I have defended Mike Huckabee on this blog, though he is not my first choice for the nomination. He has been the victim of unfair attacks from the regular Republican Party, who are aging, or have failed to keep up with changing situations, and are out of touch with the concerns of younger voters.
In Michigan, however, Mr. Huckabee may have expressed a confusion between general and specific revelation that would disqualify him from serious consideration for Christian voters in the republic. Perhaps the reports I have read are in error or in the heat of a campaign he simply misspoke.
What I read and heard, however, was serious.
If Mike Huckabee thinks the Constitution should be changed to conform to Biblical law, then he is in grave error.
Mike Huckabee must get the distinction between Biblical law and general revelation right to govern under the Constitution of 1789.
What is this distinction? Christians realized that there were some truths that almost all people of good will understood. They could be gained through human reason, itself a common grace of God to all humankind.
One did not need to be a Christian to make progress in math and Christians did not take long to discover that they had much to learn from Jewish, Islamic, and even deist thinkers. That sounds obvious, but it is hard to admit that what you think is true may be true, but not have all the truths.
Christianity is true so far as it goes. It may also contain truths that are not obvious to other people of good will. This is not “secularism” in the modern sense, but a recognition that there are areas of Christian thought where accepting divine revelation is necessary to gain access to certain ideas.
This revelation is the gift of Biblical faith, itself a divine mercy from God. Christians cannot, and when they are sensible do not, expect pagans and non-Christians to submit to Biblical law in those areas where one must be a Christian to “buy” the arguments.
Christians discovered through history that freedom of conscience was one of God’s great gifts to mankind.
It was a hard won lesson, one of the great gifts of Christendom to the West. It is also a lesson that was achieved in dialog with secularists or near secularists who were allowed to live relatively unmolested academic lives. This is a tolerance that it is easy to chuckle at today, but letting Hume live fat and happy was a major achievement for a culture that thought some of his views quite wicked.
Most of the world still would not give such a man the right to live, let alone be an honored member of a culture. Christians should celebrate this tolerance and not fall back fearfully on winning arguments through imposing laws on people that cannot accept them.
Even today people on the right and left struggle to sustain the principle that the right to dissent is nearly absolute.
Of course the right to dissent from law (in behavior) is not absolute.
It is not absolute exactly where the Framers said it was. Christians cannot allow the right to life, liberty, and private property to be taken away from men and women, because these are rights that reasonable people should be able to grasp without being Christian.
Traditional marriage and procreation is of interest to the state. Most people in most places at most times have believed this was a “self-evident” truth just as the right to life is self-evident. Every culture develops thoughtful minorities who may dissent from these truths, but they must submit to the rule of law.
It is important, however, that freedom of conscience, soul liberty, be maintained as far as possible. Laws do as little as possible to force people to do what they believe to be wrong or prevent them from doing what they believe to be right.
Religion contains knowledge of this sort, philosophical arguments that it can add to the public square. When these arguments prevail religious voters must do so with a consensus that the widest possible group of people can accept. Fifty-one percent law is usually bad law.
Any idea that requires a belief in Christian doctrine or specific Christian revelation cannot be imposed or should not imposed by force on non-believers.
Mike Huckabee appears to have said that the Constitution should match the Word of God. If by the Word of God, Huckabee means the Bible (it is possible he did not), then he is wrong to say the Constitution should conform to it.
A Constitution may agree with Sacred Scripture, but it should not impose that specific revelation on the commonwealth. This takes matters of personal faith and the Church into the public square where they do not belong. These issues may be knowledge of a sort, the doctrine of the trinity is true, but it is not knowledge based on argument to which non-Christians have access.
Huckabee should press for the Constitution to conform to the law of Nature and of Nature’s God, but he should not press for the Constitution to enshrine any law that requires acceptance of any religious claim more specific than that.
I hope and assume that I have misunderstood Huckabee’s position or he has disagrees with one of the most glorious accomplishments of American Baptist tradition.
It was, more than any other group, American Baptists who pressed in civil matters for maximum soul liberty. It would be sad for a great Southern Baptist leader to fail to understand this issue.