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The Huckabee Win Is America's Loss
Mike Huckabee wants to be our president. He doesn't know about foreign policy. But he believes every word of the Southern Baptist interpretation of the Bible. Here is what he believes. God is angry with us and has always been. He was pissed off with us from day one. He was so pissed off that He wrestled with making a choice between killing all of us in a flood or saving just one family -- Noah's -- so that later God could sacrifice His only Son to save everyone descended from the one family he didn't kill and/or send them to hell for eternity. God did this because Adam and Eve, not to mention Noah's great, great grandchildren-that's you and me-didn't live up to God's pre-creation expectations. Cheerful, huh?
I was raised by fundamentalist missionary parents. My life has been one of all-consuming faith, not my faith, but the faith of others that I seem to have caught like a disease. What does God want? I'm still trying to find out. And having once been a famous "professional Christian" myself (until I cut and ran in 1985) my vision is muddied by the psychological baggage I carry.
The problem is Huckabee is sincere. So are the people who voted for him. I understand where they are coming from all too well. Every action, every thought, every moment is judged by an inner voice. Everything seems to have a moral component.
This election recalls the time I was involved in my own crusade, not for the presidency, but for the hearts and minds of the evangelicals my late father (Francis Schaeffer) and I were succeeding in politicizing, as we turned them into ardent pro-lifers. That crusade involved sell-out crowds in Madison Square Garden and all over the country.
I was a zealous evangelical back in the 1970s. When you are a zealous anything -- evangelical, Marxist, feminist, capitalist, Democrat, Republican, whatever-you express your zeal by lying. The lie is always the same lie: to say that you're certain about things, that you are right, and others wrong. They are so wrong that they are evil! This is a lie because truth is elusive. Nothing is as simple as any zealot, of any persuasion, thinks it is.
I've lived to bitterly regret the part I played in galvanizing the political energies of the evangelicals who soon morphed into the so-called religious right, the same people we just saw holding hands and beseeching Jesus to help their candidate save America from the rest of us. Looking back it seems to me that it was something like unlocking the doors to a slow-motion civil war, actually more like the doors to an insane asylum.
I've quit believing in ideological, let alone theological, purity. We guess. We hope. We muddle along. But there are no theological ideas worth hating anyone over. And if you understand vengeful Southern Baptist theology you won't want anyone near the White House who takes it seriously.
We've been here before. (Remember Pat Robertson?) Mike Huckabee will fade, because most Americans are more or less sane. But as he fades he'll take a little more of our self-respect with him.
The way to destroy harmony is to be too sure. I know. I understand how destructive it is to have a message you just have to impose on people even when you know it might ruin friendships, even when it might help rip a country apart. Been-there-done-that.
Nevertheless... in one dark little corner of my brain I still wish all the "lost" would get "saved." And there are lots of other religious Americans like me. We might say we theoretically want to all get along, but on the way there we'd also like to sandbag everyone with our message.
But wanting to "convert" each other is not the way to build any sort of a sense of all being Americans together. And the basis of the whole Southern Baptist raison d'etre is aggressive evangelization.
Huckabee represents the half of us who are waiting for Jesus to "rapture" us and believe that the other half are second class citizens that God is just biding His time to gleefully destroy and torture for eternity. Thanks but no thanks Iowa.
Frank Schaeffer is a writer and author of, "CRAZY FOR GOD-How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back."
Follow Frank Schaeffer on Twitter: www.twitter.com/frank_schaeffer
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Regarding the quote by Gandhi, please recall that Jesus implored: "follow me"; he did not say "follow my followers". Even if all of the nagtive comments about Southern Baptists on all of the posts above are true , may I plead with you to follow Jesus. Yes, it is true that Southern Baptists are sinners. Do not follow us as your source of salvation. Follow the Messiah, the one who lived a perfect, sinless life.
Poor Frank Schaeffer: raised in a family with a rich spirtual heritage, born into the Schaeffer, but never born again into the family of God.
It is indeed true that God has children but no grandchildren. Francis Schaeffer's strong faith will not save his son Frank. He claims to have rejected this faith, but it is apparent that he never had it. Don't forget Jesus' words: "no one can snatch them out of my Father's hand" (John 10:29).
Frank writes that "God is angry with us and has always been." Yes we are 'sinners in the hands of an angry God'. (Jonathan Edwards, NOT the candidate) But don't forget John 3:16..
"For God so LOVED the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life."
Frank Schaeffer has a poor appreciation of his father, Francis Schaeffer. Even more sadly, he has a poor understanding and presbyopic view of his Heavenly Father.
I am praying for you, Frank.
A liar can tell the truth at any time. A fool is a fool 24/7.
God's eye is on the pheasant
and is she P*SSED!
Dude. I can totally relate. I was raised Southern Baptist, in church every Sunday morning, Sunday night and Wednesday night. At church camp I heard the Rapture sermons and hell-fire and damnation. And saw around me other kids drinking the kool-aid. It's bizzare to hear people in the same sentence sing about Jesus' love and then condemn anyone who disagreed with them everlasting torment in hell.
Luckily, in my little church we had a series of pastors who were scholar enough to teach us that the Rapture was bull and that women should be ordained as deacons and pastors. They focused on the teachings of Christ and our responsibility to serve as he did. They didn't spend so much time on the hateful god of the Old Testament or the gleeful torturer God of Revelation.
They taught me that Jesus was the Word of God and that everything else, even the rest of the bible, must be weighed against that standard.
Needless to say this drove our Southern Baptist sister churches insane. We wound up leaving the Southern Baptist convention and joining the American Baptist, a much more level headed branch of Christianity.
Huckabee, for all his populist happy talk, is a Southern Baptist fundamentalist through and through. I've seen them, I've worked with them, I've heard their beliefs and it's absolutely terrifying to think of one of these nutjobs with his finger on the button.
I am careful to make a distinction between a christian and an evangelical christian. The non-evangelical christians I have known are mostly pretty tolerant. The evangelicals I have known are mostly friendly and congenial until they realize that you aren't going to buy into their message. Then you are either a. shunned, b. reviled, or c. hounded. And, having grown up in a southern baptist evangelical church, and been a member of three different evangelical churches, I have known a lot of evangelicals.
But it is just my experience :) - not a random or necessarily representative sample. But, enough for me to avoid the evangelicals whenever I can.
Huck is the worst... except for the rest.
Whom would I rather have president? Goulie? Romney? McCain? Paul? Hunter?
Geez, gag me with a spoon.
Half a century or so back, Eric Hoffer wrote a book called "The True Believer", which dealt precisely with people like Mike Huckabee. The true believer is one who has absolute conviction of the rightness of a single, guiding idea. It could be communism, fascism or just about any fundamentalist religious belief.
True believers are often charismatic, charming, warm and funny. But they are so convinced that their own truth is the only "Truth" that they will smilingly, and perhaps even regretfully, fry your body to save your soul.
Trying to argue with a true believer in an attempt to get him to change his mind is a basically a waste of breath, because his/her belief in unshakable. They are driven by a dread of uncertainty and the subtleties of life. It is not possible for seemingly opposite "truths" to co-exist, since if A is right then B must by definition be wrong.
Most such individuals are basically harmless because they have little ability to control others. A few, though, have such dynamic personalities that they are able to influence a great many people, sometimes in dangerous ways.
And occasionally, as Adolph Hitler has shown, one of these individuals may acquire control of an entire, technologically advanced culture. And there is nothing more perilous to civilization than this.
I'm not sure that Mike Huckabee is such an individual. On the surface he seems like a reasonably "good guy." But the absolute, unshakable conviction of his beliefs, though comforting to many, should be a red flag for anyone who even considers voting for him as President.
"But there are no theological ideas worth hating anyone over. And if you understand vengeful Southern Baptist theology you won't want anyone near the White House who takes it seriously."
ORGANIZED religion is always about "them" versus 'us'.
ORGANIZED religion is the BANE of civilization.
and I'm happy you escaped from that paradigm.
Barney and Miss Beasley are nervous
http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2006-8/1210139/HuckaPsycho.jpg
the Huckabees are COMING!!!!
Have you been saved? Yeah, I saved my self.
Quit beating up on The Huck. He's driving our wedges for us. These guys have supported the "MoneyCons" and (later) the "NeoCons" because they were told at every election that their paranoia and bigotry would be addressed.
The money guys and the Tough Guys have never really given a rip about Gays or women's choice, and then along came Huck with an economic and foreign policy outlook that has Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes rolling their eyes on Fox News.
They hate and fear his populist message and are really terrified that he might implement some of the Class Warfare taught by Jesus and the apostles.
Finally, it's not 50%, it's more like 27 to 30% that will rally to him. If that happens, the Republican Party could be broken for a long time to come.
So leave the Huck alone and "pray" that he wins the Repub nomination. We can then begin to address some of his more insane ideas, like the "34% national sales tax".
Can't speak for Huckabee one way or another. But the author commits one of the popular pitfalls of today: I was once a [fill in the blank], so let me tell you - I know all about'em. Well, as a former Southern Baptist pastor myself, I can assure you that the one thing Baptists weren't was monolithic. They may have been many things, but all the same isn't one of them. Some of the most educated, liberal, pro-choice, democrats I knew sat in the pews in my churches. But then, it's hard to take a swipe at people without using those good old fashioned stereotypes that have served humanity so well. For me, I am not electing a pastor, but a president. If a former pastor wants to run, so be it. That is no more bothersome than someone who wasn’t a former pastor running for president.
By the way, I notice that the author is 'sure' that the way to destroy harmony is 'to be sure.' Kinda funny ain't it? Ah, modern enlightened thinkers. Makes me believe that 500 years from now, a popular proverb will be “that’s so stupid, only a person in the 21st century would say that!”
The American Taliban!
Blind, Deaf, without wisdom or understanding!
Jesus would not recognize any of the institutions that claim to be 'christian' as one of his own.
It would be more correct to describe these crazed branches of the 'church' as Constantinian, not Christian, as it was the emperor Constantine who armed the church and gave it the doctrine "In this sign, conquer." Jesus said to Peter, "Put away your sword."
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