Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, ordained Southern Baptist minister, enthusiastic Romney supporter, and current Inquisitor of the Republican Party, said this in a political ad:
Christians across the nation will have an opportunity to shape the future for our generation and generations to come. Many issues are at stake, but some issues are not negotiable: The right to life from conception to natural death. Marriage should be reinforced, not redefined. It is an egregious violation of our cherished principle of religious liberty for the government to force the church to buy the kind of insurance that leads to the taking of innocent human life.
Your vote will affect the future and be recorded in eternity. Will you vote the values that will stand the test of fire? This is Mike Huckabee asking you to join me November the 6th and vote based on values that will stand the test of fire.
Not only does the Huckster say that God is sneaking a peek at the secret ballot of Christians (God is a nosy deity, I guess), he also says that the vote of Christians can trump God’s will, in that their vote “will affect the future.” And, more important, Pastor Huck suggests a non-Romney vote will subject the actions of Christians—those folks purchased by the blood of Jesus—to a “test of fire.”
Most liberal commentators, because they don’t much understand the language of evangelicals, are interpreting Huck’s comments as meaning that Christians are hell-bound if they vote for The Scary Negro Who Hates God. Here’s an example from Slate:
Huckabee Says Christians Will Go to Hell If They Vote Obama
Not so though. It sounds like that, it sounds like the Huckster is sending Christian Obama voters to hell, but that’s not what he means. If you read 1 Corinthians 3, you’ll see the Apostle Paul tells us:
By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as a wise builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should build with care. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. If anyone builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, their work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each person’s work. If what has been built survives, the builder will receive a reward. If it is burned up, the builder will suffer loss but yet will be saved—even though only as one escaping through the flames.
See? “The fire will test the quality of each person’s work,” that is, each Christian’s work. Huck is saying that a “yes” vote for Obama will compel God to make a huge withdrawal from the Christian’s heavenly reward bank account, but won’t necessarily send that Christian to hell. He or she will escape “through the flames.” Slick, eh?
Thus, discerning Christians, and those with rather large heavenly bank accounts, can afford to vote for Obama without fear that God will immediately assign them to an eternity in hell. God will merely slap a big penalty on them, call it a Kenyan Socialist Obama Tax, for disobeying Mike Huckabee, but they will still get to heaven.
They just may have to sit in the cheap seats.
So, all you Christians out there with grace to spare, Barack is your man! Feel free to vote your conscience!
The Erstwhile Conservative: A Blog of Repentance 
writer89
/ October 31, 2012As a non-Christian, I don’t pretend to understand one word of this, but I can say with absolute certainty that it doesn’t effect me one bit. It’s like George Constanza’s fake charity. “I made it up!”
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R. Duane Graham
/ November 2, 2012I know a lot of folks don’t understand it. But given how powerful these kinds of people are in our culture, in our politics, they need to, at least a little bit. We have to confront this stuff as we run into it, and knowledge is power.
Duane
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J. D. Highfjdhight01
/ November 1, 2012What a hypocritical piece of crap Huckabee is. This is the guy who left politics to make money, who states that insurance companies have the right to deny coverage for preexisting conditions, and who worships at the alter of Koch. I guess he forgot that Jesus ran the money changers from the temple and said that a Christian is judged for what he or she does for the poor. If anyone will have to talk his way into the kingdom of Heaven, the hypocritical “minister” will.
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R. Duane Graham
/ November 2, 2012And he does it all with that folksy demeanor.
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Yellow Dog
/ November 1, 2012He’s an ass and he knows it. He is hawking for FOXNEWS that’s all.
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Jim Wheeler
/ November 1, 2012The Rev. Huck should be careful because if the Old Testament is right, God is quite unforgiving of those who misinterpret Him:
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R. Duane Graham
/ November 2, 2012Nice, Jim.
And Jeremiah has something timely to say about it, too:
Duane
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thgeneralist
/ November 1, 2012Good post, Duane. Taking your idea a step further is “If Grace is True” by Phil Gulley and Jim Mulholland. Like these two rascals, I’m a Quaker and I’ve approved this message. As for the Huckbuster, I’m sorry to say he got his M. Div. from Southwestern Seminary — as did I. In fact, he was just finishing up when I’d come back to work on a doctorate there. Mercifully, I did not complete those studies and my spiritual journey has taken me down a different path. I would say that Huck is cut of the same moth-eaten, pox-infested cloth as Southwestern’s current president, Paige Patterson.
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R. Duane Graham
/ November 2, 2012Thanks for the good word. And that sounds like a good book, by the way.
As I have told others, if I had my druthers, I would write about topics related to religion, theology, belief, and so on. It’s what I have spent the most time thinking about and studying, although politics comes in a close second.
The idea of universal salvation, around at least since the days of Paul, always tripped me up when I was an evangelical. I was taught that “grace” meant “unmerited favor.” But then I could not understand why that unmerited favor did not extend to all folks, since after all it was “favor” and certainly “unmerited.”
The evangelist, Chuck Swindoll (I think; I listened to so many in my day they all get mixed up in my memory), once gave a good illustration of grace: It’s like when it snows and the snow covers up all the neighborhood yards, and even though your yard is crappy, it looks as good as the rest of them when covered with snow. That’s a good illustration, but I’m pretty sure Swindoll doesn’t believe in universal salvation, even though his illustration practically demands it. That’s the problem.
I figured out, eventually, that in most people’s minds, vis–à–vis their understanding of God and salvation, even though they may talk a good game about grace being unmerited favor, about it being wholly God’s doing, there is at least a smidgen, more in some than in others, of “I deserve my grace.” That is why, I think, people can go to sleep at night with the “knowledge” that most of the world, even some of their loved ones, are condemned to hell for not believing in Jesus as their savior.
Now, they would say that it is just a matter of those people not “accepting” God’s gift, his grace, but then, again, if the favor is unmerited, if it is truly a gift given without strings, then why punish people everlastingly for not accepting that gift, for whatever reason people choose not to accept it? Why wouldn’t it be that not readily accepting God’s grace is also one of the things that God’s grace covers?
The conservative evangelical view of grace, the one I was taught, never made sense to me; it doesn’t today. The difference is that I have stopped pretending that it, any of “it,” makes sense, which was initially a perilous endeavor–we learn so much of this hell-to-shun stuff as children–but gets a little better with time. In any case, it is overwhelmingly more liberating than believing that there is a God out there handing out a wonderful gift that you had better take or else you will spend eternity in either isolation or torment.
What kind of gift is that?
Duane
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Jim Wheeler
/ November 2, 2012Answer: Strangely, it sounds a little like AT&T a couple of months ago when their man in the Philippines said to me, “I can’t fix your DSL but I can connect you to our special experts in ConnecTech who can. It is only $15 per month for the one year contract.” Left unspoken but implied was, “Or you can spin in Internet Hell, unconnected and unloved. Your choice.”
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