Mike Huckabee is a study in contradiction.  He’s a bible-believing Southern Baptist who plays base guitar and jokes about asking the Rolling Stones to play at his inaugural.  His conservative credentials on hot-button issues like abortion and gay rights are impeccable; yet he seems genuinely concerned about the environment and social justice issues.

In Baptist circles, “social justice” used to be code for “liberal”.  Real conservatives were too concerned about personal responsibility to care about poor people.  To give “those people” a hand up was to deprive them of a precious opportunity to “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps”.

Like me, Mike Huckabee is a former Baptist minister.  We both attended Southern Baptist seminaries in the 1970s.  Baptists are a tiny minority in my native Western Canada; in 1975 there were probably more Baptists in Louisville, Kentucky than in the entire Dominion of Canada.  In the dark days following the Civil War, southerners rallied around the Southern Baptist Convention, making it the nation’s dominant evangelical denomination.

When I arrived in Louisville in the summer of 1975, the SBC was a good-old-boy network that maintained the appearance of unity by trampling on “extremists”, be they liberal or fundamentalist.  The controlling personalities in the Convention at that time were conservative, traditional, and politically and sociologically savvy.  Their primary goal was to hold a massive denomination together, and that meant focusing on the basics: preaching, missions, evangelism and church growth.

Then it all fell apart.  By the late 1970s, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (known affectionally to fundamentalists as “the whore on the hill”) was under seige.  When Roy Lee Honeycutt became seminary president, he tried to placate the fundamentalist wing by inviting some of their firebrand preachers to address Wednesday morning chapel.

So it was that a tall, dark and handsome Texas evangelist named James Robison came to “Southern”.  Robison was loud, rambunctious and eloquent.  He was also half-crazy.  In one sermon he described a blood-drenched vision of his  wife and young children nailed to the wall of his study accompanied by a personal message from God written in blood.

Robison now admits that during these years he had “a claw” in his brain.  He also had a talented young press agent named Mike Huckabee.  It wasn’t long before Robison suffered a complete physical and emotional collapse, re-emerging as a soft-spoken “Bapti-costal” television personality more concerned with feeding children in Africa than with scaring folks into heaven.

Has Mike Huckabee undergone a similar transformation?

Perhaps.  It was hard to be a Baptist in the 1980s–and it didn’t matter if you were a conservative or a moderate (the handful of genuine Southern Baptist liberals had long since headed for the exits).  The Bible was a problem for everybody.  The Good Book didn’t say much about abortion, one way or the other.  You could find passages that appeared to condemn gay sex; but there were far more texts focused on God’s love for the poor.  No matter where you stood theologically, there were large chunks of the Bible that were best ignored.

The situation was aggravated by the dirty little secret of the fundamentalist resurgence.  Conservative Southern Baptists could rise to national prominence, but only as part of a loose coalition controlled by pro-business republicans.  The result: a marriage of convenience between soul-winning preachers and supply-side economics.  “Values voters” concentrated on homosexuality and abortion to the virtual exclusion of all other issues.  It was the only way to maintain an tentative consensus between conservative Roman Catholics and old style evangelicals.  A movement that eschewed evolutionary science found itself in the dark embrace of social Darwinism. 

Pro-business orthodoxy, with its stress on entrepreneurial passion and personal responsibility, provided the perfect answer to the civil rights movement.  Rejecting the carrot of affirmative action (popularly associated with moral drift and welfare dependency), southerners reached for the stick of mass incarceration. 

Here we see the roots of what the New Jim Crow.  Poor African Americans no longer had to eat in the kitchen or ride at the back of the bus; but the slightest departure from the straight-and-narrow earned a one-way ticket to hell.  While LBJ’s war on poverty receded into the shadows, the prisons filled up with poor black males whose primary sin was an inability to adapt to the rigors of high-tech capitalism.  Texas had 40,000 state prisoners in 1980; we now have 160,000.

Through the ministrations of a smiling and beneficent Ronald Reagan, this marriage between southern evangelicals and corporate Republicans becaming the regnant orthodoxy of America.

The Southern Baptist Convention tied itself to corporate Republicans by driving its moderate minority into exile.  When I returned to Southern Seminary to work on a doctorate in Church History, hard-featured young zealots were forcing the professors I remembered from a decade earlier to walk the plank.   

During my five-year stint as a Ph.D student, the halls of Southern seminary ran with blood.  Those days are now long over.  Under the guidance of the politically flexible Albert Mohler, Southern Seminary has emerged as a bastion of Republican evangelicalism.

It was during this period that Mike Huckabee became president of the Arkansas Baptist Convention.  Leaning on his wit and charm, the Baptist preacher generally avoided the theological rancor of the period.  But it wasn’t long before he left off being a preacher and went into politics.  Like me, he sees his new vocation as Christian ministry by other means.

By all outward signs, Huckabee remains an orthodox evangelical and a socially conservative Republican.  But there are signs that he is no longer driven by the crude compromise underlying the old marriage of convenience.  

Huckabee recently won almost 50% of the African American vote in Arkansas.  As a Baptist pastor he took a stand against the de facto segregation of Southern religious life; a fact black voters appreciated.  But there was more.  Huckabee frequently used his gubernatorial powers to commute the harsh sentences routinely dealt to Arkansas inmates.  The slightest sign of a jailhouse conversion and the Governor was waiting with his pen. 

Huckabee remains a fiscally conservative, small government Republican.  He recently turned down an invitation to appear at the New Baptist Covenant gathering in Atlanta, perhaps fearing that the event was too closely associated with Democrats like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.  Still, as the son of dirt-poor southerners, the presidential candidate consistently identifies with common folk.  People would rather vote for the candidate who looks like the guy they work next to, he likes to say on the stump, rather than the candidate who looks like the guy who laid them off.   Can you imagine Ronald Reagan saying that?

David Kirkpartick of the New York Times has recently noted that Huckabee’s candidacy has received a lukewarm reception from prominent evangelical opinion leaders like James Dobson and Pat Robertson.  Last night, Kirkpatrick expressed similar views on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross. 

The unenthusiastic reviews Mike Huckabee is drawing from the champions of evangelical orthodoxy is similar to the cool reception Barack Obama is receiving from the guardians of the civil rights movement.  Evangelical republicans don’t disagree with Huckabee on theological grounds; their concern is practical.  Huckabee, to their way of thinking, threatens to break asunder the marriage between evangelicals and big business Republicans.  The Arkansas governor generally agrees with fiscal conservatives, but he doesn’t bow and scrape in their presence.  Worse than that, he tilts dangerously toward the environmentalist camp and his “tough on crime” credentials are suspect.

Barack Obama fails to spark enthusiasm among civil rights leaders from Al Sharpton to John Lewis because he refuses to define himself as the champion of black America.  Obama is questionable, in this view, because he transcends the red state-blue state culture war that defined the issues for a generation of politicians and activists.

Barack Obama can preach the civil rights gospel as well as any black leader in America; but civil rights is only part of his vision.  Mike Huckabee can reach out to “values voters” as effectively as any right wing culture warrior; but his heart isn’t in the culture war. 

Obama and Huckabee disagree on the issues, make no mistake, but they are united by a willingness to cross ideological lines in search for votes and a sense of purpose.  Unlike their opponents, these two candidates don’t fit the old culture war categories.

Friends of Justice is a criminal justice reform organization.  When we bring instances of unequal justice to national attention we aren’t just trying to win justice for a few isolated individuals; we are creating transformative narratives with the power to change the bedrock assumptions that drive public policy. 

The corruption of the criminal justice system has been a bi-partisan effort.  Democrats and Republicans have been equally afraid of being labeled “soft on crime”.  But the winds are beginning to shift.  We are seeing the advent of a new kind of politician.  It is possible, perhaps likely, that neither Obama nor Huckabee will be the next president of these United States.  But they represent the wave of the future.

Young evangelicals might agree (sort of) with their parents about gay rights and abortion, but they are growing concerned about the environmental crisis and talking about social justice.  For the first time in my life experience, Christians are reading the whole Bible.  This fact might draw a shrug of indifference from secular America; but for battle-scarred Baptists like me it’s an exciting development.