Buckley’s advice to Christian activists

Christianity Today online has dusted off an interview with the recently-deceased William F. Buckley from 1995, featuring his advice to Christian activists. The interview shows his own Christian faith, as well as points like these:

What frightens people most about the Religious Right is the rhetoric that is sometimes used. There ought to be some thought given, for example, as to how you formulate your antihomosexual position: it should be more pastoral than vitriolic….

If, at the end of a broadcast by Pat Robertson, fewer people are disposed to Christianity than were before he came on (I’m not saying that is the case), then that would be awful if that were so….

Whatever you want to say about the anti-abortionists, you have got to at least say this: Theirs is the most disinterested act of humanitarian concern since the Emancipation Proclamation. They are not talking about protecting their own child, they are talking about protecting children….

Thomas Aquinas once was asked, “If the public view was that a famine was imminent, would you be justified in charging injurious prices for your grain, knowing that a relief wagon of grain was coming?” Thomas said yes, you would, but it would be wrong. A Christian would not do that.Certain things which the market authorizes simply in terms of law are unchristian and ought not to be done.

The big issue today has to do with the fidelity of marriages. The tendency now to leave your wife because you have an infatuation with a younger woman of tenderer flesh is an enormous temptation. It’s carnal, and it’s also easy to justify with all the solipsistic reasoning that we hear today. That is about the gravest offense that a human being can commit, to throw away a wife.