(Bias alert: My preferred candidate for the nomination is Mitt Romney.)
First, Hugh Hewitt does us all a favor. He documents Huckabee’s clarification of his views on amending the Constitution and defends Governor Huckabee from some of the more outrageous Internet charges against him. As I said here, if Huckabee thought the Constitution should be changed to conform with the Bible, then Huckabee had committed a serious error.
I suspected that the candidate had misspoken, made that possibility clear, and hoped for clarification. The issue was important enough and the Governor’s words unclear enough that Huckabee was going to have to make it plain that he was not (some how) calling for the imposition of Old Testament law on an unwilling Republic.
Since there are, in fact, a tiny group of fringe Christians who do call for such things, and who are given media and left-wing attention far disproportionate to their numbers or influence, this clarification is of practical importance for any serious candidate.
Hewitt links to a Beliefnet interview where Huckabee responds to a question on this issue:
Do you think that on issues other than marriage and the life of the unborn that the Constitution should be brought into conformity with the Bible, which is what that quote seemed to suggest?
No, I was specifically talking about those two issues. Those were the only two issues I spoke about in the speech, and that was the point. I’m not suggesting that we say, “Okay, the Bible says you should tithe, so now in the Constitution we’re going to amend it to say everyone tithes.”
Those were the two issues that I felt like are talked about in the political realm. I support both the human rights amendment and a marriage amendment, and the reason that I do is because I think we need to codify in our Constitution that which has been acceptable and accepted view of what life and what marriage means. Frankly, if it weren’t being challenged, it wouldn’t be necessary. But it is being challenged. Now you have states that are passing same-sex marriage laws or civil union laws.
And you also have states that not only practice abortion, but if Roe v. Wade is overturned, we haven’t won the battle. All we’ve done is now we’ve created the logic of the Civil War, which says that the right to the human life is geographical, not moral. I think that’s very problematic. That’s why I think that people like Fred Thompson are dead wrong when he says just leave that up to the states. Well, that’s again the logic of the Civil War – that slavery could be okay in Georgia but not okay in Massachusetts. Obviously we’d today say, “Well, that’s nonsense. Slavery is wrong, period.” It can’t be right somewhere and wrong somewhere else. Same with abortion.
This is very helpful.
It is in line with the classic American Christian position. In this country, Christians admit the right of “soul liberty.” Even where Christians are a majority, most places and for most of American history, individuals are allowed to follow their conscience unless they transgress on the right to life, liberty, or the ownership of private property. The great debates of American history are around the limits of those God-given rights. What is liberty, classically defined as the absolute right to do good? What is property? Can property include persons? In our own age, the chief question is, “What is life?”
Plainly, whatever his merits as a candidate, and as a successful and conservative governor of a purple state they are great, Mike Huckabee has gotten this issue “right” or at least within the acceptable parameters of historic American opinion.
This is good news. It means I can go back to worrying about his foreign policy views and whether he can broaden the base of the Republican Party enough to win an election and defend the fundamental “right to life.”
Before moving on, I think this gaffe by Huckabee, and it was a gaffe, tells us something about some of Huckabee’s critics and something about Mike Huckabee.
Some of Mike Huckabee’s critics are shown in a not-so-flattering light by their response to this gaffe. There exists in academic and media circles in particular a great deal of ignorance and prejudice against Evangelical Christians. While Huckabee stepped into a mind field and was guilty of a lack of clarity, his gaffe tempted these prejudiced people (some otherwise very good folk and themselves Christians) to simply assume Huckabee was a closet theocrat.
This does not mean a demand for clarification was wrong, but that the demands strongly hinted at guilt-before-trial and the darkest possible interpretation of his words.
There was little attempt to qualify concerns with the magical word “if”. Saying “if” Governor Huckabee meant this and not that, then he said something bad is very different than the immediate assumption that Governor Huckabee was almost surely a Protestant inquisitor.
I believe that some otherwise good, and well-intentioned people always look for the worst in Evangelicals. Any unflattering thing about Governor Huckabee, the media cannot get over his relatively brief stint in the ministry, is attributed to his religion. (How many news stories call him a minister first and do not mention, or bury deep in the article, his more extensive political experience?) Without showing any connection many stories will argue, “Because of his Evangelical faith, the former Baptist minister thinks such and such.”
This sort of non-Evangelical is so obsessed with Evangelicals that they attribute everything to Huckabee’s religious views . . . even on issues where the connection is at best secondary. When Christians say “Jesus is Lord,” we mean it. We hope that everything we believe lines up with His will (”thy will by done on Earth as it is in Heaven”), but we don’t think this Big Idea always is particularly helpful in the details!
Just as God is the primary creator of everything, but allows me to be a secondary or “sub-creator” by writing on this blog (don’t blame him for the typographical errors!), so our Biggest Idea (Jesus is Lord!) is primary always, but works itself out in many secondary ways. Failure to understand this makes a certain sort of person see religion as not just a primary (or deepest) motivation, but in every secondary discussion.
They are like a man who cannot get over the gender of a candidate to discuss other things. However, deep gender may be in a person (and I think it soul deep), it is not the immediate reason (one hope’s) that people pick what they pick.
The obsession with religious motivation can become amusing. Once when asked my tariff ideas in a political debate, I received a shocked reply that my ideas, and my expressed reasons for them, agreed with the person with whom I was debating. How could this be? Where were the Bible verses?
I could have replied (though time did not permit) that the Bible is true, but it does not contain all truth. There is precious little in Sacred Scripture that directly illuminates my thoughts regarding free trade. The ethical and bed rock metaphysics of Scripture cause me to look for a tension in a good policy between law and total liberty, but that does not do much to resolve the practical issues in a community that all agrees on the big picture.
In short, Christians can easily agree on the Big Ideas and come to different “practical” conclusions. Is this disturbing? To the contrary, this is the good news about a God who does not want robots, but sons and daughters who will (eventually) rule and reign with Him.
One hopes as they get to know more Evangelicals the diversity of thought (without the same general world view) will be obvious, ignorance will begin to vanish and prejudice cease. Sometimes I think non-Evangelicals are still in the early stages of this where they rush to read books that will breathlessly tell them “what those folk believe” while living in communities where they almost surely know several Evangelicals!
Instead of talking to such folk and becoming friends, the first step out of bigotry is almost always to read about the Other and try to mentally grasp who “they” are.
Mike Huckabee is running for President in a new media age. That means (as George Allen knows) that every word he says at almost every moment of every day will make it on-line. We are all going to have to tolerate explosions, gaffes, and stupid statements from our preferred candidate or wait for the coming of King Jesus . . . an option that the press of the election in November does not seem to grant.
Everybody is going to say something he shouldn’t. In fact, Governor Huckabee’s response to the gaffe is just the right one. He clarified and moved on to something else. In the case of his earlier gaffe about Mormons in a magazine interview, he apologized.
That is exactly right.
Gaffes in the new media age are going to be there from any candidate who is not robotic. . . a trait that will make the candidate (in the age of Oprah) unappealing and unelectable. When George Allen, the senator from Virginia, blew up and used a racial slur, it told us two things about him. First, when he saw a person of color, his first thought was “race” and “racial slur” and not some more generic insult. That was very bad news about Senator Allen. Second, he tried to bluff his way out of admitting he had blown it. His response was disingenuous.
Voters need to tolerate a higher level of gaffes in a new media age. Candidates need to admit when they make them.
In contrast to Allen, Huckabee’s gaffe says something good about him. When he gets verbally confused, he tends to fall into “Biblical-speak” or Christian thought patterns. I find that comforting in a commander-in-chief. When one considers that the Bible is indisputably one of the intellectual pillars of Western civilization, I think it should be comforting to non-Christians. This is not a man who will err by believing some new faddish theory or will make mistakes in his own calculated interest. He will fall back into traditional Christian modes of thought, modes that still capture the hearts and minds of up to eighty percent of the population.
Governor Mike Huckabee misspoke, clarified, and told us a bit about himself. Voters will decide what they make of it.