Huckabee's Overt Religiosity

Suzanne Fields shares some of my concerns about the way Mike Huckabee campaigns for the presidency, but she puts it much more eloquently:

I was thinking about the meaning of symbols this holiday season when controversy exploded over Mike Huckabee's Christmas commercial, with its "floating cross." While many insisted that the symbol was merely an illusion created by crossed lines of a bookshelf, others said the meaning of the cross was in the eye of the beholder. But nothing is ever coincidental in a candidate's campaign commercial. Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal writes that it insulted her intelligence: "He thinks I'm dim. He thinks I will associate my savior with his candidacy. Bleh." For many who aren't Christians, it played as pandering to a constituency and manipulating a religious symbol. Many voters in Iowa are evangelical Christians, the caucuses are only days away and the commercial is regarded as the most memorable so far.

My problem with Mike Huckabees advertising himself as a "Christian leader," making the cross glow as backdrop, is that he's making the religious issue divisive toward all those who are not Christians. It's a division that will linger after the holiday season. The Huckabee rhetoric is especially offensive to Jews, playing to the mentality expressed by Ann Coulter, who describes Jews as needing "to be perfected by becoming Christian." When asked whether "it would be better if we were all Christian," she answered "yes." This is the message of the Gospel -- that everyone must be perfected through Christ's sacrifice on the cross -- but it's a message for the church, not a political campaign. A campaign is not a revival meeting.

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No one -- well, not everyone -- objects to faith informing a candidate's politics. It's impossible to separate faith from intellect in the pursuit of public good. But there's more than a suggestion that Mike Huckabee's use of religion could unleash intolerance against those who do not share his faith. He has a lot of good things going for him. He's witty and charming. As one of the Iowa locals told The New York Times: "Huckabee's a moral man. He's a preacher. And he lost a hundred pounds. He's going to do all right in Iowa.

It's no just Huckabee's overt religiosity in his presidential campaign that keeps him from closing the deal. There is also his foreign policy, waffling on immigration, and positions from earlier political campaigns.