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Mike Huckabee's Fundamentalist Preacher Tactics
Mainstream Baptists have been sounding a "hue and cry" about the duplicity of fundamentalist preachers for more than two decades. Fundamentalists know that their authoritarian beliefs are outside the mainstream. If they made their real beliefs clear and explicit, fewer of them would succeed in becoming pastors of our churches - much less the President of our nation. With unrelenting regularity I am contacted by members of churches who are deeply grieved to discover that the man their church called as pastor lied to them when their church was interviewing him for their position. They've learned the hard way that a rule of thumb for many fundamentalist Baptist ministers is to "Tell the people what they want to hear -- then do what you want when you get the position."
At a recent debate in Myrtle Beach, Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee disclosed an intimate familiarity with the fundamentalist Baptist minister's rule of thumb. He knows that the patriarchal and sexist family statement that the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) adopted in 1998 is well outside the mainstream -- even for Baptists.
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Mainstream Baptists believe that husbands and wives relate as equals within the family. When the Bible talks about "submission" within the family it intends a "mutual submission" of give and take in the marital relation. That means that, at times, wives will submit to their husbands and, at other times, husbands will submit to their wives. Submissiveness depends upon the changing needs, circumstances and dynamics within the marriage.
The SBC's family statement calls for wives to be "graciously submissive" to their husbands. The authors of that statement explicitly denied that the marital relation is one of "mutual submission." In their view, the immutable dynamic and unchanging circumstance of the family is that the husband is its head "boss" or "ruler". Submission is one-sided. There is no admonition for husbands to be "submissive" to their wives -- graciously or otherwise -- in the SBC's family statement.
After the family statement was approved by the SBC in June 1998, there was a great "hue and cry" among Mainstream Baptists opposing its imposition on the faculty at SBC Seminaries. Reaction was so strong that in September 1998, I left my position as pastor of a church in Houston and accepted a full-time position as a leader among the Mainstream Oklahoma Baptists who opposed the "family" statement and other aspects of the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC.
Unfortunately, the battle over the family statement in the SBC was very brief. More than 100 prominent evangelical leaders -- including Mike Huckabee -- endorsed the SBC's family statement in a full-page newspaper advertisement. Shortly thereafter, seminary professors who refused to deny that the Bible taught "mutual submission" in marriage were terminated.
Fast forward ten years. Now Mike Huckabee is running for President of the United States. He is asked about his endorsement of the SBC's family statement. Before a national television audience he gives the impression that he is offering a vigorous defense of the SBC's family statement, but what interpretation of relations within the family is he giving? Is he giving the SBC's husband-as-ruler-of-the-family interpretation or is he giving the Mainstream Baptist "mutually submissive" relations interpretation? You make the call. Here's the complete transcript of this part of the 1-10-08 GOP debate in South Carolina:
CAMERON: Governor Huckabee, to change the subject a little bit and focus a moment on electability.
Back in 1998, you were one of about 100 people who affirmed, in a full-page ad in the "New York Times," the Southern Baptist Convention's declaration that, quote, "A wife us to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband."
Women voters in both parties harshly criticized that. Is that position politically viable in the general election of 2008, sir?
HUCKABEE: You know, it's interesting, everybody says religion is off limits, except we always can ask me the religious questions. So let me try to do my best to answer it.
(APPLAUSE)
And since -- if we're really going to have a religious service, I'd really feel more comfortable if I could pass the plates, because our campaign could use the money tonight, Carl.
(LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE)
We'll just go all the way.
First of all, if anybody knows my wife, I don't think they for one minute think that she's going to just sit by and let me do whatever I want to. That would be an absolute total misunderstanding of Janet Huckabee.
The whole context of that passage -- and, by the way, it really was spoken to believers, to Christian believers. I'm not the least bit ashamed of my faith or the doctrines of it. I don't try to impose that as a governor and I wouldn't impose it as a president.
But I certainly am going to practice it unashamedly, whether I'm a president or whether I'm not a president. But the point...
(APPLAUSE)
... the point, and it comes from a passage of scripture in the New Testament Book of Ephesians is that as wives submit themselves to the husbands, the husbands also submit themselves, and it's not a matter of one being somehow superior over the other. It's both mutually showing their affection and submission as unto the Lord.
So with all due respect, it has nothing to do with presidency. I just wanted to clear up that little doctrinal quirk there so that there's nobody who misunderstands that it's really about doing what a marriage ought to do and that's marriage is not a 50/50 deal, where each partner gives 50 percent.
Biblically, marriage is 100/100 deal. Each partner gives 100 percent of their devotion to the other and that's why marriage is an important institution, because it teaches us how to love. |
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