I’ve watched Mike Huckabee’s new campaign video, the one with the Christmas tree and the Merry Christmas message. The white-edged, cross-like object in the background looks like a cross to me. "No, no," Huckabee said later, "it’s a bookshelf." Really?
My husband and I took our whole family to Christmas Eve services in Vail, Colorado a few years ago. As we were sitting in the pew, listening to the prelude, it began to dawn on us that the very large cross on the altar of this church in the mountains was made of skis. We all got up and left. Trendy ski themes for the central symbol of the Christian faith are not in our faith tradition. But the cross of skis was, in fact, recognizable as a cross. It is also clear that for the vast majority of people attending that church, it was meant to symbolize a cross even though it was made of skis.
That’s a cross, Rev. Huckabee, even though it may be made of a bookshelf.
Huckabee seems to want it both ways. He uses explicitly theological language (remember the flap about the devil from last week) but then when asked, he makes a joke, a witty remark, a deflecting comment. When asked about this obviously cross-shaped image, he made a Beatles quip about playing the video backwards. He smirks, “It says ‘Paul is dead.'” No, actually, it doesn't.
It was during the YouTube Republican debate when I first stopped thinking of Huckabee as the amiable, albeit conservative, person of faith who happens to be running for president and saw him as a politician first, last and always. There was a video question about what "Jesus would have thought" about the death penalty. Huckabee jumped in with his now famous witticism that "Jesus was too smart" ever to run for public office. And again, we were treated to the twinkling eyes and the charming smile. Kind of distracts you from the fact that the question was about the Christian faith and state-sponsored death.
Now, you see, Jesus actually received the death penalty at the hands of the Roman Empire and any devout person of faith, anyone who is as up front about his Christian faith as Rev. Huckabee, ought to put that first before any political two-step.
Huckabee is trying to ride two horses, he wants to be seen by the Christian conservative “base” as the only Christian in the race for the President and he wants to be able to do so in a way that allows him to have a way to escape the criticism that running as “the Christian” violates the American value of separation of church and state.
Huckabee is managing to offend me both as a Christian and also as a citizen who thinks that separation of church and state protects the church as much as it does the secular sphere.
In the Christian faith perspective, Peter discovered to his shame what happens to you when you are asked a direct question about what you believe about Jesus and you deny him. In the political perspective, this is a page from the Nixon playbook. What we are seeing in Huckabee is “plausible deniability” applied to faith-based politics.
The “Christian deniability” of Mike Huckabee is becoming more and more obvious as his campaign strategy. It’s just awful.
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