I wrote the following to Charles Krauthammer on Mike Huckabee’s view of faith [disclosure: I support Huckabee and am his county chair in Iowa], which is in line with the history of our country’s past presidents like Lincoln. Krauthammer had written a piece in National Review, “Huck’s Unholy Dance,” in which he claims that “Huckabee has exploited Romney’s Mormonism with an egregious subtlety,” by calling himself a Christian leader. Not so, I argue here:
When good circumstances or misfortune befall a person, there is a choice as to what the ultimate cause was. The attribution in both cases matters. Take for example the Apollo 13 flight in which President Nixon called on the nation to pray. Looking back, one wonders to whom the nation was supposed to pray. When rescued, Nixon issued the following statement: “Their safe return is a tribute to their own courage and also to the ingenuity and resourcefulness of those on the ground who helped transform potential tragedy into a heart stopping rescue.” Thus, “prayer” means wishing one well from the heart. Nixon proclaimed a day of prayer and thanksgiving as an afterthought.
Yesterday, the New York Times’s David Brooks aptly pointed out in response to Romney’s speech that Romney’s ambiguous pluralism creates a God who is non-religious, a “bland, smiley-faced God who is the author of liberty and the founder of freedom” and doesn’t even have the semblance of Lincoln’s God or Reinhold Niebuhr’s God. But Mike Huckabee has been castigated for the same kind of specificity that Lincoln or Niebuhr employed.
For Mike Huckabee to attribute his rise in the polls to God was to give thanks to someone greater than himself rather than to his ingenuity, smart performance debates, or threadbare staff. On Thanksgiving, we give thanks to God not because He has chosen us over the poor man with a bottle in his hand slumped in the ally as if we are the chosen. The fact is that none us are very deserving on our best days. And Huckabee’s attribution was simply to give thanksgiving, not the leap that Krauthammer makes to imply that Huckabee was saying God was endorsing his candidacy.
The truest test of faith will be if Mike Huckabee ends up losing the nomination and deadpans straight in the camera and says, “I know of only one way to attribute this—the perfect design and sovereignty of God.” That is the kind of real, gritty, transformative faith that sent Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Flossenburg and Martin Luther King, Jr. to Memphis. Both men realized that providence might just guide them to their deaths—and it did. That was the kind of faith that a troubled, sorrowful Lincoln rested upon when he realized that a bloody, decimating, and awful war seemed intractable. Lincoln attributed it to the design of God.
Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
One wonders if some of the media elite would take Lincoln to task today for citing the Old Testament’s specific scripture, for being so narrow as to demand that historical events unfolding be seen in a spiritual light, and to have the audacity to express his personally held religious views while upholding the nation and Constitution.
