Mike Huckabee is a religious man. Squeeze him, get him tired, and religious talk comes out. When his rhetoric, boilerplate Evangelical speak, goes too far then the media clobbers him. They are right to do so, since what a President says matters. Mike Huckabee understands the balance between church and state, but has said things that sound like he does not.
He has been asked to clarify his views and he has.
John McCain is using patriotic boilerplate that goes equally too far in a statist direction. He sounds like we should worship our nation.
That is equally wrong and he should be held to the same standards as Mike Huckabee by conservatives. Just as Huckabee’s life makes him almost incorrigibly likely to fall into “religion speak” so McCain’s life, that of a genuine hero, makes him sometimes fall prey to abuses of the language of patriotism.
It would be demeaning to patriotism and to McCain if we did not ask him to be as careful with his language as we are with Huckabee.
I am a patriot. I believe that love of country is one of the important lesser loves. If you cannot love your neighbor, then it is hard to claim you can love an invisible God.
I admire great Christian rulers and leaders through the ages, King Saint Louis, Good Duke Wenceslaus, Abraham Lincoln, and William Gladstone. Having said all of that there is a love of country that goes too far and that has no limits. It can lead to statism, secularism, and the destruction of human things in service to a swollen notion of the “fatherland.”
Of late McCain has made patriotic statements that lack any sense of proportion and give to the state language that traditional Western man reserves for God.
Here is a troubling passage from his New Hampshire acceptance speech:
So, my friends, we celebrate one victory tonight and leave for Michigan tomorrow to win another. But let us remember that our purpose is not ours alone; our success is not an end in itself. America is our cause — yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Her greatness is our hope; her strength is our protection; her ideals our greatest treasure; her prosperity the promise we keep to our children; her goodness the hope of mankind. That is the cause of our campaign and the platform of my party, and I will stay true to it so help me God.
Well, no.
America is not our ultimate cause. Western ideals and cultural treasures are not her exclusive property, as friends in Britain and Rome would point out. America’s “goodness,” which is often dubious, is not the ultimate hope of mankind, thank God. Our rights comes from God and not the state, not even America, and are ultimately protected by Almighty God and not the Constitution of 1789.
God is not someone to be tacked on at the end to help America rule, like Jeeves helping Wooster.
This is what the Founders, at least most of them, believed.
I assume John McCain believes it as well, just as I assumed Mike Huckabee is no theocrat. But just as Huckabee’s talk threatened to claim His Kingdom had come, McCain’s talk threatens to take His Kingdom and make it merely America.
All of the things McCain says could be qualified just a fraction to be true or at least arguably true. They have been said by others, from Lincoln to Reagan, in more subtle ways that made them unobjectionable.
McCain could solve his problem by adding, as the Pledge of Allegiance rightly does, the phrase “under God” to much of this Fourth of July rhetoric. America is great when she is good. America has done great good for humankind and given of her talent and treasure in astonishing and noble ways. We should honor and love her and right her wrongs out of that love.
We should also limit our love of nation. Jesus is Lord not America.
One encouraging sign is McCain’s right opposition to the use of torture, which suggest America cannot do just anything she needs to do.
Ideas matter. When Mike Huckabee seemed to confuse the role of the Bible and general revelation, the media and this blog took him to task.
If I were one of John McCain’s advisers, I would point out that we do not worship the state and that his rhetoric is jarring to many voters.
Our rights come from God and not the state and our service to the state is limited. Christians, and McCain is a Christian, must serve God and not Caesar when the two contradict. If McCain will not, or cannot, qualify this language because he really believes it, then a thinking person cannot vote for him.
I assume that McCain is no statist and as a man who has been called to give beyond reason to his nation, who has achieved greatness in this realm, he is simply careless at times in his talk, but a conservative must ask:
Is America McCain’s god?
Theocrats and statists are equally confused and equally dangerous from the perspective of the Bible and Burke and the great conservative tradition. One reason I support Governor Mitt Romney is that he is the only candidate to articulate this position in a clear and consistent manner.