Republican candidate Mike Huckabee wants “to … amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards,” particularly with respect to “how we treat each other” and “how we treat the family.” [Link, with video.]
At first, sentiments like these can sound encouraging. “Yeah! Bring that Constitution into agreement with God’s standards! After all, the Constitution was written by a bunch of men — and a bunch of deists, at that. So … yeah! Let’s amend it to meet God’s standards!”
But here’s the catch: who gets to say what God’s standards are?
Some will say we can depend on The Bible to tell us God’s standards. But I’d argue that the Christian faith — with its more than 200 divisions in America alone — is a pretty good testimony that a lot of people have trouble agreeing on what, exactly, the Bible says.
This leaves us with bringing the Constitution into conformity with “what sombody says God’s standard is.”
Who gets to be that somebody? Who gets to speak for God? Mike Huckabee?
That would be pretty convenient for Mike Huckabee … because then, as God’s spokesman, he could claim that anyone opposing him was, in fact, opposing God.
Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God,” and praised the First Amendment for “building a wall of separation between Church and State” [link]. James Madison strived for “the total separation of the church from the state” and urged us to strongly guard “the separation between religion and Government in the Constitution of the United States” [link].
These wise men recognized the danger of allowing any man — particularly a man in government — to become the arbiter of God’s standards. Given our founding father’s emphasis on keeping church and state separate, people like Mike Huckabee need to be recognized as being about as anti-American as a politician can be.
When a politician tells you, “I want to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards,” you should immediately ask, “Who gets to say what God’s standards are?”
Separation of church and state is one of the few issues that brings out the political side of me. I was unable to bring myself to vote for Mississippi’s Democratic candidate for Governor because one of his platforms was an end run around the constitution to “put prayer back in our schools.”You would have enjoyed the sermon at Northminster this past Sunday. Brent Walker, Executive Director for the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, spoke about this very thing, even mentioning “Who gets to say what God’s standards are?” and even “Whose God?”Huckabee was scheduled to speak at the “Celebration of a New Baptist Covenant” this week but cancelled. With his views, I am guessing this would have been to liberal/moderate a crowd for him.http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22918744/