Huckabee

by Scott Lamb

  On June 12, 1979, Southern Baptists elected Pastor Adrian Rogers of Memphis to the presidency of the Convention. During the Pastors Conference, which comes just before the annual convention, one speaker after another had urged the election of Rogers, including Huckabee’s mentor, evangelist James Robison. He said that if Southern Baptists tolerated the liberalism of the convention, they would “be guilty of the death” of the convention: “We must elect a president not only dedicated to the inerrancy of the word of God, but who will stand to remove any seminary professor who doesn’t believe in the inerrant word of God.”3

  Robison’s own biography makes a fascinating story. He was born in 1943 as the product of “forced sexual experience” to an impoverished and unwed forty-one-year-old mother. His mother then placed an ad in the Houston paper, asking for help in raising her son. A local pastor, H. D. Hale, and his wife raised him for the first five years—even as his biological mother continued to see him. Then, she took James back and moved to Austin, where he was “loved, but living in extreme poverty” for the next ten years.4

  As a teen, James visited the Hales, made a profession of faith in Christ, and then finished his last two years of high school while living with them. Robison met his future wife while in high school, and they married at age twenty.

  Robison began preaching and was quickly recognized for his gifts and passion behind the pulpit. In 1967, he founded the James Robison Evangelistic Association, and wealthy Christians took an interest in underwriting his ministry.5 “Robison is the most effective communicator I have ever heard,” Texas billionaire H. L. Hunt proclaimed.6 Christian television stations broadcast Robison’s sermons throughout the South, including in Hope, Arkansas. As many as a half million viewers watched Robison each week on the television as he delivered fiery sermons denouncing immorality and declaring a simple gospel message of faith and repentance in Jesus Christ. One newspaper article in 1979 called him “God’s Angry Man”—a title he has worked hard to lose over the years, even as he retained his core beliefs.7 The “angry man” label might have seemed appropriate at one time, but the totality of Robison’s ministry can hardly be painted with such broad brushstrokes.

  As the Huckabees continued to struggle to pay their bills, a position for full-time work opened and Robison asked Huckabee to consider taking the job. “He believed in me and turned over the whole agency to me,” Huckabee said. “As a twenty-one-year-old kid, I suddenly had twelve people that worked for me. A multimillion-dollar budget. Two titles in front of my name: executive director of focus advertising and director of communications for the James Robison Evangelistic Association.”8

  “I made $12,000 a year, which was phenomenally good money in 1977—especially for the two of us and our baby son, John Mark,” Huckabee said.

  Beyond just giving Huckabee a job, however, Robison also began mentoring him. “When I went to work for him, I only owned two suits,” Huckabee said. “I might have paid five dollars for one and ten dollars for the other. They were cheap, pathetic, and double-knit. That was all I could afford. And I had just one pair of shoes. People made fun of me at school about the holes in my shoes, and the bottom was coming apart. They were uncomfortable too, but again, that’s what I could afford.

  “My first day at work,” he continued, “I got word that James wanted to see me in his office. He grabbed his keys and said, ‘Come with me. We’re going shopping.’ So we drove down to Waxman’s department store in Hurst, Texas. Robison bought me three brand-new suits, shirts, and ties. He said, ‘If you’re going to work for me, you’re going to have to look good. I’m going to take care of you and make you look good.’ ”

  Through the experience working with Robison, Huckabee also gained practical skills he could never have learned in Hope. He flew on planes constantly, rented cars, booked hotel rooms, and ordered steak at a restaurant—for the first time. “I know it sounds silly, but I’d never even heard of prime rib before, and didn’t know how to order steak,” he said. “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.”

  In return, Huckabee gave Robison an honest evaluation when he needed a critique. “That was my value to him,” Huckabee recalled. “When he would have a press conference which had gone awful, I figured that one of my jobs was to shoot straight with him. So, when I could get him alone, I’d let him know how he had botched things up in a given situation, especially with the press.”

  Robison valued Huckabee’s youthful energy and his skillful hand in communications. And Huckabee benefited from having this “preacher man” in his life, a supplemental father figure who mentored him in many areas of benefit to his future pastoral ministry, his career in broadcasting, and his public service in government.

  So Huckabee didn’t leave seminary to work for just any revivalist-evangelist—and in 1976 there were plenty from which to choose. No, he went to work for a young (early thirties) and prominent preacher with a fast-growing television-broadcasting platform. This aligned perfectly with his own vision of his vocation—to combine his love for Jesus and the Great Commission with his skills in media and communications. And in Huckabee, Robison found a young man with relentless energy and an amazing résumé in communications, considering his age—twenty-one at the time of his being hired.

  Any accounting of Huckabee’s life must place him in the context of the rise (though not the fall) of television broadcasting—the “electronic church,” as some called it. Or, as it is best known, televangelism—with all the pejorative connotations that word now conveys. But the negative impression came much later, at the end of the 1980s. In the mid-to-late 1970s, the fact that Bible preachers had come out of the proverbial backwoods and were standing in front of television cameras sending their images across space and into millions of homes by means of satellites—all of which took astronomical amounts of money to operate—what more could signal that Christianity was yet ascending in America? The idea that religious broadcasting could counter the counterculture was appealing.

  Of course, conservative preaching had been a potent force for decades. The National Association of Evangelicals formed the National Religious Broadcasters in 1944 as a response to the mainline Federal Council of Churches’ demand that broadcasters stop selling airtime to the more popular conservative-fundamentalist programming. The idea was to limit religious broadcasting only to the free time that networks had to provide as a service to the community.

  Then, in the 1970s, the decision was made to allow television networks to fulfill their community service time slots through paid religious broadcasting. The new technique of using sophisticated mailing lists for mass fund-raising efforts allowed preachers who had the organizational means to purchase the “dead zone” time slots on Sunday mornings.

  Estimates vary, but most historians put the 1970 viewership of religious programming at about ten million; by 1980, viewership had hit twenty to thirty million. The amount of money spent by broadcasters escalated from $50 million in the early 1970s to over $1 billion in the 1980s.9 Behind every dollar was a viewer with a mailing address and a set of moral convictions that could be considered “conservative.” In the minds of New Right political operatives like Howard Phillips (at the time, Jewish) and Paul Weyrich (Roman Catholic) and direct-mail pioneer Paul Viguerie (who once worked for anticommunist radio evangelist Billy James Hargis), the only question was whether or not the preachers behind the television camera could become politically active and convince their viewers to do so as well. Further, would the “megachurch” (a relatively new term at the time) pastors join in too?

  No matter how reluctant these figures may have been in the 1960s to bring politics into the world of their religious media empires, the moral confusion of the 1970s provoked them into a new mind-set about the mixture. Television preach
ers led directly to the birth of nearly all the new political-religious organizations of the 1970s: Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, Pat Robertson’s Christian Voice, and James Robison’s leadership with Ed McAteer’s Religious Roundtable. To be sure, there were men behind the men—operatives and organizers who figured out how to make it all work. But the men who stood before the camera drove the publicity and the funding. It took only a spark of opposition to get fiery preachers aflame in the political realm.

  That spark came in the spring of 1979 in Dallas, when a local television station, WFAA, removed James Robison from the airwaves after a February sermon aired in which he denounced homosexuality. Under the provisions of the Federal Communications Commission’s Fairness Doctrine, members of the gay rights community demanded equal access to time—similar to other groups that had taken umbrage at Robison’s attacks. WFAA management decided they had heard enough and took his program off the air. What happened in the ensuing one hundred days was “a pivotal moment in the formation of the New Christian Right.”10

  In the influential documentary With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America, Robison recalled that event: “It hurt me deeply when they did that. I went to them and said, ‘This won’t be accepted. I wish you hadn’t done it.’ It became a rallying point. Catholics, Church of Christ, Jews, every religious segment said, ‘This is wrong. This man has spoken on a moral issue he feels strongly about, and you’ve taken him off the air.’ I designed a bumper sticker that said ‘Freedom of Speech, the Right to Preach,’ and it just went everywhere.”11

  However, Robison needed more than a bumper sticker to get back on the air, so he began reaching out to friends. Local pastors did materialize in support of him—even some who disagreed with his theological understanding of homosexuality as being a sin. They agreed with Robison that this was a First Amendment issue and came to his defense. Even more support came from outside Dallas as the word spread among broadcast ministries across the nation. Instead of this being a localized issue pitting citizens against a city government ordinance, the Robison case threatened the freedom of the pulpit throughout the entire land. As Jerry Falwell said, “When it comes to preaching the Bible, we will not back up, we will die for our right to preach.”12

  Robison reached out to Paul Weyrich for help: “You are very familiar with the battle that I find myself now engaged [in]. I am convinced that we will be of much help to one another, as we join forces and strength together in the battle for the conservation of a free America.”13

  Robison hired a lawyer—the famous Texas trial lawyer Richard “Racehorse” Haynes—to work with the FCC in getting his program back on the air. A legal fund was established to pay for these services, as noted in the Irving Daily News on March 22: “Robison Association spokesman Mike Huckabee said today that donations should be mailed directly to . . . ‘It will be separate from funds for the ministry,’ he said.”14

  A “Freedom Rally” was planned for the first week in June. Huckabee went to work immediately, planning the logistics, crafting communications and publicity, making phone calls and invitations—just as one would in a political campaign. Though many historians—and even a few of the participants—have erroneously stated that the rally happened at Reunion Arena, that facility did not even open until the following year. The confusion is simple to understand when you realize that yet another historic event for the Religious Right did take place in Reunion Arena only one year later (see next chapter). The Freedom Rally actually occurred at the Dallas Convention Center Arena, mere blocks from the WFAA station.

  The rally was held on the evening of Tuesday, June 5 (yes, exactly one week before the election in Houston of Adrian Rogers as president of the SBC). Between eight and eleven thousand people turned out—representing five hundred churches. Jerry Falwell called Robison “the prophet of God for our day” and declared, “I think this is the first time a television station has blatantly attempted to tell a gospel broadcaster what he can’t say.”15

  Weyrich, a Roman Catholic, also spoke at the rally, with Robison making the introduction—and heading off at the pass any anti-Catholic sentiment. Weyrich observed that the barrier between evangelicals and Catholics was finally starting to fall.16

  When it came time for Robison to speak, he said, “It is my prayer WFAA will rescind their horrendous, tragic decision and put us back on the air. I ask you to pray we might have in this community someone humble and honest enough to admit they made a mistake and reverse it. Just say, ‘We made a mistake and wanted to correct it in the name of freedom, liberty and justice, and we don’t care who doesn’t like it.’ That is my prayer.”17

  Huckabee remembers the event well: “There was this amazing energy coming up from these evangelical Christians . . . I remember almost being frightened by it. If someone had gotten to the microphone and said, ‘Let’s go four blocks from here and take Channel 8 apart,’ that audience would’ve taken the last brick off the building.”18

  W. A. Criswell, a prominent local pastor and former SBC president, looked straight into the camera and told WFAA to reinstate Robison.19

  They did.

  Robison explained to reporters that the rally had been designed to mobilize people “around the Word of God and the Constitution. We want to let people hear from the Christians—the moral majority.”20 These words, printed in the Fort Worth newspaper on June 6, mark one of the first public uses of that phrase—the “moral majority”—since its being coined just one month earlier at a private Lynchburg meeting, attended by Weyrich, Phillips, Viguerie, McAteer, and Falwell.21

  The close proximity on the calendar between the May meeting in Lynchburg and the Freedom Rally in June, combined with the common leaders at both meetings, led Huckabee to view the latter event as the bona fide origin of the Moral Majority. “In April of 1979,” he wrote, “I had been one of the organizers of the ‘Freedom Rally’ that was held in Dallas Reunion Arena that was the actual birth of the Moral Majority and which gave the framework for the National Affairs Briefing.”22 The official entity known as the “Moral Majority” was chartered in June, so Huckabee’s main point—“I was there at the beginning”—is duly noted.

  The true long-term impact of the rally came as the result of a brief strategy session the leaders of the rally conducted that very night. They sensed they were being compelled by the circumstances of the moment to become more involved in the political realm. But the question remained—did their constituencies feel the same way? Paul Weyrich suggested they conduct a poll of their people in order to find out. Standing just outside the door of this historic strategy session, Mike Huckabee soaked up all that he had seen and heard that night.

  In the months that followed, Ed McAteer, a retired businessman and member of Adrian Rogers’s church, formed a political caucus called the “Religious Roundtable.” He persuaded Pat Robertson, Charles Stanley, Jerry Falwell, and D. James Kennedy to serve on the organization’s board of directors, and he made James Robison the vice president.23 McAteer saw the Roundtable as having the ability to pull in congregations and leaders from evangelical and mainline groups, not just the independents.24

  The Roundtable met in December 1979 to discuss the results of Weyrich’s survey. Present at the meeting were Falwell, Howard Phillips, Robison, Beverly LaHaye, and Phyllis Schlafly. Weyrich reported that church members were not against being politically active. In fact, his survey showed that they were emphatically in favor of it—“off the charts.” “That was life-changing when these guys saw that,” Weyrich said. “They fell over themselves to start some activity or to involve themselves.”25

  One of the first things that McAteer and Robison began planning was another rally in Dallas—a “National Affairs Briefing” to be held in August 1980. They figured it was time for a revolution. Robison was grateful to Huckabee for his organizational leadership
in the 1979 rally, and he would once again lean on his young protégé for help in pulling together the 1980 event.

  CHAPTER 17

  REVOLUTION

  1980

  All the complex questions facing us at home and abroad have their answer in that single book [the Bible].

  —RONALD REAGAN

  DALLAS HAD RECENTLY OPENED THE DOORS ON ITS NEW Reunion Arena in the spring of 1980, providing an air-conditioned venue for entertainment: sporting events, conventions, and concerts. The NBA Mavericks and the NHL Stars would play in the arena, along with a panoply of other leagues, teams, and professional wrestling. Foghat was one of the first musical acts to play in the arena on June 25, followed by a three-act concert the next night: Ted Nugent, the Scorpions, and Def Leppard. The Who came in July.

  Outside, it was hot. Freak atmospheric conditions kept much of the United States locked into a record-breaking grip of heat. Arkansas and Texas baked. In Dallas, the thermometer ran above 100 degrees for forty-two consecutive days and a total of sixty-nine times altogether. Twenty-eight of those days the heat rose above 105; five times it went above 110.1 Across the nation, over a thousand people died and $20 billion (in 1980 dollars) worth of crops withered and turned to dust in the field.2

  Queen, a pioneer in the art of music videos, filmed “Another One Bites the Dust” while at Reunion Arena during the first part of August. The song’s disco beat exemplified the decade that had just passed, but the fact that the song had a video hinted at the decade to come, as MTV launched the following year.

  In a similar fashion, Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign offered a return to something stable, even as he was leading America to have a renewal of hope and optimism about the future. One week after Queen’s concert, Reagan also arrived at Reunion Arena, at the invitation of Mike Huckabee’s boss, to speak to more than fifteen thousand evangelicals gathered for the Religious Roundtable, including nearly every single leader of what became known as the “Religious Right.” The sheer fact that Reagan came to the event, combined with the subtle force of what he actually said to the crowd, won their hearts and their votes and helped move him into the White House.