Huckabee: Leaders need biblical worldview

Mike Huckabee may be considered a frontrunner to become the Republican presidential nominee for next year’s general election, but the former Arkansas governor made it clear his appearance in Statesville on Sunday afternoon was not part of any campaign trail.
“I’m not here to give a political speech,” Huckabee said. “There is a time for that and I love doing it. But I’m not here to make Republicans out of you.”
That likely would have been an easy chore in the largely conservative Christian room to which Huckabee was speaking.
“Though I’d be happy to do so after the event,” he added, and was answered with a round of laughter.
Huckabee was the featured speaker at a fundraising event sponsored by Statesville Christian School titled “Faith, Family & Values,” and he mostly stuck to those topics.
He did take one humorous jab at the Democrats -- though not by name. At one point during his speech, the room filled with the screech of audio feedback.
“I think we have someone from the other party working the sound system,” Huckabee joked.
Huckabee also said that one reason the federal government is in poor financial shape has to do with the fact that many in government never got the idea of what good government should be “at the family level.”
The reference was to a message contained in his latest book, “A Simple Government,” about the idea that most people are exposed to the idea of “government” from two-parent families.
“The first form of government most of encounter is the mother and father in the home,” Huckabee said Sunday.
He said that too many fathers have children that they take little or no responsibility for after they are born.
But Huckabee also had some words for parents who, perhaps, take on too much responsibility and leave their children with none to take for themselves.
He told of a time when he was a child and got in trouble at school.
“My parents were of the understanding that it was my fault,” Huckabee said, “not the fault of the teachers or the school.”
Huckabee joked that now, when kids get in trouble, the parents look for lawyers to sue the school. “But when I was young, I could have used a lawyer to help me get out of all the trouble I was in.”
In a more serious tone he added, “I think it is wrong to raise kids to believe that nothing is their fault and they take no responsibility for their actions.”
Huckabee also said that when he grew up (in the town Hope, Ark., in the late 1950s and 1960s), folks were more open about their faith.
“We were not ashamed of Judeo-Christian heritage,” he said. “And schools and the community did everything they could to support it.”
When he arrived at the third topic of his speech, Huckabee aligned values with the notion of being “created equal,” as is noted in the Declaration of Independence. He said that idea did not exist at the time of the founding of the United States
In something of a tongue-twister, Huckabee said the U.S. “was created to be an exceptional exception to that notion of exceptionalism” that existed at the time.
He said that the kind of “biblical worldview” taught at SCS was in the direction of unmitigated equality.
“I’d love the world to be lead by people who have a biblical worldview,” he said.
“Wouldn’t it be an exciting thing to have leaders who believe all of us are equal?” he later asked.
Huckabee said part of such a worldview as is taught at Statesville Christian is the idea of absolutism that rejects moral objectivism and stipulates that some things “are always right” and others “are always wrong.”
Huckabee’s political career started in 1992 with an unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate. The following year, following fellow Hope native Bill Clinton’s presidential inauguration, Arkansas held a special election for the lieutenant governor’s seat Jim Guy Tucker vacated to assume the governor’s role. Huckabee ran and won the seat. He won a full term as lieutenant governor in 1994.
And, in 1996, he moved to the governor’s mansion when Tucker was convicted of fraud in relation to the Whitewater scandal, which initially started as an investigation into the doings of Bill and Hillary Clinton (and which eventually led to President Clinton’s impeachment trial).
Huckabee said Sunday that he has been asked many times if it is difficult to be a Christian and a politician/elected official.
“I always answer that actually it’s a lot easier to be a Christian,” he said. “I wake up every day knowing what I believe.”
Prior to his speech, Huckabee allowed time for a very brief press conference at which he was asked by the R&L if he planned to be part of the group running for president.
“I could be part of,” he said. “It’s a decision I have to make thoughtfully and prayerfully.”