Dear Governor Huckabee,
I will vote for you in the general election if you get the nomination of my party and are running against Secretary Clinton, but you are my fifth choice in the primaries. Since my family is deeply pro-life, pro-marriage, and pro-justice, this might seem odd.
You are a singularly winsome communicator. You were a successful two-term governor. You care about the poor and the working class in ways that few other Republicans articulate. I know you are no theocrat and despise the snobbery against Evangelicals from badly read bigots tempted by the faults of a true elite, the snobs, without any actual excellence. You stand for a persecuted Church very forcefully when such a voice is needed. You have spoken up for racial minorities in ways that other candidates have not.
And yet you are my fifth choice in the primaries.
Why?
Times being what they are, we need a person capable of talking to people outside of our bubble. Nothing wrong with a group having a dialect, but detrimental when a minority group cannot talk to the majority. Evangelicals are a minority, a big one, but still a minority and a great many people do not like us. Harder to blame them when our most articulate leaders do not try to speak so they can understand and your talk was pitched to me (I liked it!), but not to the rest of my fellow citizens.
A President has to govern all of America and Evangelicals have to show that we can. I think we can, but we have yet to prove it. W was one of us, but he was also a Bush so we do not know. Governor Walker is an Evangelical who knows our language, but he also talks to the rest of the nation. Senator Cruz is the angry young candidate, but he can do Harvard-Yard as well as Calvary Chapel. Senator Rubio can make us cry like a Sunday night revival, but mix it up with the best of them.
Presidents do not need to be intellectuals, God forbid we get another Woodrow Wilson, but you do not sound intellectually curious. What are you reading? What informs your worldview? I hope the Bible is there . . . and I bet it is. What are the commentaries you read? What are the magazines? There is gravitas missing from your speeches. The President of the United States represents us in our Republic, but he cannot be one of us. By the nature of the job, he must be more thoughtful than most. I am not talking about the fact based gotcha questions . . . this is why God allowed us to create Google. . . but a deep abiding intellectual curiosity. Even his critics cannot deny that Ronald Reagan moved from the Roosevelt left to the Goldwater right under the influence of books.
What do you read? What are the five key books that shape your thought? We need to know, but you never get to this in ways that other candidates do. I can tell what Cruz or Walker have been reading.
My concern is that like another good Evangelical in politics, William Jennings Bryan, you too often confuse opposition to your cause with opposition to His cause. When he gave the laboring classes a “crown of thorns” and said the Republicans would “crucify” us on a “Cross of Gold” it was marvelous rhetoric, but it confused the sublime with the mundane. The mundane matters and is redeemed by the sublime, but no cause can be puffed up to become the reason that the Lord Jesus died. Like Bryan, at times you sound as if you confuse the cause of this age with the Rock of Ages.
Finally, I worry about your tendency to divide the world into sheep and goats. That day will come and a Greater Judge than either of us will do the dirty job. At the end of History, nobody will stand on the line but all will be found to have either sided with the Good or with evil. Yet you seem, even in Party fights, to play a Manichean card as if all fights are Armageddon and you certainly stand for the Lord. They are not and Teddy Roosevelt lost the election where he used that phrase.
Our opponents are wrong on the issues . . . often deeply wrong . . . but especially in America few are so wrong they deserve being simply “other.” If you were to win, you would be their President too. Secretary Clinton is a soul created in God’s image, whip smart, resilient, and loyal. She has good qualities and a failure to see this runs the risk of missing the lesson of Alexander Solzhenitsyn (I paraphrase): the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. There are a few groups, ISIS and the government of North Korea, who are so evil that there is little sense in seeing much good there, but even then a Christian loves his enemies.
Somehow you come across as if you love us, the common folk who share your faith, but not the great unwashed in the Blood of the Lamb. This is a new and different snobbery and it is equally fatal as the other. Worse perhaps in us because we should know better. Jesus had a kind word for His enemies as He hung on the Cross before them. The trouble is not being forceful for our views, I love that about you, it is that you show too little humility to be trusted with power.
So it goes.
Thank you for standing up for the worker. Thank you for not falling into foolish libertarian and libertine dreams. Thank you for being a jolly soul (that guitar!) in an overly eager age. Thank you for serving when you could have stayed and grown richer, but I probably will not vote for you.
At least in the primaries.
Under the Mercy,
John Mark N. Reynolds
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