Scott Lively has been in independent ministry for 30 years. He has been active in the pro-life movement, and more recently in opposing the homosexual lobby, including consulting with foreign governments on how to resist homosexual activism in their countries. Because of his activities in Africa, he was sued by homosexual activists and, although their lawsuit was ultimately thrown out, was forced to defend and expensive and time-consuming lawsuit for several years. We’ve previously reported on the progress of this lawsuit.
Lively is an expert on the history of homosexual activism, and has published several books on the topic. We republished an article by Lively that appeared in World Net Daily in which Lively discussed the connection between homosexuals and “far right” racism.
Lively has earned a law degree, he has run for governor of Massachusetts twice, and now is focusing on founding a bible college in Memphis, Tennessee, First Century Bible College. He aspires to train Bible students to emulate the Christianity of the First Century, AD, before papal corruptions entered the Christian Church.
I caught up with Lively on September 25, before he spoke at a meeting at a Dallas church near Fair Park. We met at a Hare Krishna Temple a few minutes away, on Gurley Avenue in Dallas, Texas, and had a lively (no pun intended) and wide-ranging conversation while waiting for the temple’s vegetarian restaurant to open. It was a real pleasure and an honor for me. Below is a transcript of the first part of that interview:
DR: Scott, tell us a little bit about yourself. When did you first become a Christian?
SL: I was born and raised in a Catholic family—I’m the oldest of six kids—in western Massachusetts. [But] I don’t consider myself a Christian just because I was born into a Christian family; I believe that you must affirmatively accept Christ as your savior in order to be a Christian, and that didn’t occur in my life until I was 28 years old. I went from Catholicism to New Age paganism; I dabbled in many different cult-like organizations, and then, when my life was in shambles after 16 years of bondage to alcoholism and drugs, I got down on my knees in an alcohol and drug rehab center, a secular one, and surrendered my life to Christ.
DR: After you committed your life to the Lord Jesus Christ, and got off drugs and alcohol, then what did you begin doing?
SL: I was actually miraculously healed and delivered in prayer on my knees, I surrendered my life to Christ, and when I got up I never had another desire to drink or take drugs ever again. I didn’t even have to try. The inclination was completely gone, and that was after having lived a lifestyle in which I was incapable of abstaining from drugs. It was a remarkable experience.
I was married already when this happened, and my life began to transform considerably. I had always deferred to my wife in all things; she was the financial provider and I was a handyman, which was all I could do with my condition. After I was delivered, I began to come into myself as a man, and this cause tremendous tension in our household. She had two sons from a previous marriage, and they didn’t recognize the new guy that I had become; they liked the happy-go-lucky drunk they had known before.
We ended up in crisis; my wife and I were separated and expecting to divorce. During that time, I met my former drug dealer on the street. He had become a Christian in the interim. Through his ministrations, I ended up attending church for the first time, an evangelical church. I became a member of Portland Four-Square Church in Portland, Oregon. Again, another milestone in my life. I went back to my wife, asked my wife to get back together with me to raise our children according to biblical values, after just a few weeks of attending that church. She agreed, and ever since then I have been dedicated to Christian service.
DR: At what point did you decide to go into independent ministry, and what led you to do that?
SL: Well, I was never really deeply connected with any denomination or denominational perspective. For the first year of my sobriety, I went to AA and Jesus was my “higher power.” It wasn’t until my former drug dealer took me to church that I had any connection to the church at all. From that point on, my sense of being a Christian was always grounded on what the Bible said, not necessarily on what I heard on the radio or what a pastor said, so I had a different notion of Christianity than most people do. And because the Lord led me into a ministry of sustaining the sanctity of life on the abortion issue, I had a very broad, multi-denominational ministry that broke down any other barriers that I might have had. I worked with Christians from every walk of life, including Catholics, and that further solidified me in that sense of having my Christianity defined by the biblical worldview as I understood it.
DR: Let me stop you for just a minute, because the abortion issue is interesting, and we’re dealing with that in my denomination, which is the Seventh-day Adventist Church. We are in the process of re-writing our statement on abortion. Unfortunately, the statement we adopted in 1992 is wishy-washy and does not take a strong pro-life position. What advice would you have for my denomination on what we need to do in that area?
SL: If you can’t get right on the essentials of the gospel, including that life is a gift from God—it’s absolutely precious—if you can’t get clear on that, then everything else is in dispute. If your presuppositions are not sound, your conclusions will not be sound. It’s one of the most fundamental presuppositions of creation that you are created in the image of God. And that entire process from conception to natural death is self-evidently His divine impression on us, and we fit within the created order by His hand, by His attention, by His design.
DR: So, in other words, whether life is brought into being or not depends on God, and it is not for man to veto what God has ordained with regard to conception and birth.
SL: That’s correct, that’s correct. And, really, you can almost analogize DNA to the tree of life, in that when a child is conceived, there is new DNA. It is the binding of the parents’ DNA together creating a separate new person. In fact, the conception of life is in one sense a fulfilment of the “one flesh” paradigm of Genesis 1:27 and 2:24, that we’re created in his image, two complementary halves of one whole, and then 2:24 “therefore shall man leave his family and cleave unto his wife and they shall become one flesh.” Now, certainly that has spiritual implications, but physically the one flesh is the conceived child, literally, in that the two have become one through that process of conception.
DR: So, stepping out to the broader world, where do you think the United States is on abortion? In a lot of areas we seem to be drifting toward the Left, but on abortion we seem to be getting more conservative, and there is more appreciation for the pro-life position even among young people.
SL: Well, there are two reasons for that phenomenon. The first is the unrelenting pursuit of the sanctity of life by the Catholic Church. They’ve concentrated their political efforts on the pro-life issue and they have a lot of influence on the culture. That combined with non-Catholic Christians who share that as a key aspect of the culture war.
That’s one factor, but I think a bigger factor is actually not positive, and that is the collapse of critical thinking and the rise of emotionalism in the younger generation. Rather than coming to a pro-life position through logical deduction, they’re coming to it in the same way they come to the defense of homosexuals, through just simply an emotional inclination to protect those they think are somehow being abused. In other words, the pro-life position for a Christian is grounded in rationality and the created order, but for a lot of young people it is grounded in social justice, in their concept of social justice as protecting the weak, without any discrimination as to whether the weakness is justified, or the consequences. For example, the same people who will be inclined toward a pro-life position from an emotional impulse will also be opposed to capital punishment. They will be unwilling to sacrifice the innocent—and hence oppose abortion—but they also want the guilty to be set free. It is all wrapped up in this subjectivist, emotionally driven approach to all issues in the society.
DR: That is fascinating. I’d never heard it explained in just that way. I’ve heard that the younger generation is becoming more pro-life, while still moving left on other issues, but I’d never heard it explained by reference to their social justice beliefs.
DR: With regard to the younger generation and what they’re being taught, it seems that there is a lot brainwashing on the issue of man-made global warming. The most hysterical advocates of that issue are the younger generation, going even down into grade school, and certainly high school and college. What is your take on the global warming issue? Ideologically, what is driving that?
SL: I perceive so-called “global warming” as a tactic for establishing global government. The global carbon tax system is just a placeholder for global taxation. The 2030 agenda that was put forward at the United Nations a couple of years ago is a 17-point plan that essentially takes over six different spheres of society and moves them into a global system of order. So that’s what this is all about. There’s no question that there are changes in our climate, but climate change is perpetual. This idea that somehow there’s supposed to be some constancy to climate is ridiculous, and no one ever, ever challenges that premise that somehow, because things are changing in our climate, that the default setting should be absolute consistency from year to year forever. That’s just simply preposterous.
DR: And we know that’s not true from a mainstream geology point of view, because we know that there was an ice age, and that at times in the far-distant past temperatures were much warmer, because there were cold-blooded dinosaurs at the north and south pole. So whether you’re a creationist or a Darwinist, there are many reasons to acknowledge that the climate is always changing, it’s never been constant. The idea of a constant climate is really an artifact of people living in the present.
SL: Right, but this is the strategy. If you look at the 2030 agenda, “sustainability” is one of the code words. This is carefully crafted social engineering at the globalist level, and it is imposed on all the countries of the world through the UN. You cannot go a day listening to the radio without hearing the word “sustainability” probably multiple times a day, it has percolated through everything. And this is all propaganda; it is indoctrination in a perspective, and the people most vulnerable to this propaganda and manipulation are the children. It is reprehensible that the Left participates in the active manipulation of the minds of children for their own political benefit. It is just reprehensible. But then again these are the people who will kill babies with impunity and abandon all sense of ethics.
DR: and for whom abortion right up until the moment of birth is almost a sacrament, it is a political untouchable on which they all toe the line.
SL: You see, this is where a biblical worldview is essential for people who claim Christ. That comes from biblical literacy. First, it comes from an intention to pursue truth and to love truth above anything else, because you love God and believe in a created order that is good, that God’s creation is good, and that it is perfectly designed by Him. The flaws in it are a result of the entrance of sin into the world. But even so all of it is in God’s hands and He is producing results according to His plan. As soon as you lose biblical literacy in the church, then you give ground to humanist alternative arguments.
This all comes down to a very long war against Judeo-Christian civilization, in which the demonic side has perfected its arguments in the past two centuries with Marxism. The culture war, the struggle that we have in Western Civilization, it all comes down to a conflict, really, between Marxists and Christians. And Christians have simply given up ground to the Marxist every step of the way, until we’re almost ready to be extinguished by these guys.
DR: And the main ground we’ve given up is the education system; there’s no way we should have been allowing Marxists in the education system to indoctrinate our young people.
Let’s go back a minute. You stated that you believe that the ultimate goal of the global warming propaganda is to maneuver us into a world government. I think most Americans, at least most conservative Americans, instinctively are frightened of world government, because we believe we’ve been uniquely blessed and have uniquely optimal institutions and laws that have allowed us to have unprecedented freedom and prosperity. But leaving to one side the “American exceptionalism” that we feel at a visceral level, why should we fear a one-world government? In theory doesn’t that stop wars, stop genocide, solve famine and poverty and want? If we could actually have a functioning one-world government, wouldn’t that be great? How do you respond to that?
SL: Well, that’s an awfully big question. I would bring it back to the United States. A one-world government, if it was modeled on the U.S. constitution and grounded in constitutional originalism with a biblical world view, would be a wonderful thing. And there is going to be a one-world government in my theology—the millennial kingdom. Jesus Christ will reign in Jerusalem on the throne of David for a thousand years, if you take the Bible literally as I do.*
But the global government that the globalist elite is pursuing is a global socialist order that is atheistic in its premise. Actually, it is secular-humanist in its premise, which is slightly different. It is premised on the idea that human beings are their own god, that we are capable of self-perfection. That’s the premise of Marxism from the beginning: that human society is evolving toward an ultimate perfect version—a socialist utopian order—and since we know what it is going to look like anyway, why don’t we get rid of this monstrosity that we’re encumbered with now, and build the socialist utopia on its ashes. That’s always been the satanic fantasy that has driven the Left.
DR: But utopianism is doomed in the Christian worldview because man is fallen and is not perfectible this side of the second coming of Christ. That’s why I believe utopianism is a delusive fantasy, because in fact human nature is not perfectible because of the Fall. That’s where I come from on the issue, but the proof is in the pudding, and these utopian ideologies have killed over a hundred million people just in the 20th Century alone.
SL: The heart of man is desperately wicked, who can know it. This is the reality of things. [But there is the process of Christian sanctification.] In my theology there is a three-part process: justification, sanctification and glorification. Accepting Christ, we are justified in His name, by faith alone, in Christ alone, and we have our ticket to heaven. Sanctification is the process of becoming like Christ over the course of our lives, a process that will either go quickly or slowly, depending upon how much we cooperate with the Holy Spirit in the process. But in any case we will never reach perfection until, “He who has begun a good work in us will be faithful to complete it,” which is glorification, where God fills up whatever deficiencies we have in our spiritual bank account, and we enter into spiritual bodies like His, and rule and reign with him in the millennial kingdom. All this is literal straightforward teaching of the Scripture.
In one sense, when you look at Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels did, with this fantasy that they had, it is really a satanic counterfeit alternative to the millennial kingdom, in that it is human beings who will be able to produce it for themselves.
DR: In other words, perfection comes through the process of sanctification, which comes through the Holy Spirit, through Jesus Christ. It works on individual hearts, one person at a time, as they are converted. You don’t have perfection of a whole society based upon banning private ownership of the means of production and instituting common ownership of the means of production. That’s not how it works.
SL: You don’t get perfection at all, because human beings are by nature imperfect, and that doesn’t change. No society—we’ve done better than any other society in the history of the world, by scientific application of biblical principles, by very intelligent, inspired men and women—the founders of the United States—who were standing upon the shoulders of those who came before them, in the development of the concept of government by the consent of the governed and rule of law by covenantal oath, which is a constitution—that’s the Mayflower Compact, the first constitution of America, a covenantal oath, where Christians came together and said, “let’s make a plan of how we’re going to govern ourselves, putting God first, and following the order that He’s established in the Bible.”
That’s the best you can get, but even under those circumstances, it always falls apart. That’s why the original pursuit of [common ownership], when the church was at its highest level of unity and zeal for the things of God, they were not able to sustain that culture of holding all things in common. Even at that time, even when the fire of passion burned brightly in each of them, they were not able to sustain that, just because of the way we’re made, the way we think. And because sin and challenge is built into this world—that’s part of our development [as Christians] is encountering difficulties, trials, and temptations. And we’re suppose to count it all joy when [trials] happen, because it is for our development through difficulty. If we didn’t have any difficulty, we wouldn’t have any growth.
DR: You adverted to the Book of Acts, where it says they held all things in common. The latest theory I heard on that, from one of my pastors, was that they held a common purse because they were gathered in Jerusalem for Pentecost from all over the Jewish world, and when the Holy Spirit came upon them, they stayed rather than going back home to their towns and their jobs, and they had to have a common fund to support each other. But we are not told that, in any of the other cities in which Christianity arose, that they even initially held things in common. So the myth of primitive Christian communism may just be a myth.
SL: Well, it was certainly very much localized. But there’s nothing in the Bible by accident, either, and the fact that it is there, and it is demonstrated that it didn’t work, is a lesson to everyone who follows. We cannot now go back to it and say, “we communists, we Marxists can actually do it better than the Christians did it.” That’s a ridiculous premise that the atheistic Marxists would be able to achieve what the early Christians could not.
*Adventists believe that during the millennium the saved will be in heaven with Christ, and the earth will be desolate and empty. This is based upon several points of Bible evidence including 1) while on earth, Christ told his disciples that He was going to prepare a place for them, but would come again and take us to be with him (John 14:1-4), 2) that the saved go up to meet Christ in the air at the second coming (1 Thess. 4:16-17), 3) At the second coming, the unsaved are destroyed by His appearance (1 Thess. 2:8; Rev. 19:21) and are not resurrected until after the thousand years are over (Rev. 20:4-5), 4) the earth is desolate during the thousand years (Jer. 4:23-26) with only Satan left alive, but bound to the empty earth (Rev. 20:1-3), and 5) the New Jerusalem is “coming down from heaven” at the end of the millennium (Rev. 21:1-3). These Bible fact, taken together, indicate a millennium in heaven, not on earth.