The Nappy Cat Chronicles

The Huckabee family [insert gerund here] their [insert sarcasm here].

Presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee is in the news again. If it’s not clear from the stripes and elbow patches, Huckabee is a very very gullible man when it comes to faith and decisions made in faith. Andrew Sullivan has a good post on the matter of faith in politics. He writes:

[I]n a secular society, it is vital that when making the argument for your position in public, you do not deploy arguments that depend on or invoke religiously-revealed truths. The essential civic discipline in a pluralist democracy is to translate your religious convictions into moral arguments - arguments that can persuade and engage people of all faiths or none. Only a few secularist extremists are saying that people’s politics should not be informed in any way by religious faith (an impossibility in any case); most of us anti-Christianists are saying rather that political arguments should not be made on explicitly religious grounds, and political parties should not be allying themselves explicitly with one religion or another.

I’d like to add a third point to his last argument. Since it’s obvious that Americans will, on occasion (and sometimes twice), elect a whack job, the way in which a presidential candidate’s faith informs his (or her!) decisions must be considered by those who consider such things.

President Bush, for example, has a very substandard, immature, and ill-informed type of faith. He believes that his god will provide as long as he is doing his god’s work. He believes that his god is infinite and can provide indefinitely; so, he believes that his country’s capacity is infinite. Subsequently, Bush has made horrendously cavalier and reckless decisions. Compounding those decisions is the message that is intrinsic to his faith: Doing God’s work means never turning back.

Another type of faith is more thoughtful, soulful, and quiet. It allows the individual to agonize over and rethink decisions. It recognizes that Jesus didn’t hop on the cross and yell out “Beam me up, Daddy!” It’s a powerful type of faith that I could get behind even if the decisions made were the same as those decisions made in type of faith referenced in the former.