And now for some inside baseball about the puzzling question of why the leaders of the religious right aren\u2019t in love with Mike Huckabee.
\nThe former Arkansas governor is an ordained Baptist pastor who believes everything in the Bible is literally true; he opposes abortion and doesn\u2019t 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.
\nBut many of the nation\u2019s top Christian Republicans aren\u2019t rallying behind him. The reasons they cite include: he\u2019s not electable because he doesn\u2019t have enough money or organization; he\u2019s a political lightweight; and religious leaders had already committed to other candidates before Huckabee surged in the polls.
\nCase 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\u2019s largest Protestant denomination, with 15 million menbers. But Pressler openly supports Fred Thompson for president.
\nWhat gives? Try this: Evangelical leaders\u2019 reluctance is partially rooted in the Southern Baptist Convention\u2019s Culture War of the 1980s and 1990s.<\/p>\n
\nIn 1979, Judge Pressler and Paige Patterson, president of Southwestern Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, became alarmed at what they viewed as dangerous creeping liberalism in the Southern Baptist Convention. So they hatched a movement of theological and political conservatives to \u201ctake back\u201d the SBC. Pressler and Patterson led what they called the \u201cconservative resurgence\u201d and what Baptist moderates called the \u201cfundamentalist takeover.\u201d
\nIn some ways, the Baptist War resembled the battles in larger American culture at the time, because it was about who controlled the message of what was deemed \u201cmainstream\u201d belief and behavior. At the time (and still today) Americans were arguing over abortion, women\u2019s rights, gay rights, and the death penalty. Were most Americans pro-choice or pro-life? Feminist or not? Were they pro-gay or anti-gay rights? Pro-capital punishment or not?
\nSouthern Baptists, meanwhile, were fighting over the Bible\u2014essentially a proxy for the issues listed above. The Baptists\u2019 fight was over whether the Bible should be read as God\u2019s literal word, completely free of errors. Or whether it should be interpreted as a document written by people who were inspired by God but not immune to errors.
\nIf the Bible is free of error, as conservatives maintain, then cultural issues can be settled by a close reading of scripture. Abortion: no. Women\u2019s rights: circumscribed in church. Gay rights: no. Death penalty: yes. If the Bible is up for interpretation, then cultural issues become much more complicated to settle.
\nIt\u2019s worth noting that this same discussion about the Bible was happening in plenty of other denominations, and still is to some extent. But the Baptists turned their argument into a civil war.
\nThe battle lasted for parts of two decades and was fought annually at the denomination\u2019s annual conventions, which were (and still are) held at giant convention centers in cities throughout the Bible Belt. At those conventions, Baptists elected the denomination\u2019s national leaders; the elections were critically important because the leaders determined the makeup of the boards of the denomination\u2019s major organizations. Conservatives reasoned that if they could wrest control of the denomination\u2019s most important organizations, colleges, and seminaries, it could control the denomination.
\nAnd ultimately they did.
\nThis is where Mike Huckabee\u2019s 2008 Presidential candidacy comes in. In 1989, he ran for the presidency of the Arkansas Baptist Convention. Huckabee ran as the moderate\u2019s candidate against the Rev. Ronnie Floyd, today the pastor of First Baptist Church of Springdale, Arkansas, who was the conservatives\u2019 candidate.
\nAn important note here is that there were never just two sides, \u201cconservatives\u201d and \u201cmoderates,\u201d in the Baptist Civil War. There were more like five groups:
\n1.\tFundamentalists who believed the Bible was inerrant who didn\u2019t want to have anything to do with anyone who disagreed.
\n2.\tConservatives who also believed the Bible was inerrant but were willing to engage with others and to tolerate some (small) differences in beliefs.
\n3.\tThose who were inerrantists but who believed there didn\u2019t need to be a battle over the Bible, or who believed the battle had gone far enough.
\n4.\tModerates who, if they had attended a mainline Protestant seminary, would have been considered conservative. These Baptists believed they needed to believe in Jesus to be saved but also believed the Bible contained some errors.
\n5.\tLiberals, who questioned large portions of the Bible but who identified as Baptists.
\nHuckabee was in group three. He was in no way a theological liberal; he wasn\u2019t even a moderate. He was theologically conservative, and believed in Biblical inerrancy. And he won the election. But that wasn\u2019t the point, according to conservative leaders. He had betrayed the conservative cause. He couldn\u2019t be entirely trusted.
\nSo today, while some Baptists have endorsed him \u2014including Ronnie Floyd\u2014others have not. Judge Pressler is behind Thompson; Patterson is neutral; so is Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (and a Casting Stones contributor).
\nAnd while all of these non-endorsing Baptist leaders have good things to say about Huckabee, the fact that they won\u2019t endorse him or act on his behalf is crucial, in my opinion. It\u2019s a signal to other evangelical leaders, such as Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation, who endorsed Romney; Sam Brownback, who endorsed John McCain; Pat Robertson, who endorsed Rudy Giuliani; James Dobson of Focus on the Family who remains officially neutral; and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, also officially neutral. And I think it tells evangelical voters, particularly Southern Baptists, all they need to know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
And now for some inside baseball about the puzzling question of why the leaders of the religious right aren\u2019t 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\u2019t believe in the theory of evolution–in other words,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n