Why I, as a Christian, Will Not Support Mike Huckabee

The American Thinker has a good piece by Bruce Walker on Mike Huckabee that fully explains why I, as a Christian and Home School dad (our kids have since matriculated from college), will not be supporting Mike Huckabee in the primaries.

I don't have a problem, necessarily, that he wears his Christianity on his sleeve, but I do have a problem that he wants Big Govt to play the role of the charitable Christian.

Here's a blurb from Walker's article:

Mike Huckabee said last Sunday on Meet the Press that his faith was important to him and that it drove his views on everything from the environment to poverty to disease and to hunger. Huckabee then went on to say that he thought the Republican Party needed to take a greater leadership role on these sorts of issues and that, as a Christian, he wanted to make sure that Republicans spoke out more on these issues.

Excellent. As a Christian Republican myself, I will express support for protecting God's Creation, fighting sickness, and ending hunger. All are profoundly Christian ideals. But Mike Huckabee, as a Christian, is not really talking about protecting Creation, fighting sickness or ending hunger. Mike is talking about using the coercive power of government to force other people to pay taxes and to comply with onerous and arbitrary laws to do what Mike thinks, as a Christian, he should be doing.

That is the salient fact: as a Christian, Huckabee can be a witness to Christian behavior; he can exhort others to themselves become a witness to Christian behavior; but he cannot demand the enslavement of others to do those things which, as a Christian, he feels that he should do. The term "enslavement," of course, is relative. Americans are comparatively free. But everything that Huckabee feels government should do requires a loss of freedom for every American. Moreover, Huckabee is not just asking for the greater enslavement of Christian Americans, but he is asking for the greater enslavement of all Americans. This is most un-Christian. Does my verdict sound extreme? Substitute "Rome" for "America" and substitute "publican" for "tax dollars."

Did Christ ever say his followers should ask Rome to do more for the welfare of its subjects? Or did Christ ask each individual Christian to personally do more to feed the hungry, to comfort the sick, to care for the widows and orphans, and to seek justice and mercy? Rome was a welfare state. The urban masses of Rome lived on bread and circuses. Roman power, outside Rome, build good roads, aqueducts, baths, bridges, libraries and undertook many other public works projects. Pax Romana was a very real blessing to nations who had fought wars around Mare Nostrum for centuries.

The entire article couldn't be more right on. Be sure to read the entire piece.

One's religion has no place in government. Our government should be secular, and the populace should be religious. The constitution makes no provision for a "religious" government.

The very reasons I do not and will not support Mike Huckabee in the primaries are the very reasons democrats like Susan Estrich see Huckabee as a dream come true. They know full well they can blow him out of the water because of his beliefs and how he'll apply them to his would-be administration.

I truly hope Huckabee doesn't turn out to be the republican nominee. He won't have a leg to stand on and I hope his Christian supporters and my fellow Home Schoolers will soon wake up to that.