December 2007 Archives

By Steve Strang, founder and publisher of Charisma magazine and a supporter of Mike Huckabee for president

As a Christian, my faith is the most important thing in my life. It defines where I work, the friends I have, who I married and the values I cherish.

I'm pro-life not because it’s a nice public policy to support but because my Christian faith says all innocent life should be protected. I support traditional marriage not because I happen to be heterosexual but because the Bible teaches that marriage is designed by God to be a lifelong union between a man and woman.

My faith forms my total outlook on life. So when it comes to deciding what political candidates to back, my faith enters my decision-making process. And why not? Faith colors everything else in my life.

Yet with the constant drumbeat of secularism emphasizing separation of church and state, somehow it seems out of bounds to let one’s faith determine how he'll vote.

Yet people vote for all sorts of reasons—some important, some silly.Sometimes voters simply rely on a “gut feeling” that the candidate is the best choice. Sometimes it’s for pragmatic reasons—they accept a candidate who barely matches their values because the one who does match their values seems like a long shot to win.

Others may choose because they think a candidate is more intelligent or more experienced. Those qualities are important. I want elected officials who have the intelligence and skills to handle the job. That's just common sense.

But what good is intelligence or experience if the candidate has no moral values? I believe values affect everything else about a candidate. I want an intelligent candidate with unwavering core values—a candidate who does not change his or her morality because of politics.

Values form the basis for the policies that a candidate will support in office. Values steer what political appointments are made or how decisions are reached.

So I look for my values in the candidates I support, whether they are running in local, state, or national elections. Often, no candidate matches what I would like to see in a leader. In that case I look to see if his or her values are more or less in line with mine based on their statements or policies.

Sometimes I don't like either candidate, and I must settle for the “lesser of two evils.” But if I find a candidate whose values are like mine and to whom faith is an integral part of his value system, I get excited and support that candidate enthusiastically—as I have former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in this year's Republican presidential primaries.

I love what Huckabee says: “Faith doesn't just influence me, it really defines me. I don't have to wake up every morning wondering what I need to believe.”

I don’t support Huckabee because of his denominational background. He's a Southern Baptist and I'm a Pentecostal. Both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were Southern Baptists like Huckabee, and I didn't support them. While I hope both of those men are sincere believers, their faith doesn't seem to affect their policies—especially when it comes to the sanctity of life, which I consider the bedrock issue. How we chose to value life as a culture defines everything else about us.

I can support a man who believes what Jesus Christ taught: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Matthew 7:12). I can support a leader whose policies while he was governor helped the poor while maintaining fiscal responsibility. Huckabee served tens of thousands of Hurricane Katrina refugees who fled to Arkansas for help. His ARKids First program provided health insurance to children of underprivileged Arkansas families. Yet Huckabee also turned a $250 million deficit into an $800 million surplus during his Little Rock years.

There are many people who share my faith and values, but I would never support them for public office if they aren't qualified. Yet Huckabee is not simply a member of my evangelical culture. He has also gained the important executive experience necessary to govern skillfully, handle any crisis and solve huge problems as governor of Arkansas for 10 years.

I have never believed in a candidate more strongly that I believe in Mike Huckabee. I am impressed by the way his faith affects his policies. While that quality doesn't appeal to many--especially not to secularists, who seem wary of anyone with firm values based on faith-- it makes Huckabee appealing to millions like me. The “Hucka-surge” we've seen in recent weeks wasn't caused by the entrenched power structure. It came from the grassroots.

I'm encouraged that Huckabee may actually win the GOP nomination and be elected. But if nothing else, his candidacy and the recent surge has let party leaders and the media know that there are millions of Americans just like me who won't support someone just because they have raised a lot of money or are backed by the party or media elites or even that they appear "electable."

We won’t even back someone just because of religion. That’s because religion alone isn’t the issue—it’s the candidate’s value system, which arises out of his or her religious faith.

An award-winning journalist and entrepreneur, Steve Strang was named in 2005 by TIME magazine as one of the 25 most influential evangelicals in America.

By Mark DeMoss, president of The DeMoss Group and a supporter of Mitt Romney for President

I have something in common with Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and, Mike Huckabee—we all claim affiliation with the Southern Baptist Convention, meaning we would all profess to be “born again” Christians. Personal faith has moved front and center in this presidential primary season thanks in large part to the candidacies of Mike Huckabee, who has run as much as a Southern Baptist preacher and a “Christian leader” as a former governor, and Mitt Romney, a former governor with a now well-known Mormon heritage.

Nothing is more important to me than my personal relationship with Jesus Christ—not my family, not my career, and certainly not this upcoming election. I can say with Mike Huckabee that my faith “defines me.” In fact, I wrote a book this year telling others how they could know Jesus Christ, and I would be thrilled if every American president had a genuine, personal relationship with Christ. But I have at least four problems with expecting or requiring my personal faith in a candidate for public office—be it a Republican or a Democrat.

First, Article VI of the United States Constitution prohibits it: “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any public office or public trust under the United States.” This spring, I was speaking to a group of pastors in a southern state and one of spoke up, saying he was “concerned about Mitt Romney’s faith tradition,” and was therefore waiting for Fred Thompson to enter the race. “Let me ask you a question,” I said. “What do you know about Senator Thompson’s faith tradition?” After a brief pause, he looked back at me and said, “Well, I know he’s a Protestant.” In the span of two short sentences this Baptist pastor seemed to rule out one candidate while selecting another on the basis of their faith alone. I submit that a more complete vetting process is in order when evaluating potential American presidents.

Second, we don’t apply this spirituality test to any other aspect of our lives. If I were to choose a candidate based primarily on a personal faith most like mine, I would have endorsed the former Arkansas governor long ago. But I don’t choose a doctor using this test, I didn’t choose my architect or homebuilder this way, and the Christian university where I sit on the trustee board didn’t hire our new athletic director solely because he was “one of our own” spiritually. Why then would we use this criterion alone, or even primarily, when choosing something as important as the president of the United States?

It was religious conservatives who catapulted another Southern Baptist, Jimmy Carter, from relative obscurity to the White House in 1976, primarily on the basis of his public pronouncements of his “born again” Christian faith. Ironically, most mainstream Southern Baptists don’t consider Mr. Cater to have been a good president and now don’t even claim him as a fellow-Southern Baptist. Indeed, while one’s faith determines his salvation, it should not determine his electability

Third, our political system and election process tempts both the exploitation and the selective use of a candidate’s personal faith. For example, Mike Huckabee ran a TV ad in Iowa and South Carolina that identified him as a “Christian leader” and showed him telling potential voters, “Faith doesn’t just influence me, it really defines me.” Curiously, however, this ad wasn’t running in New Hampshire, a critical early primary state which lacks the evangelical fervor of Iowa and South Carolina.

The Wall Street Journal reported that during a recent three-day campaign swing through the Granite State, where economic conservatives outnumber religious ones, Gov. Huckabee did not mention his faith, abortion, or marriage unless he was specifically asked. While this politically astute strategy may have been the work of a campaign consultant rather than the candidate himself, I believe the governor would agree that our faith should define us in all 50 states, or not at all.

Finally, candidates often develop a sense of religious entitlement which is both dangerous and unfair. For example, Mr. Huckabee expressed his frustration at some fellow Southern Baptists who had not endorsed him, telling the New York Times Magazine, “They make ‘electability’ their criterion. But I am a true soldier for the cause. If my own abandon me on the battlefield, it will have a chilling effect.”

Dismayed that Focus on the Family founder James Dobson has yet to publicly signal his choice for 2008, Huckabee had this to say: “I just don’t understand his neutrality. I’d be an obvious choice for his endorsement. We’re old friends. I love him, and I love his wife Shirley. I just don’t know how to explain it.” I can think of a few possible explanations: Dr. Dobson intends to support someone else, or no one, or perhaps to support the governor later—all of which he is entitled to do.

To the extent that faith has played too big a role in this election cycle, the blame can probably be shared among certain campaigns, the media, religious leaders, and an electorate often content to settle for one-dimensional descriptions of candidates.

Personally, I would like a president to be a man or woman of faith, whether or not it mirrors my own. But I also want them to have relevant executive experience, proven management experience, intellectual capital, crisis-tested decision-making skills, enough government experience to understand how government works—but not so much that they only know how to work for the government. In other words, as with every other personnel choice in life, I want competence.

I believe faith plus character plus experience plus competence is a recipe for the ideal presidential candidate. But faith alone should neither disqualify one from getting my vote, nor guarantee that they will. A candidate’s character cannot be overstated; his or her faith can be, and in this election probably has been. Specifically, Mitt Romney’s faith should not cost him votes, and Mike Huckabee’s faith should not assure him votes.

A few days ago, Mike Huckabee weighed in on this very issue, telling a television journalist, “I don’t think a person’s faith ought to be a plus or a minus. It ought to be their character.” Amen!

The DeMoss Group is an Atlanta-based public relations firm which works primarily with evangelical organizations and causes. DeMoss, a former chief of staff to Jerry Falwell, is author of The Little Red Book of Wisdom.

Evidently, he violated gun safety etiquette:

Republican Mike Huckabee took his presidential campaign for a quick pheasant-hunting expedition in Iowa on Wednesday, and at one point, a reporter asked why he hadn’t invited sporting enthusiast Dick Cheney along. "Because I want to survive all the way through this," Huckabee replied, in a chuckling dig at the vice president’s accidental shooting of a quail-hunting partner last year.

Any good sportsman, though, couldn’t miss a distinctly Cheneyesque moment in the press accounts of the former Arkansas governor’s morning hunt: At one point, Huckabee’s party turned toward a cluster of reporters and cameramen and, when they kicked up a pheasant, fired shotgun blasts over the group’s heads.

This, friends, is dangerously bad hunting form.

Your Swamp correspondent, the son of a longtime hunter education instructor, grew up plying the corn rows and stream banks of rural Oregon with a Labrador retriever and a Mossberg 20-gauge pump shotgun. On our hunts for pheasant, grouse and quail, merely swinging a gun barrel in the general direction of another person was grounds for day-long banishment to the truck (which smelled like wet dog).

(via)

Even if he isn't a poseur like Kerry, this whole thing is such a poseur thing to do. It reeks of pandering.

And now for some inside baseball about the puzzling question of why the leaders of the religious right aren’t in love with Mike Huckabee.

The former Arkansas governor is an ordained Baptist pastor who believes everything in the Bible is literally true; he opposes abortion and doesn’t believe in the theory of evolution--in other words, the kind of person Christian conservatives have been trying to get elected since Jerry Falwell formed the Moral Majority in 1979.

But many of the nation’s top Christian Republicans aren’t rallying behind him. The reasons they cite include: he’s not electable because he doesn’t have enough money or organization; he’s a political lightweight; and religious leaders had already committed to other candidates before Huckabee surged in the polls.

Case in point: when Huckabee went to Houston on Dec. 18 for fund-raisers, a guest at one of the luncheons was Judge Paul Pressler, a lion of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, with 15 million menbers. But Pressler openly supports Fred Thompson for president.

What gives? Try this: Evangelical leaders’ reluctance is partially rooted in the Southern Baptist Convention’s Culture War of the 1980s and 1990s.

As long time readers (I know that we have a couple) know, I'm not a McCain supporter at all but I thought his Christmas ad was quite moving and it made me tear up. Allahpundit thinks he might have been pandering to Christians, reminding us that he was one of us but I don't care if he was, I thought it was moving and was a wonderful story to share this time of year.

They realize that he's not ready for prime time. I think that might be the answer to Rod Dreher's question, "Why does the GOP Establishment fear Huck?" I know that would be my answer to that question. They're afraid that...

It's a nice little ad, focusing on where the voters' attention is right now: Christmas and politics. He was smart to include campaign issues along with his Christmas greetings. And he brilliantly wished everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday...

After he endorsed Romney. Very strange and confusing for the MSM. Here's the backstory: The Iowa congressman kept his endorsement choice under wraps so closely that no one knew who he would choose between Thompson or Romney for his nod....

And he says that he has a theology degree? In an interview with CBNNews in November, Huckabee said “…I truly understand the nature of the war that we are in with Islamo fascism. These are people that want to kill...

David writes: "If Mitt Romney isn't required to face a theological grilling about his religious beliefs, why should Mike Huckabee be subjected to that grilling?" Because Huckabee is campaigning on his "Christian leadership" skills. You can't blame the MSM for...

By Richard Land Mitt Romney gave an eloquent defense of the positive and crucial rule that religion has played in our nation’s history from the first settlements down to the present day. In that regard, Gov. Romney performed an...

I was struck by the bald attack on non-believers: “Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me.” He went beyond assailing “secularism” (though he did that...

Unbelievable! He makes his Christian faith a major part of his campaign, speaks about it on the stump and even features it in his campaign ads and yet he complains when the press ask about it: Huckabee bristles about the...

Former Massachusetts Governor and current Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is going to give a speech on “Religion in America” tomorrow in Texas. I have been encouraging Governor Romney to give such a speech for over a year now, since...

By Dan Gilgoff When Mitt Romney stands before the nation tomorrow to deliver his much-anticipated "religion speech," evangelical Christians will be listening particularly intently. Though polls show that one in four Americans feel squeamish about voting for a Mormon...

I guess Hillary has started her negative campaign. You know, if he nuanced this a little and spoke about how precious life was, he may be able to pull away some pro-life voters if it's a Rudy/Obama race. Here's what...

He needs to hire someone to brief him on the news of the day before he meets with the reporters. He is looking very unprepared to this nation in a time of war: Kuhn: I don’t know to what extent...

No one expects the Spanish Inquisition! That's what this race has become. Republican presidential hopeful Fred Thompson Monday said he didn't need to apologize for his faith, despite concerns from Christian conservatives that he does not express his religious beliefs...

Is the media going to push Huckabee to give the JFK speech the way they're pushing Romney? In the near future, the coverage of Huckabee will be an interesting exercise. How will reporters – most of whom cover politics, not...