done, you’re going to use persuasive means instead.

Jim Babka: That’s it.

Jim Babka: That’s the whole shoot and match.

Jim Babka: You don’t need anything more.

Jim Babka: There’s this whole debate between thick and thin.

Jim Babka: We could do a whole nother thing on that.

Jim Babka: I probably am going to do a podcast about that very soon.

Jim Babka: I’m literally thinking about that right now.

Jim Babka: But I tend to think that the thick part kind of mess things up quite a bit.

Jim Babka: It really should have been a situation, and you’ll forgive the analogy, but it just I love alliteration, where the pastor and the pornographer could sit together at the same libertarian event and have a wonderful conversation, get along and find out that they’re interesting people and maybe even friends, even though they have very different things that they were going to go back to when they left.

Doug Stuart: My cynical view, just knowing the reputation of pastors at conferences, means that his conversation might have had ulterior motives.

Doug Stuart: Sorry, that was such a side note, but my cynical brain goes to that.

Jim Babka: Okay, so let me rephrase that, the proselytizer and the pornographer.

Jim Babka: I got it.

Jim Babka: Okay.

Doug Stuart: And I like your alliteration.

Doug Stuart: I get blamed for doing that too much in our internal documents.

Doug Stuart: I’m like, no, I need all these five points to start with the same letter, because the first three happened to do that by accident.

Doug Stuart: So the last two I have to make start with the letter S or whatever.

Doug Stuart: Anyway, go ahead.

Jim Babka: Well, I’m anti-mimetic, but pro-mimetic.

Jim Babka: How’s that sound?

Jim Babka: I wanted the idea to stick.

Doug Stuart: There you go.

Doug Stuart: Oh, that’s good.

Doug Stuart: That’s good.

Jim Babka: Where were we?

Jim Babka: Because you…

Jim Babka: The proselytizer and the pornographer should be able to sit together at the same event.

Jim Babka: But where were we even before that?

Doug Stuart: Can somebody believe this ex-libertarian thing and still be a Christian?

Jim Babka: Yeah, so I think that there’s been a lot of people who kind of like, you know, then this is an interesting question for them.

Jim Babka: Maybe they have a denominational doctrine upon which they rely, and they think, well, you know, I’m libertarian up to this point.

Jim Babka: Libertarian is a modifier of my Christianity.

Jim Babka: I’m a Christian first and a libertarian second.

Jim Babka: I don’t make that distinction.

Jim Babka: To me, it’s kind of like the warp and woof.

Jim Babka: If you are a believer, let’s start there.

Jim Babka: Let’s look at that side of it.

Jim Babka: If you are a believer, then I believe that a consistent practice of libertarianism is the full expression of your faith.

Jim Babka: If you’re not practicing libertarian, you’re missing out or leaving behind an important part of the gospel of grace.

Jim Babka: And that’s why I call my show Gracearchy, because we spend our time talking about that.

Jim Babka: The proper expression of our faith is voluntary and non-coercive.

Jim Babka: The proper expression of our faith is love, not force.

Jim Babka: So I see that as kind of like a categorical mistake and a missing out.

Jim Babka: On the flip side, I see a lot of libertarians who don’t realize that they are behaving in very Christian fashion.

Jim Babka: I see them doing things that are unique and special and different from how lots of other people behave in the world.

Jim Babka: We talked about one of them, this kind of rooting for the underdog thing, this empathizing with somebody who is not on the side of the mob.

Jim Babka: I can give you all kinds of examples, because again, I think they’re practicing an ethic that prefers grace or love over force.

Jim Babka: So they’re acting in ways that I think could be described in many cases, even though it’s not clearly, there’s not a religious impulse there.

Jim Babka: They’re acting out of love.

Jim Babka: They’re acting Christian.

Jim Babka: So to me, it’s consistent.

Jim Babka: I would even go so far, and this is sacrilege, and I realize it’s even a bit anachronistic.

Jim Babka: I’m aware about what I’m going to say next, but I will even say that I believe God is a libertarian.

Jim Babka: Proper understanding of our world after you come to faith should develop into a more libertarian society.

Jim Babka: Again, I’m not going to use violence or theft to get what I want.

Jim Babka: I’m going to find persuasive ways to go about addressing social problems.

Jim Babka: I’m going to work in community.

Jim Babka: I’m going to invent something.

Jim Babka: I’m just going to pick up and do something quietly without telling the whole world that I dropped the coins in the plate.

Doug Stuart: Now, I have two show titles here that we could probably go with for this conversation, Jim, but one is Christian Should Bake the Cake.

Doug Stuart: The other is God is a Libertarian.

Jim Babka: Well, I am going to, at some point, do the God is a Libertarian episode.

Jim Babka: I’ve been dared to do it several times, so if you leave that one to me, I’ll get to it later.

Doug Stuart: Okay, all right.

Doug Stuart: I’ll leave that one to you.

Doug Stuart: I probably won’t use the former one.

Jim Babka: Since you’re going to do the cake, let me say one more thing, because we all had some experience together as a community of having a candidate, a man I thought was kind and decent and honest and quite libertarian, named Gary Johnson, run for president and get the most votes of any libertarian candidate that’s ever done the job, and I like Gary.

Jim Babka: I’ve met him several times, I’ve appeared on stage in front of him a couple of times, nothing but high regard for him, but there was a big hang up on some people’s parts about whether or not he should or he was right about baking the cake, and I even had a guy that defriended me on Facebook, blocked me on Facebook because I raised an issue attached to this.

Jim Babka: He’s like, oh, there you people go with this f-ing cake again.

Jim Babka: You know, we should be focused on bigger issues.

Jim Babka: You know, you’re dividing everybody, but I didn’t see this as a minor issue, and it wasn’t because I’m, you know, everybody has B-Purity tested or get along with me 100%.

Jim Babka: Quite the contrary.

Jim Babka: My career at Downsides DC would prove demonstrably by behavior.

Jim Babka: Otherwise, I worked with people who disagree with me on things all the time.

Jim Babka: No, what I was saying here in this particular case is it was fundamental.

Jim Babka: The ability for us to choose our relationships, the ability for us to voluntarily interact with one another, freedom of association was very much at stake.

Jim Babka: So my voluntarious side of my libertarianism says that I should be able to choose all the relationships that I have, the ones that regulate me, the ones that govern me, the ones that I live with, all those to work with, those things should all be chosen by me.

Jim Babka: And at some point, if I feel that they’re no longer serving me, I should have an exit strategy or plan available.

Jim Babka: In marriage, we call this divorce.

Jim Babka: Now, that doesn’t mean divorce is desirable.

Jim Babka: Divorce is good.

Jim Babka: It doesn’t mean anything like that.

Jim Babka: But it does mean it is still there.

Jim Babka: It also doesn’t mean it won’t be messy.

Jim Babka: There won’t be some tearing in the separation.

Jim Babka: But it does mean that the relationship was voluntary in there.

Jim Babka: We have no way of divorcing the state.

Jim Babka: And the idea that you would come and say, we’re going to add one more thing from which you cannot divorce, to me is wrong.

Jim Babka: It was a coercive act that violated something that’s sacred and so important, which is our ability to choose the relationships that we have.

Jim Babka: I told you earlier I would bake the cake if I was in that position and the reasons for that.

Jim Babka: But I really don’t think any libertarian, consistent libertarian, should have overlooked something so fundamental as to coerce somebody to serve another person.

Doug Stuart: Well, Jim, we have talked about a whole host of topics, some of which we planned, some of which we didn’t.

Doug Stuart: Is there anything more you want to say about the Zero-Aggression Project, Gracearchy Podcast, anything you want to share with our listeners?

Doug Stuart: Where can they find you?

Doug Stuart: Just go ahead and plug all that.

Jim Babka: Yeah, so we still have Downsides DC going, home of the Read the Bills Act and the One Subject to Time Act and the Write the Laws Act, which I co-authored, all of which are introduced in Congress.

Jim Babka: And, you know, I would encourage people to come check out downsidesdc.org.

Jim Babka: We go, Agenda Setters by Downsides DC is the organization name at present.

Jim Babka: That’s what people know me best for.

Jim Babka: The Zero-Aggression Project was an adjacent project that we started.

Jim Babka: It’s an outgrowth of the Downsides DC Foundation, the sister organization, where we’re trying to get everybody on the planet to be aware of the idea that it’s wrong to use force, that initiating force, aggression, is both morally wrong and leads to bad outcomes.

Jim Babka: It does both things.

Jim Babka: So we’ve tried to explain that view.

Jim Babka: We have a tool there called Mental Levers, where we go through and show how libertarians think.

Jim Babka: What is our thought process?

Jim Babka: How is our worldview constructed?

Jim Babka: That’s there.

Jim Babka: But it has become a vehicle through which my show Gracearchy is delivered.

Jim Babka: Gracearchy is the thing personally I care about the most right now.

Jim Babka: It’s the evolution of an entire career.

Jim Babka: And I enjoy being in a position like this, where I’m staring at this camera, talking about things like this that to me are important and profound, and trying to find commonality with people who have some connection to my values.

Jim Babka: We’re on most of the streaming platforms, Rumble and YouTube.

Jim Babka: You can find us at Zero-Aggression on YouTube, or you can just simply look up the word Gracearchy.

Jim Babka: Or you can go with Jim Babka, search any of those.

Jim Babka: You’ll manage to find me somehow somewhere.

Jim Babka: But that’s the thing that I’m kind of most passionate about right now.

Doug Stuart: All right.

Doug Stuart: Well, Jim, thank you so much for joining us.

Doug Stuart: And I know we’ll have another conversation in the future.

Doug Stuart: So we’ll see you back sometime soon.

Jim Babka: I am already looking forward to it.

SPEAKER_4: Thank you for listening to another episode of the Libertarian Christian Podcast.

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SPEAKER_5: The Libertarian Christian Podcast is a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute, a registered 501c3 nonprofit.

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SPEAKER_5: The voiceovers are by Matt Bellis and Catherine Williams.

SPEAKER_5: As of episode 115, our audio production is provided by Podsworth Media.

SPEAKER_5: Check them out at podsworth.com.

Doug Stuart: Hello everyone, it’s Doug from the Libertarian Christian Podcast.

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LCI uses automated transcripts from various sources. If you see a significant error, please let us know.