Rev Dr Peter Barnes has been a strong advocate of Religious Right causes for many years now. He holds down jobs at the Revesby (NSW) Presbyterian Church and the Presbyterian Theological Centre and spends some of his spare time supporting Rev Fred Nile’s enterprises such as the Festival of Light and the Family World News (FWN) monthly journal.

Barnes strongly favours the physical punishment of children - ‘part of God’s plan to deliver souls from hell’, according to him (FWN, Mar. 1997, 9) - and is adamant that wives should ’submit’ themselves to their husbands (FWN Mar. 2003, 6).

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Filed in: Creationism, Fundamentalism, People

You might like to know some more about the people who support Bill Muehlenberg on his CultureWatch site, and even occasionally perform the difficult feat of outflanking him on the right.

I won’t bother for the moment with Jonathan Sarfati and Tas Walker, both of whom are senior staffers at Creation Ministries International (CMI), Australia’s leading Young Earth Creationist (YEC) group. Brief (and glowing) biographies are available for both of these gentlemen at the CMI site. Muehlenberg is uncharacteristically coy when it comes to defining his own position on creationism (YEC, Old Earth Creationist, Intelligent Design supporter etc.), but YECs like Sarfati and Walker are among his favourite people.

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Filed in: Abortion, People, Politics

Bill Muehlenberg is becoming more and more disenchanted with the state of the ‘Christian West’:

… [M]ost Westerners have for too long now been strung out on the narcotic of social welfarism and cradle-to-grave statism that they have nothing left to live for or die for … All we seem to want is our internet porn and 30-hour work week …[We are] bloated, blind and balding …

Muslims really do not need to terrorise their way into hegemony, they are already achieving it by enjoying sex. We on the other hand are aborting ourselves into extinction.

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Filed in: Islam, People, Secularism

Bill Muehlenberg recently offered the following response to the series of blogs concerning his background and activities that have appeared on this site during the past few weeks. This response took the form of a letter to the evangelical fortnightly New Life (2 Nov. 2006, 10):

I have long been aware of the number of people and organisations that really do not like me and what I am doing. But lately I have learned of even more hatred and animosity being directed at me, and all this makes me realise how much more I need your prayer covering. The hatred and vitriol is of course symptomatic of a deeper spiritual war, as Scripture tells us …

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Filed in: Christian Right, People

(5) Is Muehlenberg a theocrat?

Bill Muehlenberg denies that he is a theocrat, but I disagree. In national terms, a theocrat claims that a god is a particular country’s ultimate ruler and that the nation should be operating according to that god’s laws. In the longer run, Muehlenberg would like to see Christ returning to earth and directly ruling the entire planet. In the short term, he wants to accelerate the process by which this situation might occur by ‘Christianising’ the nation. I’ll begin by drawing rather extensively on an article I wrote in 2003 entitled ‘Australia’s Theocratic Right‘.

The modern ‘Christian’ theocratic approach to politics is often termed ‘dominion theology’ and it has a wide range of guises and levels of intensity. Adherents of dominion theology encourage Christian political activism leading to sweeping social change rather than mere adjustments to the social system. In practice, these proposed changes tend to be of an authoritarian kind.

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Filed in: Christian Right, People, Theocracy

(4) Muehlenberg vs the culture vandals

Like the late B.A. Santamaria, head of the National Civic Council, Bill Muehlenberg views himself as a soldier engaged in a war:

As in all conflicts, there are two competing sides seeking dominance and victory. On the one side there are those who hold to the Judaeo-Christian world view. On the other side are those who can best be described as secular humanists.

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Filed in: Christian Right, People

(3) 2000-2006

Having rejoined the Australian Family Association (AFA) as National Secretary early in 2000, Muehlenberg was later appointed National Vice-President of that body (Muehlenberg, letter to Age, 27 Mar. 2002) although his responsibilities - writing of articles, media liaison etc. - seem to have remained the same.

Having soft-pedalled the origins of his Bible college degrees for most of the 1990s, Bill suddenly became very up-front about them. He began reviewing books for Amazon and in one such review (Scott Hahn Hail, Holy Queen, 31 July, 2002), Muehlenberg referred to having graduated from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Boston (fifth review) ‘with highest honours’. He has since referred to his outstanding performance in this degree on a number of occasions. - www.christian-witness.org/archives/Entre/authors.html (second last entry)

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Filed in: Christian Right, People

(2) 1989-2000

Between his arrival in Australia in 1989 and his appointment to a position with the National Civic Council’s (NCC) ‘Australian Family Association’ early in 1992, Bill Muehlenberg immersed himself in the conservative side of Australian political culture. AD2000, an NCC publication, told its readers that Muehlenberg:

… who is a Baptist, is a graduate from Wheaton College and the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in the United States and has had extensive experience in research and library work in the Netherlands and US. He was until recently head of the environmental policy uni[t] at the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne. He is the author of ‘Modern Conservative Thought: an Annotated Bibliography’, published by the Institute of Public Affairs. - (Introduction to) Bill Muehlenberg ‘Christians and the “Green” prophets of doom: the need for scepticism’, AD2000, Aug. 1990, 4

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Filed in: Christian Right, People

Andrew Lansdown, ‘Writer and Editor’ for Life Ministries WA, has strong views about justice. Justice demands, for example, that animals which happen to kill human beings must be held morally responsible for their actions, and put to death:

God will not tolerate the killing of innocent human beings, whether the killers are humans or animals. He will hold them to account at the cost of their blood … (’Sympathy for a shark’, Salt Shakers Journal, Feb. 2001, 13)

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Filed in: People, Sexuality

(1) 1953-1989

William John (’Bill’) Muehlenberg has been a leading figure in the Australian Christian Right for the past 15 years. He has held a number of official positions with organisations such as the Australian Family Association, Australian Christian Lobby, Focus on the Family Australia and Salt Shakers. He currently runs his own CultureWatch website. He also played a key role in the National Marriage Coalition, which in 2004 successfully pressured the Howard Federal Government to pass legislation banning same-sex marriages. I’ll begin this series with a brief biographical sketch.

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Filed in: Christian Right, People