The Baptist Joint Committee’s Brent Walker was a guest on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews last night discussing the proposed Islamic Center near ground zero, which he said should be seen as a “monument to religious liberty.” He also commented on the Florida pastor dominating the news: “99.99% of all Americans think Pastor Jones is crazy,” he said, “and we need to get that word out to the rest of the world.” The mosque, he added, would be a good way to do just that.
Transcript is available here.
Here are some of Chris’s exchanges with Brent:
MATTHEWS: Let’s go to Brent Walker. What do you think about these two issues? Put them together. Some politicians as we mentioned have done that.
WALKER: The are related. Both involve fundamental First Amendment rights: the freedom of speech and the freedom of religion, but the effect of each is going to be completely different. They’re apples and oranges when it comes to the effect of the two. But they are related in this sense… I think building the mosque in Manhattan would be a monument to religious liberty that we treasure in this country, to the plush pluralism that we have. Far from being a detriment, I think it would be a monument to the goodness of America, in part to counter the notion abroad that we are all like Reverend Jones. I mean, 99.99% of the American people think he is crazy, and we need to get that message out. What better way to do it than to embrace the mosque in lower Manhattan.
…
MATTHEWS: I’m told that some group of people – call them if you will fundamentalists in this country, evangelicals, even – believe so strongly in their Christianity that they believe that Islam is wrong, it’s even evil because it’s a wrong faith and it should be if not denied, maybe more than denied, it should be repressed. … WALKER: It doesn’t water down the validity of my faith and my belief to concede to somebody else their right to believe as they see fit, as long as they don’t try to impose it on me. I think you need to recognize the fundamental Christian virtue of humility. We often forget that. Pastor Jones is ignoring that principle. It seems to me he’s following bad theology, bad churchmanship and bad citizenship.
