Written by Don Byrd
Former Arkansas Governor and current presidential ponderer Mike Huckabee has once again made news with his views regarding violence in public schools. The problem, he says, is our schools’ lack of daily religious activities.
Right Wing Watch (a blog of People For the American Way) has the quotes:
During a speech earlier this month at televangelist Morris Cerullo’s annual conference, Mike Huckabee said that school shootings wouldn’t take place if public schools organized daily prayers, religious assemblies, Bible readings and “chapel services.”
“Because we were bringing Bibles to school people weren’t bringing guns to school, except for the deer hunters who left them in their trucks,” Huckabee said. “What has happened to our culture? What’s happened is we have lost our landmarks. When we reject the Bible as the objective word of truth, when we say that the Bible is no longer the standard by which we live and we make it whatever we feel, what we think, what we believe, then we have no landmark at all because that landmark is always being moved to accommodate our lifestyle rather than make our lifestyle accommodate the word of the living God and the power of the Holy Spirit.”
Huckabee said much the same thing a couple of years ago following the Sandy Hook school shootings. In response, the Baptist Joint Committee’s Brent Walker called Huckabee’s remarks “bad theology and a blatant misstatement of the [constitution].” Walker’s column is worth a read again following this new round of unfortunate remarks from Huckabee.
I understand that being controversial is one way to draw attention when considering a political campaign. But that is no excuse for the grotesque suggestion (which is also, as Steve Benen points out, factually inaccurate) that the institutional separation of church and state jeopardizes the safety of schoolchildren.
Furthermore, the separation of church and state is not a rejection of the Bible. It is an affirmation of the Constitution, and of our rights of conscience and religious liberty as Americans.
