The last Sunday before the caucuses, Mike Huckabee backed off from giving a scheduled sermon at an Iowa church, saying he wanted to worship instead of speak. But on the previous Sunday, just two days before Christmas, in front of a packed crowd at John Hagee's 5,000-seat Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, Huckabee equated real believers in Christ with the lowly shepherds who heralded the arrival of the newborn king, and selfish nonbelievers with Herod, King of Judea, who felt so threatened by Jesus' arrival that he ordered all baby boys to be murdered. Believers, he maintained, are unselfish and want to serve Jesus; the nonbelievers, like Herod, want power and money all to themselves and refuse to worship the son of God.The Huck gets around in Christianist circles:
Although Huckabee has insisted that he didn't replace the Arkansas capitol dome with a steeple and that his comments in religious settings shouldn't be misconstrued as theocratic, it was hard for this Jew in the pew (in the church that claims to love the Jews, after all!) not to interpret his sermon otherwise. Arrogant and exclusionary, it left me wondering, what happened to all that peace on earth and good will business?
While he was in San Antonio, Huckabee stopped by for a fundraiser at the home of billionaire James Leininger, one of the most prolific donors to Christian right and Republican causes in Texas and the country. Known as "God's Sugar Daddy," Leininger has bankrolled campaigns, PACs, nonprofits, and Patrick Henry College, which funnels home-schooled kids from its campus into government jobs in Washington.Posner also reports that a Pentecostal "prophet", Lou Engle, is giving his followers the inside word from God on the Huck:
Later in the week, Huckabee spoke at a multilevel marketing event hosted by Qixtar, owned by the Amway founder and religious right fundraising giant the DeVos family.
This past weekend, in an e-mail to supporters, Engle wrote that God had spoken to one of his colleagues several years ago about the 2008 presidential election and said, "If the church in America will lean into me in prayer for this, he [a presidential candidate] will come in a brown bag and his five loaves and two fish will be more than enough."Some liberals have cast the Huck's success to this point as some kind of populist uprising by the rank-and-file Christianists against the Wall Street types in the Republican Party. For example, Markos (Kos) Moulitsas writes in Huckabee's gate crashers 01/04/07:
Although Engle said that he and his friends didn't understand this word from on high years ago, today he believes that "the Lord may have given us a clue" in Huckabee, who credited the biblical tale of loaves and fishes in accounting for his second-place victory in the Iowa Straw Poll last summer. In a second e-mail, Engle recounted another prophetic story about Huckabee and concluded that "I believe that the nation should rise up and support this man. It is so important that the churches keep crying out to God for supernatural assistance in these elections and that He would promote the humble and the righteous. Let us pray for favor on the one he has chosen to exalt before the others."
Think about it -- these are people that have been taken for granted by the Republican establishment, exploited and overworked, only to receive crumbs and empty rhetoric in return. Sick of being marginalized except when needed (election time), they have taken matters into their own hands and -- without money or "professional" organization, propelled their candidate (one of their own) to victory. (my emphasis)Now, it seems to be that the Huck isn't necessarily the first choice of the Wall Street crowd. But I have a couple of reservations about this line of thinking on the Huck's campaign and its significance. One is the implication that George W. Bush has been anything other than "one of their own". Historians and contemporary observers can certainly question how subjectively "sincere" Bush's Christian faith may be. But Bush has strongly associated himself with the Christianist movement for a long time. Remember his famous Jesus-as-his-favorite-philosopher moment?
My other problem with this kind of analysis is that it tends to distract from the Christianist nature of the Cheney-Bush administration. Conservatives are already trying to disassociate themselves from this train wreck by claiming that this administration didn't represent "pure" conservatism. But, in reality, it represented the real existing form of conservatism, in its Wall Street, Christianist and fanatical antitax versions.
I think it may be hard for some liberals to let go of that fond hope that never dies that somehow the Christian Right and the Wall Street plutocrats will split the Republican Party between them. It's a nice fantasy but not much more than that. As Joe Conason wrote in It Can Happen Here (2007):
Whatever their differences ... the religious right and the corporate right have much more in common. They hate the public sector, regulation, and government spending, except when they can get a grip on the federal teat through faith-based programs, privatization, and other contracts. They hate social insurance, welfare, and health programs, including Social Security, which the Birchers among them have wanted to abolish for sixty years. Rod Parsley, the Columbus, Ohio, megachurch pastor who is a rising star among right-wing evangelicals, parrots the free-market fundamentalism that serves as economic gospel. "I'm convinced the best thing government can do to help the poor is to get out of the way," Parsley told the American Prospect magazine. "If government reduced taxes, removed industrial restraints, eliminated wage controls, and abolished subsidies, tariffs], and other constraints on free enterprise, the poor would be helped in a way that welfare, Social Security, and unemployment insurance could never match." ...Tags: authoritarianism, christian right, christianism, joe conason, markos moulitsas
Whatever contradictions and tensions exist between the religious right and the corporate lobby - over such intractable problems as immigration, for example - they continue to be outweighed by their shared objectives and mutual control of the Republican Party.
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