Mike Huckabee intends to run for a refreshed personal brand as the evangelical American pope. He’s not running for president, really, because that’s an actual and hard job.
Seeking the presidency is but a marketing tactic in his pursuit of a kind of American fundamentalist popehood.
Huckabee plans to present himself electorally as an experienced slayer of the evil Clintons. So he’ll announce his presidential candidacy early next month in Hope, the place of birth he shares with Bill. He’ll say that his political victories in Arkansas amounted to vanquishing the vaunted Arkansas Clinton machine, which is quite an exaggeration but hardly Huckabee’s worst.
Beyond that, Huckabee will gleefully espouse whatever wild and crazy right-wing positions are necessary to win the support of people who find Ted Cruz and Rand Paul neither wild nor crazy enough.
That’s not enough to win, but it’s enough to make money.
History suggests Huckabee will do credibly in Iowa, then run well in that new Southern-wide regional primary in early March. He might get up to second place. And even if lightning struck and he became the Republican nominee, there is no way he could win the general election in modern America.
He is a creature of niche, not consensus; of pockets of America, not modern America as a whole.
Pat Robertson and James Dobson can’t live forever, and Jerry Falwell has departed this life already. So there’s big media-mogul money to be made in spokesman status for the religious-intolerance industry in a culture that seems determined to be tolerant of the hated homosexuals.
In the political and culture wars, you draw your capital from standing strong against a hated enemy. Gays are printing money for the emerging American evangelical pope. And Huckabee can smell the green.
What better emerging new intolerance chieftain than the Huckster, who suggested over the weekend on a kook-right radio show that real Christians should not enlist in the military until we get a new president who is not so tolerance-driven and neutrality-inclined and inclusiveness-prone.
That’s right. Huckabee told a radio talk show in Iowa that real Christians ought to think about holding off on serving the country until Barack Obama is gone as president.
That’s all about the gays and the Muslims.
Obama supports rights for gays and religious acceptance of Muslims, at least to the extent that not all who practicing the Muslim religion should be stereotyped as terrorists and murderers—because, you see, they aren’t, just as all Southern Baptists aren’t in the Ku Klux Klan.
In Huckabee’s niche, you must understand, a difference of opinion about whether to prefer Fords or Chevrolets is one thing, and a free thing in our free country. But there is no biblical permission that the Huckster can find to hold an opinion on Christian tenets and precepts different from that of the Huckster.
The central issue has to do with military chaplains and what they may say.
Allow me to summarize the typically overblown, fear-exploiting brouhaha: The Pentagon has decreed that military chaplains are to be doctrinally neutral and are not to proselytize, meaning use their government positions to try to recruit enlistees to their religious views. They are to counsel in general and lead religious services of a particular variety only for willing participants in that variety. And since it is now the nation’s policy not to discriminate against homosexuals in military service, these chaplains are not to tell any enlisted persons that their sexual orientation will cast them to hellfire.
That is to say we don’t want to accept these folks’ service and then reward them with scarlet letters.
There have been a few specific confined episodes like one in which a chaplain in the VA was told by a supervisor to quit quoting scripture or praying in the name of Jesus. But these isolated cases were not actual federal government edicts.
It is true that the Pentagon once disinvited Franklin Graham from speaking at a prayer breakfast because he had smeared all Muslims as killers and wife-beaters and child-sacrificers. Pentagon officials thought it might not be best to associate directly with such rhetoric and potentially inflame even allies elsewhere in the world where our brave servicemen and servicewoman were serving.
From that, the great right-wing rumor mill and chain-emailing network have spread the word that, under Obama, Christians in the military may no longer pray or say the name Jesus or practice their Christian beliefs.
That is true only if one is of a professed Christian variety in which followers are commanded to browbeat everyone else into sharing, embracing, espousing and practicing that same professed Christian variety.
There are sufficient numbers of persons who practice that kind of narrow religious chauvinism to keep the mortgage paid on the Redneck Riviera mansion, soon to become the Vatican of evangelism.
John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.