restless reformer

Huckabee’s late-90’s rhetoric about “taking the nation back for Christ” is standard fare in American evangelical circles. Prediction: that statement will get the evangelical base more fired up for Huckabee than they ever were for Bush. I think the evangelicals have found their candidate.

So, in the spirit up the season of Festivus, to all the Huckabee evangelicals out there, “I’ve got a lot of problems with you people.” Here is my list of grievances:

• What, exactly, does it mean to take the nation back for Christ? Can someone please point me to this mysterious time in which the nation was for Christ? Can someone show me the place in the Constitution where Jesus is made King of America?
• Speaking of this mysterious missing period of time, what are we going back to, exactly? I’m as appalled as the next guy about the continuing progression toward moral bankruptcy in America…in some areas of American life, anyway. The casual way sex is treated is appalling. The fact that we’re not holding slaves anymore, on the other hand, is quite good. It’s not really wise to idealize some time “back then” when the nation was “more Christian” or something like that.
• The potential for a nationwide embarrassment due to the mindlessness of some evangelicals - or perhaps, of the mindlessness of much of evangelical culture - is huge.  Drudge broke the story today that Democrats see Huck as an easy kill.   If Huck gets elected, there will, in the general election, be an answer to the question, “Are evangelicals running the country now?”  I’m concerned about the answer.  My biggest problem is this: A Huck election will prove that evangelicals have become more infatuated with political power and the culture war than the message of the gospel.  The culture war has all but killed the gospel message in America.  Huck might be the death blow.
• Everything I’ve read so far suggests that Huck has an exceedingly sketchy record on a lot of issues.  I’m not sure how he’ll survive attacks in those areas.  But these issues don’t matter to evangelicals, who have become unbelievably boring and predictable when it comes to politics: Say “Abortion bad; gays bad; take the nation for Christ,” and you’ve got the evangelical vote.  No depth of thought, no complexity, no nuanced thinking.  Pavlov’s dog.  Ring bell.  Evangelicals salivate.

I should note in closing that I’m not against Christians in politics, and I’m in agreement with N.T. Wright that the cross and the proclamation, “Jesus is Lord,” is inherently political.  I just don’t think that it’s supposed to look like culture-war moralizing detached from everything else that is implied in the Gospel.