Libertarianism Needs Christianity | Tho Bishop on The Babylon Bee
Tho Bishop, assistant editor at The Ludwig von Mises Institute and resident Florida man, is finally in studio with The Babylon Bee to talk about whether libertarianism needs Christianity to survive, how embarrassing the Libertarian Party is, and the eternal coolness of mullets. They also discuss how King DeSantis could be the future of the Republican Party. You can check out Tho Bishop's work at The Mises Institute and podcasts like Radio Rothbard. Also be sure to check out the new animated series What Has Government Done To Our Money?
Welcome everyone to another Babylon Bee interview show.
I'm Kyle Mann and this is Dan Coates, our producer, finally in front of the camera after a long stint behind the camera.
And today we're talking to Tho Bishop, who is completely based.
He is a based Mises Institute guy.
So we've had a couple of Mises people on and they're like smart economic nerds, but most of them don't have mullets.
Yeah, Thoe's mullet game is a pause.
Point.
Yeah.
He's a Florida man.
He supports King DeSantis for president.
He knows a lot about money and stuff, and he explains it in lemonade stand analogies.
So they put everyone else out of business and they can raise their prices or they can now start to no longer serve lemonade to people they don't, you know, the click they don't like.
He also wants you to check out this animated series that they're doing on money.
It's called you can go to whathasgovernmentdone to our money.com and check out all the Mises Institute stuff as well.
And we will also link Tho's social handles so you can follow him and all his worship of Ron DeSantis online.
So here we go.
Come on in, Tho.
Tho Bishop, thanks for coming in, man.
Thank you for having me.
This is a great honor.
No, no, this is a great honor for us because you're the first mullet in the Babylon Bee studios.
Well, you know, proud Florida man from the Redneck Riviera.
I think you got to be the meme.
So that's what I'm trying to do.
I've got my wife's approval, too, which is very important on this endeavor.
I think that you just lean into it.
You're not ashamed at all.
Yeah, me and my wife are walking around.
We saw a couple mullets the other day.
And she's like, is this coming back?
Is this a thing?
What are your thoughts?
Oh, I believe so, trying to bring it out.
And I think, you know, the more popular Ron DeSantis is, I think a greater appreciation for Florida culture is a natural extension.
That's called culture?
I think so.
Yeah.
That's what we're going to call it.
And I appreciate the, sorry.
I appreciate the sports coat and like you're looking nice and the mullet together.
It's really great.
It's compliments.
Oh, you know, try to be versatile.
Diversity is our strength.
Well, that's what it is, like business up front, right?
Yeah, I guess you are a human mullet in some ways.
Business here and party here.
If you take this off, then I've got my pink tank top on my dress shirt.
Would you mind doing that right now?
Afterwards.
That'll be in the exclusive subscriber portion.
I don't think I was aware of that, but all right.
Though, you're from Libertarian Hogwarts, you tell me.
Yes.
What is that?
What are you talking about?
I think it's a truly magical place, the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, of all places, which it's an educational center on Austrian economics.
It's a little odd, but we do a lot of work on economic education, libertarian political philosophy, revisionist history, which I think is important.
So a lot of great people that come through there, so just an honor to be a part of that organization.
So if the Mises Institute is libertarian Hogwarts, who is like Hagrid?
And who is Dumbledore?
Well, Dumbledore would be Lou Rockwell, the founder, the great man that built it.
In many ways, I'm trying to play the role of Hagrid.
Often the first people, one of the first people that people see when they come in the door.
I've got a great pink umbrella.
I myself do not have a PhD in economics, so I don't have credentials.
Yeah.
Hagrid didn't graduate.
No.
So we are, I think, kindred spirits in that way.
He got his wand taken away.
Oh, sad.
Doing magic or something.
I don't know what.
Do you know much about Harry Potter?
Well, I'm a millennial.
So you compare all political things to Harry Potter.
It's the only way that we can get through to you.
Well, the monetary policy of the Harry Potter universe, you can't duplicate gold.
It is a non-fractional reserve banking system with the bank vaults.
Can they really not duplicate gold?
That's a whole subplot in the fourth book.
So, yes.
Oh.
Sound money.
I didn't know.
I read him, but I don't remember him.
J.K. Rowling, an obvious gold bug, which I appreciate.
Huh.
Interesting.
So Thoe Bishop wants to go on the Harry Potter standard for our money.
Harry Potter standard.
I do have an article out there about what the Fed can learn from the magical world of Harry Potter.
This was even before some of the social stuff.
So yes.
What do you think about how the bankers were obviously Jews?
I think that Harry Potter.
Funny how these things happen.
Is that a thing in Harry Potter?
It's like they're quite obviously like a Jewish stereotype.
Okay.
But they're like, what are they dwarves or not?
Goblins.
Goblins, that's what they're saying.
Yes.
Oh, that's flattering.
Yeah.
And they're like greedy over the money and stuff.
And you're like, hmm, it's like an old chick tract or something, right, in the Harry Potter.
Well, there's this whole controversy, too, about like the bank.
I guess there's like a six-pointed star in the bank scene.
Like that was actually on the bank that they filmed it at.
So it wasn't there for you.
So again, that's curious.
So Tho, we invited you out here.
You flew all the way from Florida and you kind of had this idea.
I want to talk about libertarianism and Christianity and how those two intersect.
And where are you coming from on that?
Yeah, well, some from my own personal experiences, particularly the last few years, I think recognizing the cultural state of not just America, but the West.
And this has been a topic that I think has always kind of distinguished kind of the Mises Institute brand of libertarianism away from a lot of other kind of DC-based organizations is that we've never been hostile to religion.
Louis von Mises and Murray Rothbard, who are very prominent scholars in our tradition, were both agnostic Jews.
But we have had a lot of Catholic influence.
We've had a lot of Presbyterians come through.
And I think ultimately, I think sound economics, one of the issues that's creating a lot of the problems we have is that economics and liberty are often defended on kind of purely materialistic sort of grounds.
And I think that's not enough.
It is important, but not sufficient.
And I think ultimately it's a larger sort of cultural appreciation for the role that Christianity had and having respect for your fellow man.
That played a very major role in what made the West great in the first place and has been a source of strength for America.
And I think the more secularized we're seeing Europe in America is not a coincidence that's overlapping with a lot of the problems that we have right now.
So trying to end the stereotype of the atheist libertarian.
Every libertarian has to wear a fedora.
That's the battle.
Because the problem is that you have a lot of people that think they're too reasonable, too rational for this superstition of God.
But the problem is you never remove God.
You simply worship something else.
So you have the objectivists that worship Ayn Rand, right?
You have certain people that worship the market or they worship libertarian ideology itself.
And I think that if you remove God from society, there's still that desire to be part of something larger.
And ideology often fills that void.
And that can go into some weird libertarian circles, that can go into leftist circles, that can go into a variety of different ways.
But I think this is something that's often been a problem within libertarianism broadly.
So it seems like, though, from where you're coming from, you're seeing libertarianism and Christianity fitting together.
Like they should coincide because one without the other is not going to go for, well, I mean, Christianity could go on its own, but you're saying libertarianism without a foundation in something other than like rational logic.
Like just logic alone isn't going to make your system go.
So how do you, what would you say to people that see libertarianism and Christianity as being at odds?
I understand that given, again, some of the brands out there, I think that the problem comes into almost kind of fetishizing individuality as an end in itself.
And I think that is one of the lessons that I've personally learned during 2020 was recognizing that my personal liberty is not a matter of my own individual rights, but precisely the fact that it was valued by my community and my state.
There's a collective aspect that ultimately comes down to any sort of liberty and practice.
And ultimately, I think when you see libertarians defending the sexualization of children, for example, with Drag Queen Story Hour, things like that, or the celebration of – It's a blessing of liberty.
Right.
That's what I was told.
And that comes across if you have no underlying value structure besides what the state can and cannot do.
And ultimately, I think this creates this very weird dynamic where libertarians, by making their political viewpoint or their larger philosophical viewpoint purely about the behavior of the state, miss out on the fact that most of our community is not necessarily dictated by the government.
It's built by our civic institutions.
It's by the morals of our community.
And if we are not recognizing that we need something larger than simply telling what the state it can't do, you know, that what is being taught to our students is going to have a direct impact on our community.
And guess what?
What's coming out of our universities is not particularly libertarian in any friendly way.
You know, ultimately it is a self-governing responsibility, individual responsibility that leads itself to a free and self-government, to a, allows you to diminish the role of the state in your community.
And so the question is what creates, you know, what fosters self-governance?
And again, I think ultimately it must, I think there is a major dynamic there where recognizing that there was something higher than you, that there are hierarchies, you know, that we are born into families, that we are born into nations, that we are born into this natural hierarchy, and that there is a value system that history has shown to cultivate human thriving and human dignity.
I think it's very arrogant to dismiss that because you read an Ayn Rand book that made you feel very self-empowered.
Yeah.
So just pure libertarianism, you end up with individualistic chaos where people can do whatever they want, drag queen story hour, have a mullet, and it's just a disaster, right?
It's a tragedy.
And what's interesting is this actually played out a little bit in libertarian history because Ron Paul, who is one of the most wholesome, I think, Americans of his generation, he ran for the LP nomination in 1988.
And he was mocked and ridiculed because he only had one wife and he was loyal to her.
And he was a very public Christian.
And that went against the way that a lot of libertarians of that day thought a libertarian should act.
And so that is what led people like Lou Rockwell and Murray Rothbard and Ron Paul to leave the libertarian movement and instead try to do outreach to kind of the anti-war conservatives of the 90s, the Pat Buchanan crowd and that sort of stuff.
And what's interesting is that with the political dynamics now, there's a lot of overlap there.
And again, I think that it's a grave, it would be very unfortunate for libertarians to prioritize, to not recognize that the people that want to protect their children are natural allies against the regime.
And again, it's something that I think is seeing those battles that happened in the 90s, I think they're relevant now in very important ways.
Yeah, it seems like the tagline I heard for years from the Libertarian Party type people, and I actually hung out with some local libertarian party people in California here.
It seemed like their tagline was always, we're fiscally conservative and socially liberal.
And I remember at the time, I'm reading free market stuff.
I'm like, I think I'm a libertarian.
I like this libertarianism idea.
And at the time, I remember being really repulsed by their lifestyle of its drugs, it's sex.
I'm not saying that's all mullets.
But that seemed to be the tagline.
I'm fiscally conservative.
I believe in low taxes.
I believe in living within our means.
And you're like, okay, that sounds good.
And then they would always say, I'm socially liberal.
And basically, they were like low-tax leftists.
And even up until recent times, I think with the kind of party the Libertarian Party has been and the kind of candidates that they would put forward for president, it kind of seemed like that's what they were going for.
When you see this play out, I mean, like, the Cato Institute has spent more time worrying about whether government AI is going to misgender trans individuals than standing up against this entire public health regime that were locking people in people's houses.
I can't think of a more basic litmus test on individual liberty than that.
Your pronouns are he, him, right?
Sorry, we forgot to ask at the beginning.
And like that dynamic, because the problem is there's a lot of libertarians that ultimately agree, they are progressive in their way they view humanity.
They think that the future is going to always get better, that if it feels good, do it, that we should be celebrating alternative lifestyles and that there is no, you know, that ethics is something relative.
As long as you're not hurting other people, anything goes.
And I think that dynamic doesn't work.
And ultimately, I think these are the battles that if we really care, trying to act like in 2022, that on one side, you have, again, a party that is dedicated to the sexualization of children.
And then on the other side, you have Ron DeSantis, who is messing with Disney's tax status.
Trying to act like these two things are equal, I think doesn't lend itself to protecting one's individual rights in the real world.
So your message to all the libertarians is repent and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.
I think that would be my advice for a lot of them.
Yes.
Have families.
Care about things bigger than yourself.
Now, what was your political journey and your spiritual journey and how did those two affect each other?
So I've been an evangelical libertarian much longer than I have been someone who could self-describe as a Christian.
My parents were very politically active.
And so I was, you know, someone listening to Rush Limbaugh in middle school.
I was a sick freak.
And then the Iraq war happened and the financial crisis happened.
And it got to the point where, how in the world could I trust the Republican Party when I see the consequences of this playing out?
I completely lost interest in politics.
And that led me to getting interested in philosophy and economics.
And so I used to be high school college dropout.
We had an oil spill in Panama City a while back because I just read a bunch of libertarian books on the job site because OSHA regulations were fantastic for downtime and became a big fan of the Mises Institute during that time because I was trying to understand that.
What were you doing for work at the time?
Yeah, cleaning up tarballs and things like that.
We didn't get quite a lot of oil over my way.
So a lot of it was, again, just, there was a jobs program during the Obama years, but paid well.
Nice.
And so I became a big fan of the Institute.
I actually got a job up in Congress writing about some of these things.
I was with the Financial Services Committee for a few years.
And so I was just a happy Rothbardian libertarian.
That was my, what I would identify with in terms of any sort of larger philosophical foundation.
And then we had a talk by a man named Daniel Jamian at the Mises Institute a few years ago, bashing the Enlightenment.
It was like the cost of the Enlightenment.
And this was like some really interesting stuff.
And then just the way that the political environment became, the more I read like Tom Holland's Dominion, which was a very fascinating history on the impact of Christianity.
He's not the Spider-Man actor.
Right, right.
Yeah, the other Tom Holland.
Oh, it's disappointing.
He's based?
And so there was a lot of kind of things that all kind of were happening at the same time that were in the last year, I've recognized the importance of something larger than ourselves.
That's kind of a similar journey for me, because I think I would probably consider myself years ago a very purist type libertarian of free market solves everything.
And I was a Christian, but I didn't really think about the implications of the need for civilization to promote certain values so that society can keep going and civilization can keep going.
And I think I started reading books like Patrick Denin.
I don't know if you've ever read Why Liberalism Failed, but certain books like that.
And then those paleo-conservative type writers, I think you mentioned Pat Buchanan and I started reading Russell Kirk.
And so I kind of had that similar journey where I started thinking, yeah, just having a pure logical answer to things of, oh, yeah, the market will solve this because of A, B, and C.
I think that structuring your society just based on pure abstract logic isn't really feasible.
What would you say about that?
I think we could lie to ourselves about what we can rationalize to ourselves.
And that's one of those dynamics that, you know, it's if you don't have, again, something higher, if you're relying only upon your reason, I mean, mankind is able to reason their way into all sorts of horrific things.
And so I think you need a value system that goes above that.
And the question is, what should be the foundation of a value system like that?
And I think ultimately, you know, God and the Bible, that's a very strong foundation right there.
You can look at this empirically.
You can look at this, I think, just from an understanding of what the underlying message, particularly that of forgiveness and salvation, which goes so much against the caricatures that growing up in modern liberal America, the caricature of the hateful Christian, I think it's so powerful within culture.
And once you recognize the whole reason, a major leading aspect of Christianity's spread was the idea that even someone born a slave or a prostitute can be saved by God.
That is an incredibly powerful dynamic.
And again, the more that you see, I think, secularized modern society, the problems that we have, I think you're seeing a generation of people looking for something else.
And this is also, I think, something within some of the critiques about liberalism, sort of from that classical standpoint.
The Anglosphere was very much grounded within Christianity.
I mean, John Locke and Cato's letters and things like that, these were not French atheists rebelling against the old regime in quite the same way.
I think that if we're looking at what made the Anglosphere so successful, what made America so successful, while it's perhaps a little bit overly materialistic to focus only on the sort of historical record of performance there, I think that that's something that, again,
even if I think libertarians, even if they are not believers, have to have some humility to look at that and to reevaluate for themselves maybe some of their prior judgments and skepticism of religion, if you can see what has actually worked in practice.
Now, there's the Florida man stereotype.
Do you have any cool stories about Florida man?
Or any experiences actually being there surrounded by Florida?
I used to have a gator in my backyard.
Like a pet or like a government?
Why just, you know, a golf course pond resident that would love to make the rounds.
If you go walk down Miami during the two times it's particularly cold during the year, you'll have iguanas fall out of the trees, which is always fun.
Of course, the best part about being a Florida man now is Ron DeSantis.
Being a very radical libertarian for a very long time, it creates, it forces you to evaluate one's premises when you find yourself proud of your government.
That was a very uncomfortable feeling.
And it's been very interesting to see the degree.
Again, like, you know, the only reason why Florida was the way it was, it wasn't because we have some sort of outstanding Republican Party.
It's not because we had a legislature that was ready for a fight.
It's because we had one man make the judgment that he was going to actually, for one, read the science in a remarkable way and keep the state open and then go beyond that and to fight back against the corporate side of the regime, which I think is, again, this is an area where libertarians fail.
If you think that the power of big tech, big pharma, these large corporations as some sort of product of the marketplace, like that's, that's, sorry, these are products of policy.
And so the fact that Ron DeSantis has had that great of an impact, not just on me, but my friends and my neighbors.
I mean, Bay County is the most tourist-dependent county in the entire state of Florida.
If we had shut down for a year and a half and not had tourism, I mean, we'd be dealing with Great Depression-level issues there.
And then all the New York Democrats wouldn't have had anywhere to go for their vacations.
Where would AOC vacation?
And so like, you know, it gets to the point where recognizing someone who has, I think, the judgment to fight my enemies and has the power and willingness to do so.
If there is political legitimacy, if political legitimacy is possible, I think ultimately it comes down to do you make the people you govern better off or worse off?
I think the federal regime is illegitimate because it is a parasite.
I cannot make the same argument for Florida.
And so King DeSantis, baby.
So did the Mises people take over the Libertarian Party recently?
There are a group of people that are big fans of the Institute.
And I think they're the best part of the Libertarian Party.
But yes, a fan's the Institute.
They just take over the LP.
Do you have any thoughts on Aleppo?
What is Aleppo?
That's the correct answer.
This guy's a libertarian.
He knows.
He knows.
Yeah, that was so weird that Gary Johnson was running for president as a Libertarian Party candidate.
And everywhere he went, he was just noticeably high.
He would go on all these TV shows, and you can tell he just blazed right before then.
It's peak libertarian activism right there.
Yeah.
What was the naked guy on the stage at the Libertarian Party a couple years ago?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, he ran across the stage in his underwear because he lost a bed or something.
Don't make me admit that I know this guy's name.
Was that a Mises guy or no?
No, no.
Okay.
I think he made himself an enemy of the Mises.
I thought he was going to say, of course I know him.
He makes me.
So was that the catalyst for you guys to take over the party?
You saw a naked guy running across the stage and you're like, we have to make this party functional and not embarrassing.
So that was, I think, definitely that whole 2016 campaign was a motivation for some folks.
I myself make proud DeSantis Republican, of course.
But yeah, I think that very much was a motivation by Michael Heiss and Dave Smith and Tom Woods.
Some great people.
But they were, you know, if we're going to have this party out there using the L word, let's make it our L word.
And I think that was the sort of motivation there.
And didn't they take out the, like they took over about like last month, right?
And didn't they start taking out some things in the platform, the party platform that were like what I would say socially liberal?
Like then they started going to town and hacking things away.
That's what given a lot of bad press from both the Southern Poverty Law Center and Reason Magazine, which there's often some overlap there.
One of the aspects, so one, there was a plank about bigotry being irrational and repugnant.
They removed that with the argument that bigotry is a word that is being thrown around willy-nilly these days, and they replaced it with something that, you know, the Libertarian Party defends the rights of all Americans, regardless of, you know, creed or whatever.
The other side was removing language about abortion.
And to, you know, the previous one was both sides have good arguments, but ultimately the state shouldn't be involved, which is effectively a pro-choice stance.
And so they just removed that entirely so that this party has no base as I would hope.
So we need to get it full pro-life.
Certainly, I can compare the changes the LP made to what the Texas GOP has done, which has declared Joe Biden an illegitimate president, that abortion must be criminalized in Texas, that there should be a referendum on secession.
I know which one seems a lot more bold and extreme.
Extreme might have a negative context, but much more pro-liberty in my position.
But that's a different thing.
So they're going to change the platform.
It says you must be a Christian.
Yeah, once we get President Though in there.
Yeah, King Thow, I guess.
Yeah, it seems like, I don't know, Republicans are kind of, they were kind of cringy for a long time, you know, and they've kind of fallen into all the conservative stereotypes.
But, you know, if you're actually trying to get involved in the political sphere, they're the ones who are fighting back.
They're the ones who are actually doing things and going out there and saying we got to fight for this, you know?
And they're actively conserving things sometimes, depending on where you are.
And libertarians are the ones who are kind of like, I don't know, we talked about the wishful thinking, but it's, you know, the system works great in a vacuum.
And then you, and then you get to the real world and it's like, oh, you know, you guys can do whatever you want.
It doesn't really matter what society is like.
It doesn't matter what our values are.
You can believe whatever you want as long as the government is going to get involved.
But one side is necessarily going to progress us off the cliff if you're just standing there not defending anything, not actively conserving.
What was Chesterton's thing about the post?
You know, that there's a post that's that's falling apart in the woods.
And if you don't actively keep repainting it, it's going to fall, you know, it's going to fall into rottenness and disrepair.
And you have to actively conserve it and not just sit there and say, well, I'm okay with whatever, you know, whatever your choice is.
You have to actively go back the other way.
There was not a question there.
Libertarianism at its best is a critique of power.
And the problem is that critiques of power aren't enough.
The question is, how do you build institutions that can actually protect you and your family?
How do you actually prevent people that want to do you harm from doing you harm?
And I think that there is an aspect there, and this is something that I've picked up from the Patrick Dean sort of crowd, is I think one of the classical liberal myths is the notion of separation of church and state.
Neutrality.
Yeah, because ultimately power is always wielded with some sort of value system.
Now, that doesn't necessarily have to be connected to a specific church itself as an institution.
But the question is, what is the ethics that guides power?
And if your ethical worldview is that Drag Queen Story Hour is the same means of free expression as teaching your kids about religion, which are some of the arguments going on within libertarian circles, then that's not an area where I want to be engaged with that conversation.
If that's the conversation we need, that's not a productive use of my time.
I want to be dealing with the people that obviously recognize how absurd that is.
And so ultimately, that's where, and I don't think it's a coincidence, that the most radical, in a good way, the strongest Republicans out there typically come from a strong Christian foundation.
Because that is a loyalty that they have beyond whatever the government tells them.
And I think that's one of the big differences between perhaps a Donald Trump and a Ron DeSantis.
And again, I think Donald Trump's presidency was a massive, at the very least, a delay of the inevitability of progressives taking over everything.
So I'm very appreciative.
And I'd be perfectly fine with four more years of Trump and then 24 years of DeSantis.
But ultimately, I think you could see a big difference there between a Ron DeSantis who is, I think, where Christianity plays a major role in his world framework, where Donald Trump is more of a transactional guy whose favorite book might be the Bible, but is more of an art of the deal sort of guy.
And I think that might end up showing some differences in the way they govern as well.
Yeah, the vibe I got from Trump was that obviously he's not a Christian, and I think he knows that.
I heard him speak over the weekend when we went to the thing in Nashville, and he was making fun of himself for not knowing the Bible very well.
But he said something like, but there's people around me who know the Bible very well.
And that's the sense that I got is that he did allow people in his life that had good values, even though I don't think he has great values.
If Fedor told, try to tell someone in 2012 that it's going to be President Donald Trump that ends both nationalist wave.
Right, right.
But the friend-enemy distinction, I think, is very important.
And that's something that a clear advantage there on these issues.
So maybe one more thing to wrap up the libertarianism and Christianity topic is, are there any Bible verses or anything that you go to in Scripture that would seem to reinforce your political views?
Was Jesus a libertarian?
You have one minute to do that.
Well, I mean, he was definitely an enemy of the state.
That's true.
So I do not yet have a Bible verse that really speaks to me.
I have a friend, Ford Seuss, who has gone, who's really played a role of being a teacher within the Christian tradition.
He's a big fan of George MacDonald.
He was a missionary in India for a great deal of time.
So he has his own very, almost anarcho-orthodox view of Christianity itself, where he's very skeptical of the institutions of the church.
The Bible and the word of Jesus is what you need.
So he's someone who I lean a great deal on in my own spiritual growth.
But I do think there's some very interesting dynamics just looking at it from an economic side of things, where the degree to which Gary North, who's a very interesting figure, both in the religious and economic environment, but he's got some very interesting commentary on Christian economics.
And some of that stuff I think is very interesting as well, is a degree to which The recognition of not relying upon the state and kind of the fiat declarations of the regime to guide what motivates us, I think, goes a very long way.
And those are some things that I find very interesting.
And when the Pharisees tried to take Jesus, he said, Am I being detained?
Which is another great example.
Coming up next for Babylon Bee subscribers.
You want to talk about changing the culture.
When you actively punish saving for the future, with the goal of consuming now, I think that creates a very dangerous materialistic element.
I need everything explained in terms of lemonade stands, but so because the number, the rate is low, it's better for me to buy something.