Where to Next?: Huckabee the Irresponsible -- Part II

Mike Huckabee has succeeded in ensuring that John McCain captures the Republican nomination. Along the way he has disparaged fiscal conservatism, threatened to turn our Republic into a theonomy, and demonstrated a peurile understanding of foreign policy issues. In short, as the perceived political spokesman for evangelicals, he has confirmed nearly every stereotype our intellectual and political opponents have cast of us over the last 40 years.

This hurts the evangelical movement not only in the political arena but more generally in our civic efforts. Huckabee has harmed the efforts of evangelicals involved in charity and economic development by suggesting that government can do the job better. Huckabee has made it more difficult for evangelicals to engage in political and civic discourse with his "us vs. them" rhetoric. Huckabee has given evangelicals in the business world real cause for concern by defending his old tax-and-spend gubernatorial habits. Huckabee has impeded the cause of evangelical moral and legal philosophy by rejecting arguments from public reason in favor of theonomous dogmas.

However, if we evangelical conservatives are to rid ourselves of the Huckabee legacy, it is not enough for us merely to disavow the man. We must also figure out where we go from here. By now we should have inferred that no baby-boom, conservative evangelical standard-bearer is going to emerge from the Kansas wheat fields (a la Brownback), the hills of western Virginia (a la Falwell), the Colorado front range (a la Dobson), or a little town called Hope (a la you-know-who) to lead us into the future.

This is not to disparage the Herculean efforts of the Baby Boomer evangelicals -- Dobson, Falwell, Robertson, Schlafly, and others -- who between 1973 and 2004 convinced evangelicals to emerge from their isolation and who built arguably the most influential cultural and political force in American politics today. It is to suggest that those leaders can carry evangelicalism only so far. The Boomer leaders raised public evangelicalism from infancy into adolescence. Now the movement must step out on its own into adulthood.

Evangelicals must continue to move forward to face the challenges facing a new generation. We cannot afford to live our public lives as if preserved in amber. And if evangelicals are to carry public reason seasoned with grace into the public sphere, we must, put simply, grow up. As if they were ill-fitting jeans and ratty t-shirts, we must shed immature conceptions of the public good, of economic progress, of international relations.

Theonomous assertions got us this far, but we must move beyond them. Any argument that begins, "The Bible says..." should never pass our lips or appear in our writings. We should at all times invoke God's blessing, but never his mandate. We need to resist the temptation to believe that God has made us responsible for eradicating poverty or preventing infant mortality, even as we freely give of ourselves to the poor, the ill, and the downtrodden. We need to demonstrate enthusiasm for the complexities and messiness of free markets and rebuke those who would employ government to tidy things up.

More than anything, we need to be comfortable in our own skin. We don't need Mike Huckabee, or even Chuck Norris, to show the world how cool we are. To the contrary. We need to resist the urge to accomodate, to fit in with secular elitists. We might very well be heading into a dark period in American history, a period from which America will emerge weaker, more timid, less optimistic. Someday, maybe several years from now, America will desperately need light. We have the Light of the world. Will we have an introduction ready?