Mike Huckabee In The News

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Healing For A Broken World

Steve Monsma, political scientist from Calvin College, has published a new book which should be of interest to readers of Politics & Christianity. We have not read it yet so please do not consider this an endorsement. Nevertheless, in Healing For a Broken World he focuses upon public policy issues rather than partisan politics and on Biblical principles rather than out of the can answers. I am looking forward to reading and interacting with it. I would welcome thoughts from those who are familiar with it.

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2008 Election Results Accidentally Leaked

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Religionists Are Just Frustrated & Bitter

I can't believe that even Barack Obama would stoop low enough to say the following:

"You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Excerpted from a speech by Senator Barack Obama's at a fundraiser in Pacific Heights in San Francisco on Sunday, April 6, 2008.

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Tony Blair Speaking Out On Faith

"AT last, the Gospel according to Tony Blair. As prime minister he permitted his spokesman to declare: "we don't do God", now, as a retired elder statesman he decided he does and not only that but religious faith is now central to solving the world's problems." (Read more...)

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Barack Obama Committed To Liberation Theology But Is Courting Evangelicals

The following is an excerpt from an article by Floyd and Mary Beth Brown in the Wilmington News Journal:

Barak Obama’s church, Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, is dedicated to Black Liberation Theology and income redistribution. This liberal theology goes hand-in-hand with the liberal politics which Obama espouses. Obama’s faith is heavily based in the social gospel, meaning an emphasis is placed on the humanitarian example of Jesus. Humanity’s need for a savior to pay the debt due because of sin, which is satisfied by Christ’s death and resurrection, is relegated to the sidelines. (Read more...)

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Presidential Candidates Faith Committments

The following is an excerpt from an article in the Grand Forks Herald:

All the top Democratic presidential contenders spoke of their faith this election year. But more than any other Democratic candidate, Obama has made religion a core part of his message and outreach.

The Illinois senator has held faith forums, created a grass-roots support network of “congregation contacts” and has spoken in evangelical churches that Democrats had rarely visited.

His strategy is rooted in the Christian faith he found as an adult through Wright at Trinity United Church of Christ, a predominantly African-American megachurch. In fact, Obama has said he came to a personal faith in Jesus and actually walked down the aisle to the front in response to Wright’s call to faith.

Obama’s book, “The Audacity of Hope” was inspired by a Wright sermon.

But last month, Obama distanced himself from his pastor, after video circulated of Wright’s most inflammatory rhetoric from the pulpit. Among the most remarked upon sound bites was Wright proclaiming “God damn America” for its racism. He also accused the government of flooding black neighborhoods with drugs. In a March 18 speech on race that was partly aimed at damage control, Obama described the history of injustice that fueled Wright’s comments, while also condemning his pastor’s statements and acknowledging the resentment of whites.

Obama appeal

Obama’s focus on racial reconciliation has a special appeal to traditional Bible believers. Their concern about diversity has intensified recently, in part because of the growth in immigrant churches in the U.S. and by a new awareness that conservative Christianity is spreading dramatically in developing countries.

James Guth, an expert on religion and politics at Furman University in South Carolina, said Wright’s comments haven’t killed Obama’s chances. The candidate has built up some good will and “curiosity” through his outreach to evangelicals, including appearing at a Christian AIDS summit hosted by megachurch pastor Rick Warren and his wife, Kay.

But Guth said Wright’s views inevitably would receive extensive publicity, as would Obama’s denomination, the United Church of Christ, considered the most liberal of the mainline Protestant groups.

Clinton, too, is a mainliner: she has been a Methodist all her life and says she is from a long line of Methodists.

She has said that her ancestors in the coal-mining regions of Great Britain were converted by Methodism’s founder himself in the 1700s.

In an interview in February with the Christian Broadcast Network, Clinton said, “It was thought in my father’s family his great-grandfather actually heard John Wesley preach,” she said.

Asked to describe her faith, she said, “It is the person, it’s the scriptural, it’s the traditional, and it is also very much in keeping with my understanding how faith can be based in reason as well as passion.”

Clinton’s faith

She talked of the “continuity of the faith tradition that I was given as a gift, which I then had to make my own. And I did because as a Methodist, which I am, we look at the roots of our faith, our personal relationship with God, obviously through Jesus Christ, which gives us a sense that we’re not only saved and that we’re called and that we are given much and therefore much is required.”

All accounts of her life say a youth pastor had a profound influence on her during her high school days, in applying her religious faith to social issues and the questions of the day.

While in the White House, the Clintons usually attended a United Methodist congregation, which is her denomination. President Bill Clinton was raised a Southern Baptist and knows the Bible well and is able to talk freely with pastors about religious and spiritual issues.

She has acknowledged that speaking about her faith does not come naturally to her. But she became active in an evangelical Bible study group in Washington in the 1990s and credited it with helping her personally. Like Obama, Clinton is a strong supporter of abortion rights, a stance not shared by most evangelicals and Catholics and many mainline Protestants.

But Clinton spoke in December at the annual Global Summit on AIDS at Saddleback Church near Los Angeles, one of the leading evangelical congregations, headed by Warren, the best-selling author, who wrote “The Purpose-Driven Life.” She quoted the book of James, that “faith without works is dead” and added that for “many of us the golden rule calls on us to act.”

McCain is the only one of the three remaining main presidential candidates who has a recent religious change of sorts.

Raised an Episcopalian, including attendance at the elite Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Va., where daily chapel was required (Episcopalian is the most common denomination of U.S. presidents) McCain reported last year he had begun attending North Phoenix Baptist Church in Arizona several years ago. It’s a huge congregation of the conservative Southern Baptist Convention.

He has said he was not “born again,” in that congregation, nor rebaptized. According to the Christian Science Monitor last fall, McCain said he “came into that church, I sat down, I got the message of redemption and love and forgiveness, and it resonated with me. I found going to that church was beneficial to me in my life.”

Like Clinton, McCain never has been comfortable talking freely about his faith, saying first it’s a private thing.

But McCain says he prays every day. His father, an admiral, prayed twice daily on his knees, McCain said, probably to keep him from drinking.

His own faith sustained him during his 5 ½ years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, an experience that led him to public service, he says.

“There is no logical reason for me to be on Earth, if you look at my life, so I should spend this time trying to serve a cause greater than myself,” he told the Monitor last fall.

He had moments of transcendent grace among the horrors of the prison camp in Hanoi, McCain told the Monitor.

He told of a North Vietnamese guard releasing him from painful rope tortures for a few hours. Then on a Christmas Day, being allowed a rare few minutes of freedom outside in the courtyard. The same guard walked up and stood beside him, then, using his sandal, drew a cross in the dirt with his sandal. After looking at McCain for a moment, the guard rubbed it out and walked away.

“My friends, I will never forget that man,” McCain said emotionally at a town hall meeting, the Monitor reported. “I will never forget that moment. And I will never forget the fact that no matter where you are, no matter how difficult things are, there’s always going to be someone of your faith and your belief and your devotion to your fellow man who will pick you up and help you out and bring you through.” (Read More . . . )

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