In my next post I will perform an autopsy/eulogy of the 2008 Huckabee candidacy--the greatest thing to happen to Faith and Values politicking since George W. Bush identified Christ as his favorite philosopher (about which more anon). But today I want to respond to the generally un-stimulating and jaw-droppingly repetitive comments made about my previous post. Most of these were submitted by self-identified secularists, liberals, atheists and outspoken critics of Georgetown University’s hiring practices (faculty members at Princeton, no doubt).
For starters, I am surprised by how many concluded that I had drawn a one-to-one correspondence between Huckabee’s unfortunate comments about the Constitution and Obama’s somewhat disjointed reflections at the University of Texas at Brownsville.
My thoughts on Huckabee were linked to the essay (here they are again) and readers of that column would have noticed that I referred to his outburst as “the single most egregious Faith and Values’ blunder of the 2008 campaign.” As for Obama, by contrast, I simply called for greater scrutiny of his pious musings. Not censure.
But this does not absolve Obama from secular sin and a lot of my respondents were in too forgiving a mood. Many came to a conclusion that went something like this: “Huckabee—that Fundie crackpot!—said he wants to amend the constitution. And surely he would do so if elected. But Obama was just showin’ the love to Christ. Totally different.”
Savvier commentators attributed Obama’s remarks to a profoundly political—as opposed to a profoundly theological—agenda. This would include staving off rumors that he was a Muslim or cutting into Hillary’s hefty lead among Latino voters.
Working under the mistaken assumption that only Republicans utter disturbing things about Church/State separation, few noticed that Obama also said: “our values should be expressed not just through our families, our communities, and our churches, but through our government.” That formulation is ambiguous, maybe intentionally so. At the very least it deserves to be looked at more carefully. (Huckabee, I would add, once deftly responded to a question at a debate with the sly protest that he always got the “religion questions.” Perhaps the media should now direct some of those questions Senator Obama’s way.)
In any case, let us agree that Senator Obama is just doing what all politicians in 2008 do. He’s playing the religion card—and he does so quite skillfully. But to insist that his “Christing-up” is categorically different from that of Huckabee strikes me as disingenuous to say the least.
Put simply, many atheists, liberals, secularists (and the Media) are applying a double standard. The non-religious and religious Left has been going bonkers--absolutely bonkers-- about GOP Faith and Values palaver for eight years. They hit the roof when Bush spoke of Christ as philosopher. They lost it when John McCain called America a “Christian nation.” They howled when Huckabee dubbed himself a “Christian leader.” They cursed the heavens when Mitt Romney equated freedom with religion.
But when Obama spoke about “trust in Christ” and “God’s plan” for America there was silence—silence drowned out by defensiveness and a little anti-Evangelical sentiment to boot.
Jacques Berlinerblau is the Rabbi Harold White Chair in Jewish Civilization in Georgetown's Walsh School of Foreign Service and senior advisor to the Center for Jewish Civilization, where he was director from 2006 to June 2020. Berlinerblau has published on a wide variety of issues ranging from the sociology of heresy and modern Jewish intellectuals to African-American and Jewish-American relations.
