"Do I understand Jerry [Falwell] correctly? Is he saying he supports the misnamed Patriot Act, a law that all but eviscerates the Fourth Amendment and does serious injury to several others, a law that was first proposed by Bill Clinton and Al Gore? Is he saying he supports domestic surveillance, which many fear does more to create an American police state than fight terrorists? Does he mean he supports warrantless searches and seizures and warrantless eavesdropping?
I had always believed that Christian conservatives were among our country's most ardent defenders of liberty and constitutional government. All that I knew and understood from my schooling at Thomas Road Baptist Church and the Thomas Road Bible Institute, plus all of my involvement and effort in Jerry's Moral Majority, convinced me that if we Christian conservatives believed anything, we believed in freedom and constitutional government. Am I now to understand that we are supposed to support a Big Brother philosophy to government and must willingly surrender constitutionally protected liberties?
As to the war in Iraq, do we Christians really desire that our young men and women continue to die in another non-declared, no-win war? Is it wrong to wonder whether this never-ending "war on terror" really serves the cause of national security or rather the commercial interests of globalists? Do Evangelicals really have a litmus test whereby any future president must be determined to continue and perhaps expand constant interventionist policies, nation-building, and preemptive invasions of foreign countries? Must we be equally determined to turn the United States into an Orwellian nightmare until life in America looks like one giant airport terminal? None of this reflects historic Christian conservatism as I ever understood it!" - Chuck Baldwin, friend of Falwell and longtime stalwart of the religious right.