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Reflections

Holy Huck!

by Ralph R. Reiland,
Professor of Free Enterprise

With things heating up in the presidential primaries, the God-talk seems to be getting increasingly bizarre.

Looking for votes in the upcoming Florida primary, Rudy Giuliani went to an evangelical congregation and said he wasn't looking for votes. "I'm not coming here to ask for your vote," he declared. "That's up to you and it's not the right place. But I am coming here to ask for something very special and more important -- I'm asking for your prayers."

In Iowa, Michelle Obama painted her husband's victory over Hillary Clinton in somewhat heavenly terms: "We had a miraculous victory in Iowa. Ain't no black people in Iowa!"

But the best at political God-talk is Southern Baptist minister and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee -- a self-described "Christian leader" in his political ads on TV.

Asked by a student to explain a recent and significant surge in his poll numbers, Huckabee pointed to Jesus: "There's only one explanation for it, and it's not a human one. It's the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of five thousand people."

Highlighting the connection of the alleged fish stretching to his own campaign, Huckabee continued: "There literally are thousands of people across this country who are praying that a little will become much, and it has. And it defies all explanation."

Faith "doesn't just influence me," Huckabee explains. "It really defines me." For starters, that means no marriages for same-sex couples and no abortions for different-sex couples.

And within the power dynamics of different-sex couples in marriage, the faith that "really defines" Huckabee seems to call for a less-than-equal position for the female half of those relationships.

In 1998, a full-page "You Are Right" ad in USA Today supported the Southern Baptist Convention's amendment to the Baptist Faith & Message regarding marriage, which declared, in part, "A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the leadership of Christ."

Huckabee and his wife, Janet, were two of the 100-plus evangelicals whose names appeared in the ad. There's no word on whether Mrs. Huckabee submitted her signature graciously and voluntarily or graciously and in obedience to the servant leadership of Mr. Huckabee.

Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, helped draft the marriage amendment. It says that "the wife does not get veto power over the husband's decision," he explains. "Somebody has to be in charge. The Bible says the husband is in charge."

The husband can "solicit his wife's views," says Land, but, ultimately, the males call the shots.

It's the same with guns. It's God, guns and the guys, as Huckabee demonstrated at a National Rifle Association's "Celebration of American Values" conference in Washington, D.C.: "To watch mallards come in a flock, cut their wings and land but a few feet in front of you on a cold winter day near Stuttgart, Arkansas, is just about as close to heaven as I think one can get on this Earth. And as one who believes, because of my faith, that I'm going to heaven, I'm pretty sure there will be duck hunting in heaven, and I can't wait."

What about the part in the Bible about God taking care of the sparrows and the lilies of the field? What, mallards don't count?

Huckabee went on, recounting the time he was in an antelope hunting contest in Wyoming and each hunter got only one shot: "I decided one way or the other, this hunt is about to be over, because I can't stand any more of this cold. And somehow, by the grace of God, when I squeezed the trigger, my Weatherby .300 Mag., which has got to be the greatest gun, I think, ever made in the form of a rifle -- for my sake in hunting, I've never squeezed the trigger and not gotten something -- did its work, and somehow the angels took that bullet and went right to the antelope, and my hunt was over in a wonderful way."

I'm no theologian but an estimated 20,000 children under the age of 5 die each day on this planet as a result of hunger. And Huckabee believes that the angels, with that problem unsolved, spend their time carrying his bullets into antelopes? Or does he just talk that way for votes? Either way, it feels like a cheapening of religion.

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Ralph R. Reiland is an associate professor of economics at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh.

Ralph R. Reiland
Pittsburgh, Pa. 15236
Phone: 412-884-4541
E-mail: rrreiland@aol.com

"Ralph R. Reiland is the B. Kenneth Simon Professor of Free Enterprise at Robert Morris University, the owner Amel's Restaurant, and a columnist with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review."