This bonus episode will be published Thursday 18 June 2026
https://reformedlibertarians.com/bonusD
Kerry:
In this bonus episode Gregory and I share our stories about how we became Reformed libertarians. These were initially published on the LCI website, and we’ll include the text in the transcript. We already published them separately on the Reformed Libertarians Podcast youtube channel. But for any who hadn’t read or listened to them yet, here they are together.
Gregory:
As you may know: Kerry Baldwin is not only co-host of this podcast. She’s also an independent researcher and writer, and an education entrepreneur. You can find excellent work from Kerry at her website mereliberty dot com. There, she challenges prevailing paradigms in politics, theology, and culture, from a confessionally-Reformed biblical and philosophical perspective. Among other topics, she addresses abortion and views of womanhood. She’s also Principal Educator and socratic guide at Vita Nova Academy Of Albuquerque, a learner-driven mastery-based microschool, with an emphasis in developing critical-thinking and entrepreneurial skills.
Here is Kerry’s story.
From Lutheran Republican To Reformed Libertarian by Kerry Baldwin
Kerry:
I was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico in a politically and theologically conservative home. I was baptized, catechized, and confirmed in faith at a local Missouri Synod Lutheran (LCMS) church. My mother, raised Irish Catholic (the only person I’ve known with a BA in Home Economics) was never interested in politics. But my father was. And his views shaped mine as I grew up.
He was a Green Beret, Vietnam veteran, working for the Federal Department of Energy by the time I was born. He was more or less a constitutionalist (as he understood it) and registered Republican. His major influences, as I recall, were Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, and to a lesser extent Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot. I was enamored with my father’s sense of patriotism, duty to uphold the Constitution and America’s founding principles, and distrust of the government. Among other things, he impressed on me the importance of not working for (or depending upon) the government, insofar as it was possible.
In my experience, Lutherans don’t often have any sort of robust political theology. This may be because their view of God’s “two kingdoms” (in conscience and external matters, respectively) tends to separate politics from spiritual concerns. In any case, my parents were actively involved in both the fledgling homeschooling movement and prolife activism. One of my dad’s religious influences at the time was Francis Schaeffer, a Presbyterian minister who promoted the prolife cause among conservative Protestants. My three brothers and I were homeschooled in our younger years, before it was legal in New Mexico. We spent many field trips at the State legislature as my and several other parents worked to legalize it. Although, in later years, I attended both Lutheran and government schools.
I distinctly recall attending a number of prolife events with my parents and brothers. What I took away from those experiences at the time were the religious and emotional appeals of the movement. The emotional appeal being the graphic nature of abortion. The main idea was that the hearts and minds of those who supported abortion would be changed if they were adequately exposed to the horrific reality of what abortion actually is. The religious appeal, at least among so-called Evangelicals, seemed to be that Scripture alone is sufficient and effective to argue against abortion. I later came to the conclusion that, while both appeals have a certain degree of merit, they are ultimately naively reductionistic and therefore insufficient and ineffective in changing the social, political, and economic facts and beliefs that contribute to the legality and practice of abortion.
In 1996 I followed the Clinton v Dole US presidential election, in which so-called “partial birth” abortion was specifically at issue. I turned eighteen in 1999 just in time to vote in the Bush v Gore election. Not yet recognizing the political theater that such elections are, I became engrossed in cable “news” about the drama. Meanwhile, I was enrolled at the University of New Mexico (UNM) in the Fall of 1999. I intended to double major in Medical Lab Science and Political Science because of my support for the prolife cause. I was strengthened in my understanding that contemporary legal arguments for abortion had no basis in biology, the Constitution, or human rights. And I came to recognize how such arguments were erroneous attempts to separate personhood and rights from being human.
While attending UNM, I was exposed to Evangelical (Non-denominational) Baptist beliefs and worship through the Baptist Student Union. Some classmates there tried to persuade me that I wasn’t actually a Christian if I didn’t have a conscious conversion experience and hadn’t been baptized as a professing believer. I was deeply shaken by this, and sought out my Lutheran pastor to assuage my anxieties about whether I was saved. My Lutheran pastor did a good job of doing that. And that’s all I wanted for the moment. He also gave me several introductory pamphlets that contrasted Lutheran and typical non-denominational beliefs on baptism and eschatology. It wasn’t long before I had more questions. Regrettably, my questions weren’t really answered. My pastor was still seeking merely to emotionally reassure me. Not finding the more theologically substantial answers I was then seeking, I eventually became discontent with the LCMS altogether.
Over the next year or so, I tried to work full time while fitting-in college courses when I could, without much success. Motivated partly by a misplaced sense of patriotic duty following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, and partly by the prospect of medical lab education and job experience, I enlisted in the US Air Force in the Spring of 2003. I also got married that winter. By 2005 I was pregnant, and accepted the offer of an honorable discharge. I took that option at eight months pregnant and came home to NM.
While I was pregnant the baptism question came up again. This time, I wanted a more thorough understanding of what Scripture actually teaches. I wanted to be more confident in what I believed. Either I would baptize my infant son in the Lutheran church, or I would become Baptist; raising my children as Baptists. However, mostly through exposure to the teaching of the Presbyterian minister R.C. Sproul, the next two years of study would unexpectedly lead me to the Reformed (Presbyterian) perspective. By the time I came to the Reformed view of baptism, I had already given birth to my first two children, born about a year apart. And I had them baptized in the LCMS in 2007. We were attending a non-denominational church at the time. That church was largely opposed to the Reformed Faith, and I didn’t yet know of any Reformed or Presbyterian churches in the area to join.
2007 was also the time running up to the 2008 housing crash. The GOP primary was in full swing and, still a registered Republican, I had the first opportunity to vote in the presidential primary. But there were 13 candidates at one point, and I had no idea how to choose from among them. Knowing what I did about the Constitution, I reviewed its statements about the role of the Executive. As I watched debates, heard candidates speak, and read their campaign platforms, I realized that among them all, only Ron Paul paid any attention to the Constitution.
Listening to videos by former Libertarian Party presidential candidate, Michael Badnarik, I learned more about the Constitution and Bill of Rights. I read Badnarik’s book, Good to be King. He explained that property tax was renting from the state property you owned, and that a driver’s license was a grant of permission to use your own car. This perspective was paradigm-shifting for me. I decided to vote for Ron Paul, but ultimately couldn’t. He dropped out before the primaries reached New Mexico. Instead, I voted for Chuck Baldwin (no relation) of the Constitution Party. I voted once more for President in 2012, for Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party. I haven’t voted for a presidential candidate since, though I will still vote on referendums.
In the following four years, I experienced two parallel journeys: one towards full-fledged libertarianism, and the other towards full-fledged Reformed theology. In 2012, we left the non-denominational church we had been attending. After considering several supposed Presbyterian congregations, we began attending a small Orthodox Presbyterian church (OPC). That year I started mereliberty.com with the goal of challenging the false paradigm of left vs right, and of promoting a libertarian perspective.
The housing crash and bailouts in 2008, the so-called “Affordable Care Act” in 2010, Ron Paul’s second run for president in 2012, and all the GOP shenanigans increasingly disillusioned and radicalized me. I was primed for anarchism, but couldn’t yet make that leap, mostly because of my misunderstanding Romans 13 and not seeing how non-monopolistic, polycentric law was supposed to work. It’s said that it takes only six months to become anarchist once you accept libertarianism. From 2008, it took me 8 more years. In the meantime, I was active locally in municipal politics. But, I was ultimately disillusioned when I realized the city is also run by unelected people, namely, the City Manager and City Attorney.
In 2014, my family and I officially became members of the OPC. And by 2015, I completed my Bachelor’s of Arts in Philosophy from Arizona State University. During these same years I came to realize (belatedly, as is all too common among those who are abused) that my husband was abusive towards me and our children, verbally, emotionally, and financially. He never took responsibility or expressed remorse for his mistreatment and fits of rage. When confronted by our pastor, he refused to listen. The elders of our church supported my decision to divorce in 2016.
Later that year, in a Reformed libertarian online discussion group, a friend had asked what my remaining objections were to libertarian anarchism. Before the year was over, I had been introduced to the writings of economists Ludwig Von Mises and Murray Rothbard. Especially Rothbard’s anarchist political philosophy and a better understanding of the confessionally Reformed view of Romans 13 resolved my objections. In many ways, my parallel developments in theological and political understanding dovetailed, and I became a convinced Reformed (libertarian) anarchist.
My understanding of our God-given self-ownership, property rights, and corresponding obligation of non-aggression, resulted in the consistent conclusion that monopoly states are inherent aggressors and so, illegitimate. I began to understand more clearly how non-monopolistic civil governance is both prescriptively ordained by God, and a realistic possibility, even —or especially— in sinful human society.
It wasn’t until I became aware of Jeff Durbin (a Baptist pastor) and the Abortion “Abolition” movement sometime in 2016, that I would take up the prolife defense again. I published a libertarian critique of prominent prolife and prochoice views. On the prolife side I pointed out that the lack of economic understanding contributed to addressing abortion in an overly-narrow and reductionistic way. On the prochoice side, I pointed out that the broader leftist appeal to protecting marginalized groups was fundamentally undermined by their own arguments favoring abortion. In 2019 I published a two part episode attempting to articulate fetal rights in terms of self-ownership. In December 2019, I was invited to debate Walter Block on his “evictionist” position at the Soho Forum.
In 2020, most states around the world began implementing lockdowns and other disastrous measures in response to COVID. The policies of the New Mexican governor were especially tyrannical in prohibiting gatherings, and mandating business closures, masking, and pushing vaccinations. When she could no longer keep people away from church, she mandated worshippers not to sing or take the Lord’s Supper. She would make frequent public addresses that were fear-mongering and threatening. The parallels between abusive personal relationships and the inherent tyranny of the state became more apparent than ever. Not only do states depend on aggression, but also mass psychological manipulation and financial control to perpetuate their abuse.
That same year, I began collaborating with my co-host, Gregory Baus, on developing the Reformed Libertarians Podcast. Recognizing the tremendous need, we committed ourselves to promoting an understanding of libertarian anarchism grounded in a distinctively Reformed faith and worldview. And by late 2022, we began publishing episodes with the Christians For Liberty Network through the Libertarian Christian Institute.
Since 2020, a lot of libertarians I’ve known online abandoned libertarianism entirely. The lockdowns and other leftist policies in government and its crony institutions were enough for them to oppose non-aggression as a practical principle. They went full “post-libertarian” and began promoting a statist strategy on behalf of supposed traditional values. They believe their re-embrace of violence and authoritarianism is “putting away (the) childish things” of libertarian principles. If anything, such post-libertarians only reveal that they themselves held to certain ideas childishly. However, I remain fully convinced of what we at Reformed Libertarians call the Boetie Option. As we explain in episode 8, The Boetie Option is a strategy of the peaceful “underthrow” of the state. It’s an active strategy of educating a critical mass of the population, towards withdrawal of compliance with the state’s tyranny. A critical mass need not be a majority; it is the smallest number required to sustain a chain reaction.
It may be that the promulgation and wide-spread embrace of Christianity is requisite to achieving a more just and free society. But that will only be hindered, and cannot be helped, by the use of aggression. In any case, I am devoted to the propagation of the confessionally Reformed Faith and church, because I’m convinced it is the most faithful expression of biblical Christianity. I also believe Reformed Christianity provides the truest and most robust grounds for understanding all of human life as God has revealed it to be, whether political normativity, or how we should oppose abuse in other societal spheres. I pray that others will join us, as we promote these things through the Reformed Libertarians Podcast.
***
Kerry:
And now, about Gregory Baus.
Beside his being co-host of this podcast, he’s also an independent researcher and writer in philosophy. Among his primary interests are developing and promoting the Neo-Calvinist philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd and the Reformed covenant theology of Meredith Kline.
Here is Gregory’s story.
How I Became A Reformed-Christian Libertarian-Anarchist by Gregory Baus
Gregory:
Unlike religion, politics was not a consciously prominent feature of my childhood. Nevertheless, without much reflection, I absorbed the political attitudes and opinions of my parents. In the home of my youth, from my birth in the early 70s through the 80s, it was largely treated as a given that the less government interference in society, particularly in the economy, the better. A central idea was that the United States Federal Government had gone fundamentally astray during FDR’s administration (1933-1945) with its economic interventionism. Constitutionally conservative political reform was necessary to restore the Republic, and to defeat domestic commies and all their pinko enablers. All this was obvious (so it seemed at the time), and so I didn’t think about it much.
However, in high school, I took up the anti-abortion cause, handing out pro-life pregnancy center info and evangelizing outside murder clinics, and so on. In my own minority religious community, and in the broader Christian community, abortion was considered (not wrongly, if myopically) the great societal evil of our day. Whatever the immorality of economic interventionism, legally permitting the mass slaughter of babies was a greater crisis, comparable to the enormity of Southern slavery, but worse. This was my political awakening. And, in a striking way, it brought personal and societal morality, politics, religion, and science, all together in a heady and revolutionary mixture. Abortion, or the anti-abortion cause, became a force that dragged me deep into my own religion and its civilizationally-significant philosophical meaning.
The minority religious community in which I was raised (largely in Baltimore, Maryland) was the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, within the camp of “traditional” confessionally-Reformed churches in the U.S. and Canada. The Reformed religion was once held by a majority of Americans, from colonial times until the early 1800s. However, today, there are only about half a million of us. That’s less than fifteen-hundredths of one percent of the U.S. population. There are about as many Amish and Old Order Mennonites in the U.S. as there are confessionally-Reformed Christians. Despite our vanishingly-small numbers, we possess a rich and fruitful devotional and intellectual religious heritage. And it was this religious heritage that I came to embrace, consciously and fervently, in my teen years, and that deeply shaped my philosophical and political development.
During high school, I read a number of Reformed theological classics, and books by more recent Reformed thinkers. Among the more recent, I read several books by Francis Schaeffer, who significantly helped build the pro-life movement among conservative Protestants. I was particularly inspired by his book The God Who Is There and by A Christian Manifesto. In Manifesto, one of the things that stood out to me was the confessionally-Reformed teaching on Romans 13:1-7. The view of that passage (and others like it, such as 1 Peter 2:13-17) held by the majority of Reformers, was that God only prescriptively ordains civil governance to use “the sword” or coercion against wrongdoing. When those who claim civil power create and enforce laws that do otherwise than punish actual wrongdoing, then they are unjust and tyrannical, and no one is required to submit to unjust or tyrannical power. Schaeffer particularly highlighted the book Lex, Rex by Samuel Rutherford who said, for example, “[While civil rulers act] against God’s law, and all good laws of men, they do not the things that appertain to their charge and the execution of their office; therefore, by our Confession, to resist them in tyrannical acts is not to resist the ordinance of God.”
The year after high school, I took a gap year teaching English in Japan. Besides exposing me to a substantially unfamiliar culture and social context, strange beliefs, values, institutions, and customs, and so broadening my sense of human experience, it gave me an opportunity to reflect on the meaning and significance of religious belief for history. That year one book that shaped my reflections was The Two Empires in Japan by John M. L. Young. This book helpfully recounts the history of conflict between a largely compromised Christianity with the predominant Shinto-Fascist Nationalism in Japan.
My first year in college (at a Reformed, Liberal Arts school in Georgia), when I was old enough to vote, I met and conversed with a visiting speaker on campus, Howard Phillips. He convinced me of the crucial importance of the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the political philosophy of strictly limited government (classical liberalism) that served as its foundation. I became a member of the political party, of which he was a key founder, which came to be known as the Constitution Party. I wasn’t really politically active. However, believing that the U.S. government (not to mention most, if not all, local and particular state governments), as a matter of established policy, persistently violated the supposed “rule of law,” and so was in practice, if not in principle, illegitimate, provided plenty of opportunity to share my increasingly anti-government views. In the years following, I began to realize that the U.S. government had not only started to go wrong with FDR, but progressively violated its own Constitution and the principles of liberty from the beginning (e.g. The Whiskey Rebellion of 1791-1794), and that the Constitution itself was an unlawful power-grab, against which the anti-federalists had warned.
In college I also read, and was strongly influenced by, the writings of Neo-Calvinist theologians Abraham Kuyper, particularly his famous Lectures On Calvinism as a worldview, and Meredith G. Kline, particularly his book Kingdom Prologue. I also discovered the writings of Neo-Calvinist (or “Reformational”) philosophers Herman Dooyeweerd, for example, his book Roots Of Western Culture among others, and Roy Clouser, and his book The Myth Of Religious Neutrality that superbly explains key elements of Dooyeweerd’s philosophy. These and other writings that articulated a Reformed worldview, a view of redemptive-historical Reformed covenant theology in Scripture, and a Reformed philosophical view of the basic nature of reality, continue to represent the biblical and theoretical perspectives from which I view life, religion, culture, society, and politics.
My fourth year of college, I took only one semester, and another single semester in a fifth year. Then I dropped out of school in 1997, not having finished my Bachelor’s, feeling frustrated and disillusioned with, among many other things, the college’s inability to provide deeper instruction in Dooyeweerd’s philosophy. After five difficult years of working numerous odd jobs and personal struggle (with a two year sojourn in southern California, where I also audited some evening courses at a Reformed seminary), I was able to enroll for a final year at a different Reformed, Liberal Arts college (in Ontario, Canada) that had a much stronger emphasis in Dooyeweerd’s philosophy, and finished my BA. The infamous 9/11 attacks had occurred only a few years before. And the U.S. government’s tyrannical response in the so-called Patriot Act and unjust invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, served to thoroughly undermine what remained of any naive “benefit-of-the-doubt” assumptions I had concerning the state’s supposed interest in protecting and promoting liberty and justice in domestic or foreign affairs.
Around 2003, I also became aware of Ron Paul, a medical doctor, who at the time was a U.S. representative for the 14th congressional district in Texas (that covered a coastal area southeast of Houston). Mostly through a friend who worked in his D.C. office, I became familiar with Paul’s long-time, solitary effort in the Federal Congress, standing for actual constitutional limits on government and for the political and economic liberty envisioned by many of the U.S. Founders.
Two years later, I enrolled at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam in a philosophy Master’s program. In the year and a-half I studied there, I focused on the philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd (who had been a professor at that university from 1926-1965). I especially focused on his so-called transcendental critique of theoretical thought, political and societal philosophy, and theory of what is called societal “sphere sovereignty.” Better understanding Dooyeweerd’s view of sphere sovereignty (a theory of the normative natures of, and relations between, distinct kinds of societal communities) significantly contributed to my eventual conversion to full-fledged libertarian-anarchism. However, during that same period, I also began an independent study in economics.
Through my acquaintance with the efforts of Ron Paul, I became aware of the Mises Institute, a research and educational non-profit dedicated to promoting (among other things) understanding of the Austrian school of economics. I found a large quantity of academic sources from the Mises Institute for my independent study. I became persuaded of an Austrian view of praxeology (the study of necessary pre-conditions for human action), its premise of “methodological individualism,” the importance of these for a proper understanding of economics, and of a thorough-going free market view. The central idea of methodological individualism is that only individuals intentionally or purposefully act. And this fact is not at odds or in tension with ideas important to sphere sovereignty, such as the reality of communities that cannot be reduced to inter-individual relations, and a non-individualistic conception of society. Worth mentioning here is that my study in economics and praxeology also led to discovery of ideas that significantly helped me understand other areas of Dooyeweerd’s philosophy. Often enough, discoveries in one field of study or even within a given school of thought can illuminate problems or ideas in another. This is a fact I believe many Christian libertarians have discovered in recognizing the mutually supporting beliefs of their religion and political and economic views.
My study of economics led me to the writings of Murray Rothbard, an Austrian economist and historian who also wrote on political theory. Two works crucial to my conversion to libertarian-anarchism were Rothbard’s books For A New Liberty and The Ethics of Liberty. Alongside those and many of Rothbard’s other writings, I was also influenced significantly by articles and lectures by Roderick Long, who is a professor of philosophy at Auburn University. In particular, I was helped by “Rothbard’s ‘Left And Right’: 40 Years Later,” “Libertarian Anarchism: Responses To Ten Objections,” and his ten-lecture series “Foundations Of Libertarian Ethics”. I remember very distinctly, one day in October 2008, while listening to the final lecture of the Foundations series, “An Anarchist Legal Order,” the proverbial light turned on in my mind. It took a few months, as I remember, to get used to the idea that I was now a convinced anarchist. At first, I didn’t dare admit it to anyone. The very notion seemed almost too shocking, even while I was fully persuaded of it. However, being able to see how the total rejection of aggression (or the initiation of coercion, and threat of it) against another’s person or property, and therefore, a total rejection of the monopoly state as an inherently unjust and illegitimate distortion of God-ordained civil governance, was not only entirely compatible with, but in fact, supported by my religious and philosophical convictions, reassured me that (however shocking), it was right to hold to libertarian-anarchism.
A few years after becoming a libertarian-anarchist, I moved outside the U.S. and taught English until mid-2018. During those years, I had begun sketching-out how to articulate the Reformed religious perspective on libertarian anarchism. In 2019, my friend Kerry Baldwin and I had begun brainstorming about creating a podcast devoted to explaining and promoting our shared views. By the end of 2020, we had written The Reformed Libertarianism Statement (and Principles), and in late 2022 we began recording episodes of the Reformed Libertarians Podcast as part of the Christians for Liberty Network. If you want to find out more about the Reformed Faith, the Reformed view of libertarian-anarchism, and why we believe them, you may find the podcast helpful.
Politics (including the politics of libertarian-anarchists) is by no means the solution to all of life’s problems. And on this side of Christ’s return in glory to judge the living and the dead, and to establish the new heavens and earth, even salvation doesn’t solve all our personal and societal woes. Nevertheless, as those who trust in Christ alone for our salvation, growing in our knowledge of Him, we can also grow in our understanding of what the Christian Faith means for our whole lives, including politics, in service to Him. The Lord does not promise that “it gets better” in this life, and that is not our ultimate hope. But it is our great privilege and joy, insofar as we may, to work for a politics that is more in keeping with the ordinances He has revealed.
***
Kerry:
That’s all for this bonus episode. Keep an eye out for out our planned, and Lord willing, forthcoming Reformed Libertarians Q & A series in which we discuss with a guest host prominent questions about the meaning of Reformed Libertarianism.
