Of “God’s Standards” and Conservatism
During his speech Monday night in front of his most fervent supporters in Michigan, Huckabee said something that revealed perhaps the true nature of his candidacy
Mike Huckabee has said some very strange things this campaign season - mostly to obscure his center-left record as a tax and spend populist while governor of Arkansas. But during his speech Monday night in front of his most fervent supporters in Michigan, Huckabee said something that revealed perhaps the true nature of his candidacy and what it means for America and his brand of “ conservatism:”
“[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it’s a lot easier to change the constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that’s what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards,” Huckabee said, referring to the need for a constitutional human life amendment and an amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman.
The Reverend Huckabee must be a privileged individual indeed to know the mind of God. I suppose it’s all a matter of interpretation; some people might violently disagree with the good reverend about just what those “standards” of God might be. But since Reverend Huckabee has been given the grace to see the light and pronounce the one true list of standards God has set for us then I guess the debate is over and we can simply bow to his superior insights and extra special holiness.
Christian conservatives are fond of saying that their critics don’t want freedom of religion but freedom from religion. In the grossest sense I suppose that’s true. But those making that argument ignore the ramifications of what they are proposing when protesting that they only want to be able to practice their religion in the public square. If that’s all there was too it, I doubt that too many Americans would be uneasy or even fearful. But then along comes Mike Huckabee talking about basically establishing God’s kingdom here in America by amending our Constitution to reflect his idea of “God’s standards” in moral behavior and even Christian evangelicals must look in askance at the Reverend’s candidacy.
As a conservative, I stand on the side of tradition so that when headline seeking atheists and their buddies at the ACLU initiate some unnecessary court action to remove a creche that has been placed in front of some city hall for a hundred years or a cross that has stood atop a mountain for 80 years and has become the centerpiece of a Korean War memorial, I stand with the Christians in complete confidence that I am living up to my conservative ideals. But Huckabee’s all too revealing utterance about exactly how he seeks to accomplish his idea of a “just moral order” should cause every conservative worth their stripes to denounce the candidate’s words and deplore his candidacy.
The impulse that drives Huckabee and his supporters is not a conservative one. It is a statist impulse - a desire to use the power of the government to enforce arbitrary standards of moral behavior on the rest of us. It is taking the conservative dictum requiring a moral order for justice to thrive and twisting the concept to allow for one group to not only dictate morality but also impose their own, necessarily narrow view of justice.
For my lefty friends who may not be familiar with conservative philosophy, I can assure you that going all the way back to Locke and coming forward to the present, you will not find Mr. Huckabee’s notion of state imposed religious standards for either personal behavior or law anywhere. It is, as Andy McCarthy of NRO puts rather mildly, anti-Democratic in the extreme:
Lisa, it’s really infuriating if you’ve had the experience — as I have — of being portrayed at various panels as part of the “American Taliban” for defending the purportedly Islamophobic efforts to root out Muslim terrorists. Part of my usual response, as a demonstration of how nuts this accusation is, focuses on the Taliban, their imposition of sharia (i.e., God’s law), and the marked contrast to our system’s bedrock guarantee of freedom of conscience.
Huckabee is made to order for the Left: his rhetoric embodies their heretofore lunatic indictment that we’re no better that what we’re fighting against. Let’s “amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards”? Who needs to spin when the script speaks for itself? Where has Huck been for the last seven years? Does he not get that our enemies — the people who want to end our way of life — believe they are simply imposing God’s standards?
McCarthy’s reference to a “bedrock guarantee of freedom of conscience” is, in fact, the essence of conservatism. Huckabee apparently rejects this basic freedom as not being up to “God’s standards” and seeks to substitute a capricious slavishness to a single, dominant, narrow moral criterion that brooks no questions because it establishes itself from God.
As McCarthy points out, this is exactly the same thing our enemies wish to impose upon us and the rest of the world. Who cares if it comes from a devout Christian or a devout Muslim. The effect is the same.
The friction between genuine conservatives (even genuine social conservatives) and Huckabee and his acolytes is the story of this election. The Huckabites feel they are being put upon for their religious beliefs. Not hardly. In fact, most Christian conservatives are not supporting Mr. Huckabee. Where the fracture is occurring is in the Huckabites contention that their narrow, warped view of conservatism should dominate and rule the Republican party, that their issues should be given superior weight to other conservative issues.
Giving in to them would betray everything most of the conservative movement stands for. And giving them the leadership of the party would be a catastrophe for conservatism and for the country.
I would suggest those conservatives who prior to this had been taken in by Mr. Huckabee’s easy smile and winning personality to think twice before voting for this charlatan.
Every time he opens his mouth, he renders himself just a tiny bit more irrelevant.
I don’t actually believe that everyone in the Republican party is Pat Robertson, so I’m fairly confident that he has no chance of getting the nomination. If he WERE to get it, then sadly Republicans who are not religious nuts would be in the unenviable position of trying to explain how a guy who IN NO WAY represents the party, got that parties nomination.
I actually liked him at first, and even considered voting for him if Clinton got the nomination, since I do like his stance on poverty. He still strikes me as a nice enough guy, but now I think he’d be downright dangerous as president. Not because I think he has a snowballs chance in hell of getting an Constitutional abortion ban passed, but because that kind of a president would lead to one of two outcomes:
1. Republican Congress: Lots and lots of things would get passed that I’m entirely certain I wouldn’t like. In addition to a general tearing down of the wall between Church and State, I fully expect we’d get lots of silly garbage that only would serve to muddle history.
2. Democratic Congress: Well, I’m guessing it’d be years of gridlock. The president wouldn’t sign things and the Democrats are too ineffective to get stuff done on their own.
Neither option is even faintly attractive.
The whole issue with the social conservatives does have to be resolved though. Huckabee is right when he says that the Republican party is happy to accept their votes but a lot less receptive to actually taking on issues important to them. I disagree with them on nearly everything, but I can understand their discontent. What I DON’T understand is why so much time and energy is expended on abortion and men getting married and not so often about children living in poverty right here in the USA. From what I’ve read so far of the Bible, Jesus mentions helping the poor a whole lot, but I’ve yet to see him say "thou shall not allow two men who are beloved join. This commandment I give thee far surpasses any of helping those who want"
That’s a bit of a bum rap though, Lynx, because remember that a whole lot of evangelicals WERE pulled into political involvement not because of gay marriage and/or abortion, but because of Bush’s promise of "compassionate conservatism." I’m not saying there aren’t small minded or even bigoted CHINOs (Christians in Name Only- heh) who respond like Pavlov dogs whenever gay marriage prohibitions are mentioned. But it’s wrong to paint with a broad brush and say that this is what the religious right is all about.
Apparently these ideals include ignoring first amendment violations as long as they’ve been going on for a long time…
C Stanley, since I’m not inside the religious right community, I can’t say for sure what the priorities of the group is. All I have is the outside face of the community, and what I’ve seen shows that the groups that claim to represent the community are a lot more obsessed with gay sex than they are with childhood poverty.
Also relevant is the rhetoric of politicians who claim the religious right as their base. They can be assumed to have a better idea than me of what issues are most important to that group; and they too spend a lot more time talking about gay marriage and abortion than about fixing poverty, for instance.
You could claim, even rightfully, that these groups don’t represent the majority of Christian Conservatives, and that the politicians are misguided in their way of speaking to the group, but I’m afraid that if that is the case the responsibility for fixing that rests on the "moderate majority". Yes, just like those who say that extremist Islam is but a tiny part of a religion that in it’s majority is peaceful, it’s the responsibility of that moderate majority to make their voices heard, to show the outsiders that they are the true voice of the community, not the extremists. Christians even have an advantage, they can do all this without any risk to their own life, unlike many Muslims. Until they speak up, Conservative Christians will continue to portray themselves as caring more about preventing gay marriage than preventing poverty by being represented by those people.
Oh, I understand, which is why I’m attempting to speak up.
Generally the first step for the moderate majority is to try to point out to people outside the group, that we exist and that the opinions being expressed by the extremists don’t represent our own.
Things also get sticky though when one, as a ‘moderate’, agrees with SOME of what the extremists are saying and doing but has very specific criticisms and differences of opinions. For example, I’m not very concerned one way or another about gay marriage, but I do have concerns that if it becomes sanctioned by law then there will eventually also be pressure on churches to perform these marriages. After all, once the law says that homosexual unions are equivalent to heterosexual ones, then how can people NOT start to argue that a church refusing to wed people would be discriminatory?
And my point about the poverty issue is that it’s no inside secret that Karl Rove’s strategy at least in part involved policy that spoke to real Christians who want the government to work in alliance with faith based groups to fight poverty. Plus, it’s not really fair to point out the special interest groups on the far right that ‘obsess’ about family values/sexual issues in politics without also pointing out that they have their mirror images on the left. Do gay rights groups and prochoice groups also not care about poverty, or are they just narrowly focused on certain issues?
Has the Catholic Church been obligated by law to marry any divorcees? What about admit female priests? As far as I know, though divorcees can be married by the state, the state has zero authority to force this on the Church. That’s part of the nice thing for the religious about Separation Church-State, it goes both ways. Religion can’t mandate the way government is run, and the government can’t mandate the way a church is run (as long as they aren’t killing anyone). Forcing churches to marry gay couples against their will would be blatantly anti-Constitutional, and I highly doubt it would stand up to judicial scrutiny.
But the very things you point out highlight the difference in the arguments about gays, because it comes down to whether homosexuality is a choice or not. Divorce is obviously a decision or choice made by the individuals who were married; if the rationale for nondiscriminatory policies regarding gays and marriage is that homosexuality isn’t a choice, but an identity, then a strong argument can also be made that the churches are discriminating if they persist in treating homosexual behavior as a choice.
And besides, at least you can see that it is an issue? You say that you trust that the courts would decide that the laws couldn’t interfere with the churches; well, if that’s the correct way to decide it, then why not preempt having the courts make that decision and let the legislatures clarify it? That’s why I’d favor decisions by the states to further separate the concept of secular marriage (which is really a civil union anyway, not a covenental marriage in the religious sense) and permit civil unions for gays and heteros.
C. Stanley, gender is likewise not a choice, and yet the Church is not compelled to ordain female priests, even if that could be construed to be a discriminatory practice.
That it’s an issue? Meh, I don’t know. Oh I don’t doubt someone might try to make it an issue, but it seems such a clear cut case that I don’t see it as a very dangerous matter. It falls squarely under the 1st amendment.
I agree with you that there should be a clearer distinction made between civil and religious marriage, so that each is conceptually divorced (ajem) from the other. I disagree that the Church owns the word "marriage" though, so I guess "civil Marriage" and "religious Marriage" or equivalents would have to be worked out. I’m heterosexual, but an atheist, and will not marry in a Church, but that doesn’t mean I won’t marry, and that my spouse will be "my husband" and not "my co-civil partner" or some such idiocy.
Lynx,
I’m not a constitutional scholar by any means, but my understanding of how the courts have decided such cases tells me that this is different too. My understanding is that there are distinctions made between practices that involve the religious teaching/theology itself (which clearly the rite of ordination involves) vs. activities that the church engages in which are considered more like services for the laity or interactions with the secular community. For example, in hiring practices the churches have to abide by anti-discriminatory laws but there are exceptions when those laws would interfere with the express purpose of the church- so in a Catholic school, it’s OK for the Church to insist on Catholic religious ed teachers, but they can’t discriminate against a non-Catholic math teacher.
I’m quite sure if it ever came down to it, that the argument would be that marriage is a sacrament and would fall under the same considerations as those other exceptions, but again, I think it would be better to preempt those court battles and let the legislatures spell it out. After all, you can’t blame religious conservatives for being a bit wary about how courts might decide things differently than the people might (ie, Roe v. Wade.)
The conscience of a nation takes on may aspects. Encompasses many attributes and entails many things. Christian thought is one aspect of it and it is receiving play because the man espousing it is a political campaign. I go to church. Most of the time I do not hear a sermon on abortion or gay rights. Id say 99.9 percent of the time I do not hear anything at all about that stuff.
I have gone to rallies. I have gone to good ole fashioned revivals. I have gone to bible school and I have gone to friends churches. 99.9 percent I do not hear anything about changing the constitution. Abortion, Gay rights or anything that would be construed political.
The point is that those who believe that religion should be kept shuttered for the most part get their wish. Yet when a man who is a ex pastor gets involved in politics his faith shows. His Religious values show. The people will either accept or reject those values and move on.
But for just a moment in time people are forced to think about what he/she says. Just as we are forced to think about what Ron Paul says about the constitution when he is in the spotlight.
Collectively we form opinions based upon the collective wisdom of the nations minds. It is after all what democracy is all about.
I completely agree, abrisaham, but I do think it matters how these things are framed and discussed. I’d have no problem (in fact would applaud) Huckabee if he’d say "there’s no reason that the Constitution and God’s laws should be mutually exclusive and on certain issues, if interpretation of the Constitution is skewing toward and anti-theistic viewpoint then I feel we should amend the Constitution to more clearly define the principles to protect human life."
But that’s very different (even though it would have the same intended outcome) than saying that he feels the Constitution should be amended ‘in order to be consistent with God’s laws’. The former phrasing that I used would mean that the people could legitimately choose to amend the Constitution in a way that would make it consistent with a natural law, which many of the people feel comes from God. The latter (Huck’s wording) though, strongly implies that the Constitution should always be seen as a way of enshrining religiously derived values into secular law, which is of course an extremely dangerous idea.
I know he needed to throw some red meat to the base there, but I really think that one is blowing up in his face and may wind up being the nail in the coffin that ends his run at the nomination.