Mike Huckabee says he won’t step away from his comments 10 years ago in which he urged fellow Southern Baptists to “answer the alarm clock and take this nation back for Christ.”
I’ve long thought that if Huckabee succeeds in getting the nomination, we had all better be prepared for the press (and Huckabee’s opponents) to dig up every sermon he ever preached and pick them apart. This may be just the start.
2 things:
To outsiders, such a statement may seem hyper-righteous or arrogant or (take your pick). But it’s well down the middle for something you’d hear from a Southern Baptist preacher (like Huckabee). Anyone who knows evangelical or Southern Baptist culture would say this is absolutely standard fare. I guess the question is whether or not it should be standard fare for a presidential candidate. Then again, we’ve never really had a former pastor running for president, at least not like this.
Secondly, and maybe this is the more important question: what if Huckabee said he no longer believed that? What would that say about him? Seems that if the press is trying to get him to distance himself from his own deeply-held beliefs, he’s caught in a damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t position. It’s not unlike the choice Mitt Romney often faces between embracing obscure Mormon doctrine or being forced to say he doesn’t actually believe it.
