Huckabee

by Scott Lamb

  Springsteen entered the music studio once again, determined to produce a breakout album that lived up to his full potential. Feeling the pressure of the money invested in the project and the expectations of critics and fans, Springsteen spent fourteen months on the album, Born to Run. He worked on the title track alone for six months. The album’s optimism centered on the narrative of the title track, wherein a young man with big dreams and a muscular determination to succeed beckons his girlfriend, “Wendy,” to run the journey together with him. He tells her that, though he didn’t know how long it would take, they would get to where they wanted to go.

  Springsteen released Born to Run the day after Huckabee turned twenty. You would be hard-pressed to find a song that better illustrates how the young couple were living out their newly married life together. Janet had lived through cancer, surgery, and chemotherapy that fall. And at the same time, Mike had plowed through his fifth and final semester of college.

  But life passes you by if you slow down to catch your breath. So even as he finished up his OBU coursework, the Huckabees packed their belongings and prepared to move to Fort Worth, Texas, for graduate school. Entering Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS) meant breaking with his Baptist Missionary Association once and for all. They had their own seminaries, so choosing one of the six SBC graduate schools marked a point of no return. Despite his friends’ warnings that he wouldn’t be able to pastor a Southern Baptist church, he knew that he was making the right decision.2

  SWBTS was, and still is, one of the largest seminaries in the world, with several thousand students enrolled in its programs. At that time, the average seminary student was in his or her midthirties. Many were coming to ministry and to graduate school as a second profession. That statistic has changed much since then, as the average age of an MDiv student has dropped ten years, making it a degree program full of recent college graduates. Huckabee fit that description when he arrived from OBU, except that he was even younger. “When I finished college, it didn’t occur to me to do anything else,” he said. “I thought, I’m out of school; let’s go. Let’s get to seminary. So we packed up and went. I got to class and, my gosh, I thought, I am a child. I’m twenty, and I look seventeen. It was just bizarre because the youngest people in my class were twenty-five, but most of them were in their thirties. These people were so much older than I was, and with kids. My own friends started showing up at seminary two years later, but by that time I was already gone.”3

  Some of those friends also came from OBU, like Dwight McKissic and Rick Caldwell. Another student he walked the halls with was Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Community Church and bestselling author. Like Warren, Huckabee is not an ivory-tower theologian, splitting hairs on small issues. Huckabee sometimes makes theological statements that please nobody—not the secularist, the liberal, or the conservative. One side argues that his theology says too much; the other side takes issue with his lack of precision, finding an offense because he doesn’t say more.

  Though he did not complete the MDiv, Huckabee did not lack a strong program of religious studies. In addition to his undergraduate major in religion, Huckabee took 48 hours at SWBTS: systematic theology, church history, Greek, evangelism, archaeology, and counseling—to name just a few. And the “academics were challenging and academically stimulating,” he said. “These were highly skilled and theologically advanced professors with PhDs, ThDs—all the professors had terminal degrees. It’s just that they also had a fervor. Professors like Dr. Robert Estep—he made everything come alive. He would talk about the Anabaptists, which normally would put people to sleep, but he’d have you just on the edge of your seat. He got it into you why it all mattered—there was always an application. There always was a sense of why we were studying this stuff.”4

  In 1976, the denomination was not yet under the control of the “conservative resurgence.” The seminaries were not equal in terms of tolerance for liberal teaching and leadership. Even now, each has its own unique flavor and some doctrinal differences. But when Huckabee entered SWBTS, it was considered by many to be the most conservative of the six. During the 1970s, the issues became clarified and the factions became polarized. Robert Naylor served as president while Huckabee attended the seminary. Naylor was “a really great man,” Huckabee said. “He would get up in chapel every day and quote these really long passages of Scripture from memory, with this deep, resonant voice. It was just wonderful to listen to him.”5 Russell Dilday followed Naylor as president in 1978, though Huckabee had already left for full-time ministry by that time. By 1989, conservatives held the majority position on the boards of trustees for most of the SBC entities. In 1994, the SWBTS board fired Dilday, changing the locks on his office within hours of their vote.

  Was there liberalism at SWBTS during Huckabee’s time there? “No, it was a hotbed of conservatism,” Huckabee said. “It never had a theological left turn, even at the time when Southern and Southeastern were apostate. There really was not any liberalism that I ever encountered. Not in the classroom, not on the campus. The professors were phenomenal. I never had a bad professor. I never had a professor that I thought, Wow! I can’t believe the Baptists are paying this guy’s salary.

  “Folks made fun of Southwestern,” Huckabee said. “They called it a three-year camp meeting, like a revival. And when they called it that, we said, ‘Dang straight.’ We considered it a badge of honor to be at Southwestern.

  “Of course, most students had to work,” Huckabee continued. “There were very few people just sitting around contemplating their theological navels. These were people that worked selling shoes at J. C. Penney, taking classes at night, and trying to raise a family. Some were taking a little part-time pastorate job, driving off two hundred miles on Sundays.”

  The Huckabees were no different from the rest in that regard. Janet worked as a dental assistant for the first year. Then, in November 1976, their firstborn son arrived, and she left work to stay home with the baby, John Mark. Down to one income, the Huckabees found their already tight finances stretched even thinner. “For almost six months, our daily meals consisted of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and alternating flavors of canned soup,” he later wrote.6

  On Sundays, the Huckabees commuted to church with another couple to save on gas. Then they’d pull out their loose change and “scrape together enough money to go get ourselves a treat—twenty-five-cent tacos—that was a big deal for us.”7

  During this period Huckabee sold his guitars in order to pay the bills. And a random and unexpected refund for an overpayment on a previous year’s utility bill gave the Huckabees exactly the money needed for a week’s worth of baby formula. Janet tried her hand selling Tupperware. She also baked cakes for friends and sold them (though he says she always just gave the delicious cakes away in the end).

  The biggest windfall of unexpected money came when Huckabee was involved in a five-car pileup out on the interstate. While at OBU, a friend’s family had sold them an extra car they owned, a four-door, baby blue Ford LTD. The price: one dollar.

  The Huckabees drove that LTD during college and then down to seminary. But one day, as Mike tells the story, “My car was turned into an accordion. A car hit a car in front of me, so I was stopped. And as I looked in my rearview and I saw a tractor-trailer coming. I thought, He can’t stop. And he didn’t. He plowed into me, and that threw me into the other car. Then another eighteen-wheeler came behind him. It was a mess.”

  So how did that create a financial windfall? Well, they owned the car outright, obviously, and carried insurance on it too. The insurance company took one look at the back end all crumpled down (though the taillights somehow still worked) and declared it “totaled” in the insurance sense of the word. They paid Huckabee the salvage value of the car and walked away. “But miraculously, the car was still drivable—it still ran,” he
said, “though there were a few cosmetic issues. Like, we had to get somebody to rig a crowbar where we could get in on the driver’s side. And you couldn’t get in on the backseat at all. Or on the back of the passenger side. And, of course, the back end was all rumpled up. But other than that, it was great. I drove that car around for another two years!

  “We kind of called it God’s car,” he said, “because it was a blessing to our finances.”

  “It was huge,” Janet declared.

  “We could still use the car, and we had money in my pocket. Of course, I didn’t want to make money that way very often. I didn’t want to earn income being in a wreck. There had to be a better way to finance the family.”

  The couple has many of these anecdotes about living on the edge of poverty during this season. Huckabee worked hard, but the bills add up fast when you’re in graduate school. That is when his part-time job in radio led to a full-time job offering. Should he embrace the promotion, an incredible position to be offered to a twenty-one-year-old? he wondered. Doing so would relieve his economic problems, but it would also end his educational pursuits.

  “Fairly early in 1976 I was just starting to do some freelance radio spots for James Robison’s evangelistic organization,” Huckabee explained. “I was helping to make the promotional commercials for his crusades. Then they promoted me to be the part-time media buyer. I had an advertising budget for an upcoming event. It was up to me to figure out what the ratings on the station were and to calculate which stations would serve our needs the best.” That’s when Robison offered him a full-time job as his director of communications.

  “Robison was highly respected at Southwestern overall,” Huckabee said. “Sure, some professors might have thought, Oh, an evangelist. He didn’t go to seminary. But most people would have been respectful of his effectiveness. At Southwestern, your effectiveness was more important than simply that you were an academic.”

  So he went to one of his professors, Oscar Thompson, looking for counsel as to what he should do. “I knew that he was going to tell me, ‘You stay in school, son.’ ” Instead, the professor asked him what his plans were for ministry—what did he hope to do after seminary? Huckabee said he wanted to go into broadcasting. Thompson asked him what kind of work Robison was offering him. “Advertising and running a national television ministry,” Huckabee responded. Thompson replied, “Okay, so what’s your question?”8

  Thompson reminded Huckabee that the seminary wasn’t going anywhere. It would still be sitting in the same spot if the Robison opportunity didn’t work out for Huckabee, not yet twenty-one. “Dr. Thompson oddly enough persuaded me that the opportunity was one that I really couldn’t pass up, and it was the beginning of a whole chain of events in my life that eventually led me to the governor’s office of Arkansas,” Huckabee said. “I will forever cherish the fact that he didn’t tell me what I expected to hear, nor tell me what I think he was probably expected to say as a seminary professor.”9

  In the fall of 1976, one year after Bruce Springsteen got double billing on Newsweek and Time, “born again” evangelicalism also received the same treatment. Jimmy Carter, a Southern Baptist layman Sunday school teacher who read his Bible and prayed daily, seemed to offer the nation an opportunity to vote for a man with a church life they could relate to and an ethical core they could trust. Carter contrasted sharply with the rottenness of the Nixon administration, or even President Ford, who had pardoned Nixon. Southern Baptist leaders talked about the nation being saved by “J. C.”—a play on the initials of Jesus Christ and Jimmy Carter. Evangelicals gave Carter 40 percent of their votes, the highest percent that conservative Christians had given to a Democrat in over a decade.10

  Huckabee voted for Carter. He said, “In ’76 I was still very angry with Gerald Ford for the pardon of Nixon. I had been a Nixon coordinator in ’72, and had been a Nixon fan, but felt really let down and disillusioned. In retrospect, I thought that Ford did the right thing to pardon him; saved the country from a lot of grief. But it was hard not to be angry about it.”11

  On his way to prison, Chuck Colson, former chief counsel to President Nixon, converted to Christianity and wrote a bestselling book, Born Again, to testify of his changed life.12 And on his way to defeating President Gerald Ford in the fall of 1976, Democratic governor Jimmy Carter expressed his Christian faith in a way that few, if any, presidential candidates had ever done before. “I serve Christ. I also serve America,” Carter said. “And I have never found any incompatibility between those two responsibilities for service.”13 In a similar way, Huckabee was entering broadcasting with the same motto.

  “Carter was campaigning as, ‘Hey, I’m a born-again believer’ and I thought it would be cool to have a Southern Baptist,” Huckabee said. “I didn’t have the attitude of ‘We don’t want one of ours.’ I said, ‘We do want one of ours.’ Now, it turned out he was not really one of us, although Carter’s testimony is pure as pure can be. I’ve actually been in church with him—I’ve preached in Plains when he’s given the Sunday school lesson. His presentation of the gospel was the clearest plan of salvation.”14

  Janet Huckabee knows the former president even better, having served on the board for his Habitat for Humanity for over a decade. “She’s done work projects alongside Jimmy Carter in Thailand, Nepal—all over the world,” Huckabee said. “But that’s a story for another book.”15 In 1976, the “born again” and “born to run” Huckabees were in Texas, not Thailand. But they were running fast and running deliberately, getting closer to where they really wanted to go.

  CHAPTER 16

  SON OF A PREACHER MAN

  1976–1979

  I’d never even heard of prime rib before, and didn’t even know how to order steak. Going out to eat in my home meant my dad picked up a sack of “six for a dollar” hamburgers with some fries on the side. Robison gave me a lot of invaluable experience.

  —MIKE HUCKABEE

  WHEN CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIANS ENTERED THE VOTING booth in 1980 with a chance to reelect Jimmy Carter to a second term, they shifted their votes over to Ronald Reagan. From 1976 to 1980, the public leadership of conservative Christianity awoke to the very idea of being politically active. The evangelical/fundamentalist component of Nixon’s “silent majority” gave life to the Moral Majority—to name just one of the groups birthed by the new “Religious Right” during these years. And Huckabee stood right in the midst of the labor and delivery.

  Several issues of cultural and moral concern had percolated throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many were local issues that had garnered national press coverage and led to a coalescing of the conservative movement as national figures intervened in support or opposition. In the late 1960s, parents in Anaheim, California, protested new materials for sexual education that began to reflect the changing mores of the time. In 1974, parents in Kanawha County, West Virginia, battled—in word and with fists—their school board over the issue of textbooks deemed unfit for their children. “If we don’t protect our children we’ll have to account for it on the Day of Judgment,” one protestor said at a rally of eight thousand.1

  In 1977, singer Anita Bryant began a campaign in Miami, Florida, called “Save Our Children,” designed to overturn a recently passed ordinance that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation. In other words, she didn’t want the parochial school her children attended to be forced to hire a homosexual teacher. President Carter expressed his opposition to Bryant’s campaign and his support of the ordinance. An independent Baptist preacher from Lynchburg, Virginia—Jerry Falwell—came to Miami to help in the cause, and the repeal passed by a two-to-one vote. The victory, however, ignited grassroots homosexual activists across the nation.

  Huckabee recalled those years. “A lot of people have forgotten how much public sympathy there was for homosexuality in
1980—not as much for same-sex marriage, but for accepting homosexuality as normal. There were parades, Anita Bryant was fired for her views from the Florida Orange Juice Association, and the movement was gaining traction.”2

  During the late 1960s, a great number of Christian schools and colleges opened their doors to parents who wanted something better for their children. For some parents, the “something better” meant a school where prayer was allowed; others were motivated by the controversies surrounding the textbooks or sex ed. Still others simply wanted their children shielded from the growing licentiousness and immorality of the day. Finally, forced desegregation also played a role—some parents did not want their children to attend a mixed-race school. Into all this, state and federal court decisions began to work on rooting out institutionalized racism, threatening to take away the tax-exempt status of religious educational organizations; Bob Jones University was the most public example. In 1976, during the Ford administration, the IRS revoked the university’s tax-exempt status because of their policy forbidding interracial dating.

  It was also during this same time that conservative pastors and laymen in the Southern Baptist Convention developed and implemented a political strategy to reverse what they saw as the liberal shift in their denomination. The discussion that had begun in the late 1950s led to a famous 1967 planning session by theologian Paige Patterson and Houston judge Paul Pressler. It would take twelve years for the conservatives to win their first election.