Christianity and Islam Meet at the Extremes: Christians Who Want to Stone Adulterers

Abridged from:
Tim Dickinson
Sat, July 29, 2023
Rolling Stone Magazine

[Note from Lebanon Iznogood: Christian barbarians do exist. They are many and live hypocritical lives in the recesses of modern society. Like the psychotic Evangelicals of the American Bible Belt and their newly converted idiots of Latin America and Asia, they believe in Hollywoodian end of times and Armageddon, which they use to scare off other idiots into converting in order to escape the wrath of a non-existent God. They get their inspiration from the fictional trash of the Old Testament or Torah. So to those Christians who elevate themselves by simply comparing themselves to what they consider barbaric Islam and Judaism: You just got out of the cesspool thanks to the revolutions of Reason and Enlightenment. Now you want to go back to ignorance and barbarity?]

The podcast setup at first appears familiar: a pair of white dudes, mic’d up at a table, wrestling out loud with big ideas. But the conversation between the two men veers, without guardrails, into a dystopian vision of a Christian nationalist America, in which the laws of the Old Testament have been substituted for the constitution and the community is responsible for executing people who cheat on their spouses. Those executions, the men propose, should be done by stoning, the public act of hurling rocks at a condemned person until they are bludgeoned to death. Just like the Taliban of Afghanistan, of whom these Christian numskulls are apparently jealous.

“Stoning is appropriately barbaric,” argues Luke Saint [no pun intended], the author of the Sound Doctrine of Theocracy and a recent guest on the podcast of the Lancaster Patriot, a far-right publication based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, an hour-and-a-half drive west of Philadelphia.

With stoning, Saint advocates, “Everyone knows who the accuser is. And everybody knows who the victim is. Everyone knows who the perpetrator is. Everything’s out in the open.”

As this podcast illuminates, there are factions of Christian nationalists who not only want to take America back to its supposed Christian origins, but they also seek to jettison its constitutional system of checks and balances in favor of a government based on biblical law, including reviving punishments that clash violently with modern notions of human rights.

Saint is an extremist, but he’s not alone. His interviewer is the Patriot’s managing editor, Chris Hume, who has written that America’s path forward must be “blazed by setting a clear course towards a Christian society, based on the Bible and biblical law.” Hume also believes that the GOP’s current crop of far-right candidates are far too squishy: “Until politicians like Doug Mastriano and Ron DeSantis begin operating on a platform of biblical law, they will only propagate the problems.”

Saint’s book purports to answer the question: “If Christians were to be presented with an opportunity to create a new government, what would we create?” He is also the chairman of the Mid-Atlantic Reformation Society (MARS), which touts that the Bible provides “all necessary directions and instructions for a just, happy, and productive society.”

“Biblically,” Hume says, “you have a system where the citizenry is responsible for seeing that justice is done, right?” He adds: “Society itself has to be the one to purge the evil.”

For Saint, a key part of this revived biblical justice, is recognizing what trespasses truly merit this death penalty. “First off,” he says, “we need to realize that whatever sin requires stoning is more barbaric than the act of stoning itself. Christians have lost that idea,” he argues. “We’re like, ‘Oh, stoning is worse than adultery.’ No, no, no! Adultery is worse than stoning.”

Hume answered questions from Rolling Stone via email. Asked to explain his biblical worldview, he insisted: “The Bible not only offers a better path to a just society than our current American system does, but it offers the only path to a just society.”

When pressed on the horrific nature of stoning, he conceded: “I also find the notion of taking up stones in the form of capital punishment against duly convicted criminals to be a shock to my modern sensibilities.” But he insisted, “it is not unjust,” and added: “The requirement that those bringing the charge must be first to put the convicted criminal to death serves as a safeguard against baseless accusations.”

The podcast aired several weeks ago, but has not been previously reported. This week the Lancaster Patriot has a new story promoting Saint and an upcoming Future of Christendom Conference sponsored by MARS. That conference will feature a public debate: “Is ‘Gay Christian’ a Biblically Acceptable Identity for a Member of Christ’s Church?”