As often with U.S.-specific questions, I have a kind of 'curious trans-Atlantic onlooker' view of this one.

Huckabee's comment raises -- and of course begs -- all sorts of questions: how do we know what God's standards are, who says when a dispute arises, and can you implant Christianity (or any other theistic religion) in the constitution of a state just like that? God's standards, for most religions, would include regular and faithful prayer and worship: is He proposing to make churchgoing (or synagogue-going or mosque-going) and private prayer compulsory? Is adultery going to be punished by law? What about the prohibition of images? And so on, and so on. Actually it's amusing to have an American say this because I thought part of the reason that the U.S. became the U.S. in the late 18th Century was because the nascent States didn't want governmental interference in matters of religion.

My own reflection on this -- typed on the way back from spending the morning in the House of Lords, which begins with prayer for God's wisdom in our national life, and happened to continue today with a debate on whether we should have a national inquiry as to why on earth we went to war in Iraq -- is that Huckabee's raising of the question, and the way in which these things are now debated in the U.S. (and, in a much lesser degree, in the UK) is an indication that the Enlightenment 'settlement' whereby secular governments run the country and religion is a private affair, is rapidly being seen as threadbare.

We urgently need new public debate on both sides of the Atlantic as to how to (in the ugly phrase) 'do God in public'. It won't do to scream on the one hand that that's the way to a theocratic totalitarianism, or on the other hand that 'we know' for whatever reason (the excesses of religious fundamentalism, for instance) that God doesn't, can't and shouldn't belong in public. We need serious, grown-up, informed debate...