[Dialogue] Spong 1/23/08 Huckabee and Who the heck is God?

[KroegerD at aol.com]

January 23, 2008 
Governor Huckabee: A Second  Generation Evangelical Politician  

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson managed to get through the Congress of the  
United States a national Voting Rights Act. It was not an easy task since  
Johnson had to maneuver the bill through a Senate controlled by old line  
Southern Democrats still wedded to segregation. To achieve this victory, Hhe  
employed his prodigious reputation for arm twisting., to achieve this victory.  
Working primarily with Everett Dirksen of Illinois, the minority leader of the  
Senate, Johnson separated the Republican conservatives from their negativity to  
any law that would increase the power of the federal government; and working  
with moderate and border state Democrats, he peeled away these traditional  
"fellow travelers" from the hard core racism of the deep South. The final vote  
in the Senate was 47-17 among the Democrats and 30-2 among the Republicans. 
This  tally indicated that the "no" votes did not even include all of the 
senators  from the states that had once formed the Confederacy. It was a massive  
achievement, signaling a new day for America that brought into full voting  
citizenship vast numbers of heretofore disenfranchised black people.  
Bill Moyers, who was at that time serving as Johnson's Chief of Staff,  
entered the Oval Office to bring his congratulations to the President on this  
victory, expecting to find him in a celebratory frame of mind. Instead, as  Moyers 
relates in his memoirs, he found the President in a mood of abject  
depression. "Bill," he said, "I have just handed the South to the Republican  Party for 
the next fifty years." He was remarkably correct.  
Racism had been chiseled deeply into the Southern character and was fixed  
indelibly in the Southern soul by the ravages of the Civil War. When racism was  
socially acceptable, it was quite overt. One has only to read the speeches of 
 southern politicians prior to the Civil War or even prior to the Civil 
Rights  revolution. When racism loses its aura of respectability, however, it 
doesn't  disappear, it simply becomes covert. Code words are developed. "States' 
Rights,"  for example," really means: "We believe the state has the right to 
discriminate  without the interference of the Federal Government,." and "Strict  
Constructionist Judges" really means judges who confuse constitutional 
democracy  with monocracy and who will not extend constitutional rights to unpopular  
minorities.  
Johnson understood that newly enfranchised black voters would identify  
themselves primarily with the Democratic Party, which would in turn mean that  the 
old white southern establishment would inevitably preserve its covert racism  
by becoming Republican. In Virginia, Mills Godwin, who was the Conservative  
Democratic governor of Virginia from 1965-1969, was elected the Republican  
Governor of Virginia in 1973. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, Phil Graham of  
Texas, Richard Shelby of Alabama and many others changed party allegiances  
without sacrificing their seats in the Senate. Richard Nixon went to school on  
Barry Goldwater's unsuccessful Southern strategy in 1964, adapting it in 1968 
to  sweep what had once been the solid Democratic South. In the pre-Voting 
Rights  Act era that solid Democratic South had rested on three political 
foundations:  protecting white supremacy, keeping a strong military, (which was well 
rewarded  by the location of numerous military bases in the South), and 
supporting liberal  economic measures that would benefit the poor and middle class 
white southern  voters. These three positions reflected the values of the South 
that elected  them. First, by restricting black voters, segregation kept 
political power in  the hands of the white establishment. ; sSecond, during the 
period of slavery,  which was based on subjugating significant numbers of people, 
Southerners  cultivated the military virtues, identifying them with chivalry 
and good manners  (note the number of military schools in the South including 
The Citadel in South  Carolina and VMI in Virginia), ). and tThird, the 
poverty of the white South  made economic populism a political necessity. While the 
value of Southern land  was considerable, this wealth was in the hands of a 
relatively few people. As  long as Southern politicians could keep segregation 
intact, they tended to  support the working class values of such liberal 
Democratic presidents as  Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and even 
John F. Kennedy.  
When segregation fell, however, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 probably  
more than anything else brought it down, Southern old line white Democratic  
voters found themselves willing to abandon populism as the price of their  
Republican identification. Racism always trumps bread and butter issues. Former  
Democrats began to portray themselves as "Values Voters," to which whom the  
National Republican leadership threw the emotional bones of making abortion a  
major political issue, attaching it to the liberal breakdown in sexual  
morality,; and by campaigning against homosexual people, who were, they said,  
"threatening marriage and the family." In this manner the conservative  establishment 
wedded the heretofore populist southern white voters with their  right wing, 
wealth-oriented economic policies. This new political coalition  became so 
powerful that only two Democrats could break the Republican control of  the White 
House from 1968 to 2008. One of these two was a "born again" Georgia  
Governor whose rise to power was helped by Watergate, and the second was a Bible  
toting Arkansas Governor whose path to the White House was made easier by an  
economic downturn.  
The last Republican president in this era, George W. Bush, rode into power in 
 2000 by cultivating evangelical voters quite overtly with his own "born 
again"  story. He governed, however, as an economic conservative. The Bush tax 
cuts did  not benefit the poor or the middle class. His lessening of restrictions 
on big  business gave us the huge and expensive scandals in Enron, World Com 
and Tyco of  the early 2000's and the housing sub prime market of today. His 
military  adventures in Iraq made the cost of gasoline, health care and 
education sky  rocket. The wealthy might have been well served by this 
administration, but the  poor and middle classes came under heavy pressure. Next, religious 
scandals tore  at the integrity of the "values" voter." In the Roman Catholic 
Church it was  child abuse; and in evangelical circles, it featured the 
bizarre sexual  escapades of Jimmy Swaggart and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, making 
the use of  religious politics appear to be little more than cynical jargon. 
Slowly but  surely the old political alliance of Southern evangelical whites and 
the  Republican party of wealthy conservatives that Lyndon Johnson had rightly 
 predicted in 1965, began to show signs of stress. It was waiting for a 
candidate  who could see that "the right to life" does not stop at birth, but that 
it is  important even for the children of evangelicals after birth to be 
educated, to  have health care, to find jobs that have not been exported to Mexico, 
India or  China. Even the specter of "gay marriage" did not seem so scary or 
even so  partisan when a Republican congressman from Florida who was overtly 
anti-gay was  revealed to have acted inappropriately with house pages, a 
homosexual-hating  Republican senator from Idaho was caught soliciting homosexual 
favors in a  public toilet and the ordained head of the largest Evangelical 
Network in  America was discovered to have carried on a long term sexual 
relationship with a  male prostitute in Colorado. The former Republican coalition that 
combined  "family values," pro-military patriotism and right wing economics 
began to  wobble. The stage was thus set for someone new to arise in the 
Republican Party.  Enter Michael Huckabee.  
A former Baptist preacher, Huckabee became governor of Arkansas, when, as the 
 Republican LLieutenant t. Governor, he succeeded the Democrat Jim Guy 
Tucker,  who was convicted and imprisoned for fraud. Governing as a Populist, he 
sought  to provide good education for the poor, including the children of illegal 
 immigrants, and to make health care available to the poor, including the 
sizable  black population of Arkansas. He was not afraid to criticize the Bush  
administration's incompetent management of the war in Iraq. All of these things 
 he did while touching the usual bases of evangelical concern —- evolution,  
abortion and homosexuality.  
Suddenly the face of America's ruling political coalition began to reveal  
just how deeply Southern evangelicals had been both used and manipulated. When  
Huckabee decided to seek the Presidency the traditional economic conservatives 
 ignored him until he won the Iowa Caucuses. Then they turned on him with a  
vehemence that was quite unusual for these usually smooth operators. Rush  
Limbaugh accused Huckabee of employing the tactics of "class warfare," not  
acknowledging that the Republicans have used class warfare against the poor for  
decades and that they had won. The Wall Street Journal called Huckabee  a member 
of the "Religious Left." Fred Thompson, literally recruited by the old  
Republican coalition because they did not want a Mormon;, a twice-divorced,  
pro-abortion mayor;, a maverick pro-war senator that they never trusted or this  
Republican William Jennings Bryan preacher from Arkansas, said that Huckabee was  
a Christian leader with "liberal economic policies and liberal foreign 
policy."  The word "liberal" has come to mean anti-God.  
All that had really happened, however, was that Governor Huckabee had  
reclaimed the liberal southern economic policies that Southerners had tried to  
reject when they allowed racism to make them allies with the party of big  
business and Wall Street wealth. He was a second generation Evangelical who had  
combined "family values," military might and long repressed southern bread and  
butter politics. In the process he began to threaten the powerful ruling  
political coalition. Can Huckabee or his position win? I do not think so. Can  the 
Republican Party win without this Southern evangelical part of their voting  
constituency? I do not think so.  
It has been 43 years since the Voting Rights Act became law. The 50-year gift 
 of the South to the Republican Party, about which Lyndon Johnson spoke, is  
nearing its end.  
– John Shelby Spong  
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Øystein Evensen from Oslo, Norway, asks:  
You mentioned the problem of miracles and the hand of God in prayer, but even 
 men and women have power to affect the world. In what sense do you believe 
that  God has such power?  
Dear Øystein,  
It is easier to document how human beings affect the world than it is how God 
 does. That is because human beings can experience God but they cannot define 
 God. I do not understand the reluctance of human beings to understand that  
simple truth. The human mind cannot embrace what it means to be God. We cannot 
 view the world from God’s perspective. We cannot show where God’s 
intervention  was decisive.  
If we could do that, we would presumably be able to explain why God does not  
always intervene. If God can be quoted or appealed to on one side of that 
ledger  then we must also raise the other side.  
Can God stop a hurricane from barreling down on New Orleans? Can God stop a  
tsunami before it kills 300,000 people in the Indian Ocean? Can God stop the  
inevitable progress of an incurable disease? If God can do that, why does not  
God do so?  
What is easier to see is how God might enable a person to be more attuned to  
the world and thus more sensitive to its evils and more dedicated to 
committing  human energy to eradicate these evils.  
I am convinced that we must stop seeing God as a being like us, but without  
human limits, and begin seeing God as a permeating presence, a life force, the 
 power of love or even what my favorite theologian, Paul Tillich, called the  
“ground of being.” If we could do that, I might begin to be able to answer 
your  question. Until that shift takes place, your question will always perplex 
human  beings.  
John Shelby Spong 



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