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