was john the baptist a idealist thinker?

Answer 1

No, he was drug addicted prisoner.

Answer 2

We have no way to know what he thought.

There is always someone out there really or at least pretending to be voices crying out in the wilderness. Every TV Evangelist plays that game to heighten the sense of immediacy and urgency, and to get the viewers to make donations. The nearly nothing we know of John the Baptist is that he was a Nazirite, so of course money and possessions meant nothing to him, as with the Desert Fathers and many monastics to this day. Whenever someone calls for repentance and they don't have their hand out for money, even as an atheist, I tend to listen, because while I am certain that Jesus was not divine, I am also certain he was executed for disturbing the social order in a way that tends to have meaning in every generation. Today people tend to take up more specific causes like juvenile diabetes, autism, death penalty, old growth forest, but it's the same sort of thing. When their hand's not out for money for themselves, I tend to listen, and I tend to give money.

John was a true believer, and unlike Osama bin Laden, who really wants money and power and to be Allah's general contractor if not Caliph, John was also a pure believer, the most dangerous and most inspiring kind.