Mike Huckabee endorses Bully

Color me surprised, but pleasantly so.

Mike Huckabee, former GOP Presidential candidate and now FOX News host has endorsed the movie Bully.

From the Huckabee’s column in the Daily Beast:

Bully is compelling. It’s not a pretty or pleasant story, but needs to be told.  The message is not a “horizontal” message of left vs. right; liberal vs. conservative; Democrat vs. Republican. It’s a “vertical” message that says we’ll either get better, or God forbid, we won’t learn from this and it will get worse.Surely this nation, so divided by almost everything, could unite behind the notion that the youngest among us should be treated with dignity and respect. Bully helps achieve that goal. Keeping kids from seeing it does not.

 

Ron Paul’s death-penalty-for-gays pastor interviews Monumental co-producer

Remember Philip Kayser? He is the Omaha, NE pastor that endorsed Ron Paul in the Iowa GOP primary who teaches that U.S. civil law should reflect the Old Testament book of Leviticus. In December, 2011, I wrote about his views on the death penalty for adulterers, disobedient children, gays, etc., which led to at least two national stories about Kayser’s endorsement. Very soon after those stories appeared, Kayser’s endorsement was pulled from Ron Paul’s website.

In book on the death penalty, Kayser wrote:

Difficulty in implementing Biblical law does not make non-Biblical penology just. But even on Bahnsen’s strictest interpretation of the death penalties, the results would not be as dire as people often predict. For example, while many homosexuals would be executed on Bahnsen’s interpretation, it would not be nearly as many as critics try to imply, because homosexuals would likely keep silent about their lifestyle…

Other Levitical sins (adultery, idolatry, disobedient children, etc.) are addressed in his book, which I examined briefly here.

Rev. Kayser here interviews Marshall Foster, now famous as a guest and co-producer of Kirk Cameron’s movie Monumental, about the biblical foundations of liberty, something that sounds a lot like Cameron’s movie. Cameron is offering material from Foster for sale on the Monumental website.

Marshall Foster Interview from Biblical Blueprints on Vimeo.

Biblical Blueprints is the ministry of Rev. Kayser. In 2011, Marshall Foster was the special guest and keynote speaker of the Providential History Festival, held yearly in Nebraska. The Providential History Festival is underwritten by Kayser’s Dominion Covenant Church and Christian reconstruction groups like the Chalcedon Foundation.

Mr. Foster may not agree with Rev. Kayser on the death penalty (I have seen nothing on that) but he is enough in sync that he appears to support Kayser’s approach to history. Kirk Cameron said at the end of his movie that he wants monumental to be a movement. With Mr. Foster involved, I think it is fair to ask what the movement is about.

Monumental: Shouldn’t a movie about history be historically correct?

Crosswalk published my commentary today on the revisionism of the movie Monumental.

In it, I look at three claims made in the clips released in advance of the movie. Specifically, did Thomas Jefferson and a dozen founders financed the Thompson Hot Press Bible of 1798? Did Congress print the Aitken Bible and recommend it as a “neat edition of the Holy Scriptures for use in schools?” Was the Jefferson Bible just a devotional book and not an extraction of miracles and divinity?

I hope you will go read, tweet and like it.

Kirk Cameron’s Monumental Revision of Thomas Jefferson

Kirk Cameron is giving some in the media advanced looks at Monumental (which premieres tonight), including Christianity Today. In a follow up interview, Cameron extends his revision of Thomas Jefferson to a discussion of Jefferson’s faith and the Jefferson Bible.

Interviewer Andrew Thompson gets credit for asking a couple of hard questions about Jefferson’s faith. Cameron dodges them with historical fiction. Thompson asked:

The documentary mentions that the founding fathers were Christians, even implying that Jefferson was a Christian. But most scholarship would say he was a deist who hardly held evangelical views.

Cameron directs Thompson to someone who Cameron says has studied Jefferson’s life and faith, Stephen McDowell, who is involved i the Providence Foundation, another revisionist history organization. It is no wonder that he then spins a yarn about Jefferson’s extraction of miracles and the deity of Christ twice, first in his 1804 Philosophy of Jesus and then again sometime between 1820 and 1824, in order to form what Jefferson considered to be Jesus’ real moral teachings. Cameron answered:

For that, I would direct you to other people who have studied his life and his faith for thirty years—like Stephen McDowell [author of America’s Providential History], who’s at the end of the film. We’ve all heard about The Jefferson Bible that Jefferson edited by taking scissors and cutting out the parts didn’t like—removing the miracles, and only keeping the moral teachings of Jesus. Well, that actually is not true. The story is that Jefferson was so enamored with the teachings of Jesus that he wanted to have a personal devotional book. And he cut those sections out of several of his Bibles and glued them into a personal handbook that he could keep in his back pocket for his own devotional reading. He was opposed to the idea of calling it a Jefferson Bible.

Thompson is ready with a pretty good reply (although with an incorrect quote) to that story:

In a 1787 letter to Peter Carr, Jefferson wrote that “trying to find the truth in the Bible is like picking diamonds out of dunghills.” Sounds like a pretty low view of Scripture, doesn’t it?

In fact, the phrase — diamonds from a dunghill — although quoted incorrectly here by Thompson, is very relevant to what Jefferson said he did with the Gospels. In 1813, Jefferson told Adams that he had edited the Gospels with this description:

I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill.

Jefferson extracted the diamonds from the Gospels and left in the dunghill. For Jefferson, diamonds included the Golden Rule, and the Sermon on the Mount, and dunghill included the virgin birth, John 3:16 and the resurrection. Viewers of Monumental might find that surprising. Sounds like Cameron might find that surprising. Cameron’s answer to Thompson dodges the central problem with what I have seen of Monumental:

Yeah, it sure does. I’m not running around waving the Thomas Jefferson flag. Even if Jefferson is a complete infidel—and I’m not saying that he is—he certainly promoted the basic principles of Christianity and funded major Christian efforts to get the principles of Christianity deep into the hearts and minds of people. He understood that it was only those principles that could provide the basis and foundation for a free and just society.

What are the basic principles of Christianity? This is a pretty important question since he said Jefferson promoted these principles. Jefferson believes you get to heaven by doing good works, and sure did many of them. He believed in treating others the way you want to be treated. He also believed that one’s life of virtue is proof enough that one’s religion is personally valuable, no matter what that religion was. Are those the basic principles of Christianity?

Jefferson is a fascinating figure who remains at the center of conversation after all these years. Pity for viewers that Monumental does not appear to get Jefferson right.

**Regarding the quote attributed to Peter Carr, I cannot find that exact quote. Jefferson did tell young Carr to “Read the Bible, then, as you would read Livy, or Tacitus. The facts which are within ordinary course of nature you will believe on the authority of the writer, as you do those of the same kind in Livy and Tacitus. But those facts in the bible which contradict the laws of nature, must be examined with more care, and under a variety of faces.” He added that Carr should question Joshua’s story of the sun standing still because it violates the laws of nature. Regarding the New Testament, Jefferson advised reading extra-biblical literature to contrast with the canon of Scripture. However, I think CT’s Thompson has blended a couple of quotes together incorrectly.