by Scott Lamb
If evangelicals felt any reluctance to abandon Carter, the 1980 White House Conference on Families settled the question. Carter had announced the conference back in January 1978 and was determined not to break a promise, no matter how much his advisors told him that it wouldn’t please anyone on either side of the cultural battle.3
Carter tapped an Arkansas lawyer and former congressman, James Guy Tucker, to chair the conference. People magazine profiled Tucker and remarked that his own blended family situation (he married a divorced woman with two children) was reflective of the nontraditional marriages that were just beginning to characterize America.4 True as that may have been statistically, many Americans still desired to reverse those trends, not to accept them as normative. Tucker would later become the governor of Arkansas whose resignation opened the door for Huckabee’s own term as governor. A long-term by-product of the conference was James Dobson’s creation of the Family Research Council, a political action group with special emphasis on the kinds of issues addressed at Carter’s conference.
Evangelicals united for a series of public rallies known as “Washington for Jesus” in late April. Around 125,000 attended the rally, essentially sponsored by Pentecostal leaders—friends of Pat Robertson.5 The event aimed at being nonpolitical, but invariably speakers would mention Supreme Court cases and moral issues with obvious political ramifications. Huckabee, who longed to follow in Robertson’s path in Christian broadcasting, took note of the broadcaster’s back-and-forth involvement with politics. Robertson later would run for president in 1988, providing Huckabee with the best example to date of a minister choosing to enter into elected politics.6
Building on the success of the 1979 Freedom Rally in Dallas and the positive results of the survey Weyrich conducted, McAteer and Robison planned for another political-religious rally in Dallas. Robison asked several political candidates to attend what he was calling the “National Affairs Briefing.” Carter declined but Reagan accepted.7 Though Huckabee had moved back to Arkansas by this time, he continued to provide communications support to Robison’s efforts with the Roundtable.
In the research for his excellent biography of Jimmy Carter, Randall Balmer put his hands on Robison’s letter of invitation to Reagan. Balmer wrote: “Robison had assured the candidate that the National Affairs Briefing would be ‘the largest, most significant, political and spiritual gathering’ in the South. ‘I am thrilled with the progress you are making toward the Presidency of the United States,’ Robison wrote. ‘As one seeking to know and do the will of God, I stand firmly convinced that you are the best candidate to lead us during these crisis days in American history. I will do everything possible within the limits of my ministry to be of help to you.’ ”8
The letter of invitation to attendees was signed by McAteer, Robison, and local hero Tom Landry, the head coach of the Dallas Cowboys. It spoke about “ ‘the domestic crisis which is morally enslaving our country’ and promised to give attendees strategies ‘to inform and mobilize your church and community in this non-partisan effort to do something that can determine the moral character of America.’ ”9
When the two-day event opened, attendees and countless journalists showed up at Reunion Arena. Flags and patriotic bunting were draped all around. Reagan would speak last, and Robison planned for his own sermon to come just before that—to set up Reagan.
Members of Reagan’s team understood the particular nuances of the evangelical dictionary and prompted him of their importance—though Reagan needed no prompting when it came to his understanding of Christian redemption. He ignored the counsel from one of his advisors for him to stay off the stage during the lead-up to his own speech.
Robison recalls how he leaned into Reagan with counsel for a specific opening line he thought would go over well. “I suggested to Mr. Reagan that because it was a bipartisan [event] that it would be in his best interest since we could not and would not endorse him as a body. But it would probably be wise if his opening comment would be ‘I know this is nonpartisan so you can’t endorse me. But I want you to know . . . I endorse you and what you’re doing.’ ”10
Reagan followed the Robison script, nailing it with perfect cadence and warmth. Then he went on to speak about all the things the folks came to hear—keeping the government in its place and restoring order and moral sanity. He had to stop repeatedly because of the applause and shouts of affirmation for what he was saying.
Reagan ended with a folksy hypothetical picture—if trapped on an island with only one book, he’d take the Bible. “All the complex questions facing us at home and abroad,” he added, “have their answer in that single book.”11
“We gave him a ten-minute standing ovation,” Weyrich recalled. “I’ve never seen anything like it. The whole movement was snowballing by then.”12
Historian Steven P. Miller, author of The Age of Evangelicalism: America’s Born-Again Years, called Reagan’s words here “the most famous lines of the Age of Evangelicalism.”13
It was the first time Huckabee had met Reagan, and he was duly impressed. “No one had ever given so much attention to or paid respect for the evangelicals. It was magic and a major force in Reagan winning.”14
Judge Paul Pressler, one of the architects of the conservative movement within the Southern Baptist Convention, recalled this about the event: “At the urging of some friends, I decided to go. I did not expect much, but when I arrived, I found a packed arena, full of enthusiastic individuals hearing great speakers. I went to the phone after the first few hours, called [my wife] Nancy, and said, ‘Get a baby-sitter for the children. You must come up here and hear what is going on.’ She flew to Dallas, and we had the opportunity to attend together. This was the first time either of us had met Ronald Reagan.”15
Robison remembers a closing word he had for the candidate: “I looked at Mr. Reagan. I said, ‘We really like you; we really like you. We like the principles that you espouse. But you need to understand something about the nature of this group that you’ll speak to tonight and those of us in this room. We’re not partisan; we’re not pro-party; we’re not pro-personality. We’re pro-principle. If you stand by the principles that you say you believe, we’ll be the greatest friends you’ll ever have.’ But I said, ‘If you turn against those principles, we’ll be your worst nightmare.’ ”16
It is at this very point that Robison’s influence on Huckabee was greatest. Being guided by principle over all other considerations has shaped Huckabee in both his pastorate and his politics. He said, “If I were to make decisions based on self-preservation or political preservation, then I would become everything I want to change.”17
Huckabee’s response to that day in August 1980 was twofold. First, he was enamored with it all. Richard Land, also present at the event, said, “It was there that Mike caught a new vision for the potential of faith in politics and faith in public policy. There were a lot of younger evangelicals who had been raised to believe that politics was dirty business and the last thing a Christian would do is get involved in politics.”18 (Land would eventually become the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.) The event with Reagan seemed to be a natural progression from the Explo ’72 candle lighting, which, ironically, had also happened in Dallas. What impact for good can one man have on the world? Just take the first step and find out.
Second, Huckabee’s response to all the momentous events—heady for anyone, let alone a young man in his twenties who was charting his course in life—was to accept the call to pastor a church in a town of ten thousand in the middle of Arkansas. In so many ways, that doesn’t make any sense. One might guess that it was due to the influence of Adrian Rogers’s win in the SBC that perhaps Huckabee dreamed of going back to Arkansas and bringing the conservative resurgence to his home state. But though he was a conservative, that wasn’t h
is agenda.
In one year’s time, Huckabee had watched as his mentor helped propel two men—Rogers and Reagan—into a presidentcy, each in his own realm. And throughout the 1980s, the effects of each man’s presidency would ripple and bring about revolution. Huckabee wanted to help change the world, the “revolution” Bill Bright had spoken of eight years earlier at Explo ’72. The question was, into which realm would Huckabee leap? The call to a pastorate seemed to answer that question.
As Huckabee celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday at the end of August, national news coverage of McAteer’s Roundtable stated: “Religious Conservatives Launch Bid to Influence Presidential Politics.”19 Newsweek magazine followed suit, placing Jerry Falwell on the cover of its September 15 issue, to accompany the lead story: “A Tide of Born-Again Politics.”20 From the vantage point of thirty years later, such headlines seem unremarkable—religious conservatives and religious candidates do this routinely. But at that point in time, the “preachers and politics mingle” theme of the news story wasn’t commonplace. Many considered it sacrilegious, but nobody considered it routine. Something new was in the air among religious conservatives.
On November 4, Reagan defeated Carter and won the right to govern the nation. The revolution had begun.
“Another One Bites the Dust” played continuously on the air in the fall of 1980, but John Lennon would soon knock it off the number one perch with his first single in five years. His “(Just Like) Starting Over” released at the end of October and ushered in renewed speculation of a Beatles reunion. Were the 1970s going to experience a renaissance?
Mark Chapman, another twenty-five-year-old from the South, had also walked down a “born-again Christian” path in the early 1970s. Like Huckabee, he had been exposed to multinational parachurch ministries making a big impact on the world. Chapman served with the evangelical humanitarian organization World Vision in their work with Vietnamese refugees. Chapman processed the refugees at Fort Chaffee in Arkansas, the same location where thousands of Hurricane Katrina refugees would arrive in 2005 for processing by the administration of Governor Mike Huckabee. Then Chapman entered Covenant College in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with a girlfriend he thought he’d marry. However, his life unraveled from there: he dropped out of college, struggled with suicidal thoughts, and became a drifter. Earlier, he had been a major fan of the Beatles, but now his unstable mind began to fixate on what he deemed the hypocrisy of John Lennon’s telling everyone to “imagine” a world without materialism while living an opulent lifestyle. Chapman also began to dwell on and despise Lennon for his 1966 statement “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that. I’m right and I’ll be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first, rock ’n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”21
On December 8, Rolling Stone photographer Annie Leibovitz snapped her famous photo shoot of Lennon and Yoko Ono in their apartment. Then Lennon and Ono went to go do some work in a music studio across town. As they left their apartment building, Chapman walked up to Lennon, pulled out a pen, and requested an autograph. Lennon obliged. Six hours later, when the couple returned home to the Dakota apartment building, Chapman once again approached Lennon, this time pulling out a .38 caliber handgun. Chapman shot five times, hitting Lennon four times in the back. The doorman of the Dakota shouted, “Do you know what you’ve just done?” and Chapman replied, “Yes, I just shot John Lennon.”
Chapman sat down on the sidewalk, took out a copy of The Catcher in the Rye, and waited for the police to come and arrest him.22
Huckabee, the consummate Beatles fan, remembers Lennon’s assassination quite well. “I was getting ready for the day,” he said, “and I had the radio on to the local KOTN radio station in Pine Bluff. Buddy Deane, the ‘Morning Mayor,’ did the mornings and he was breaking the news that Lennon had been shot the night before. It was especially poignant because Buddy Deane knew the Beatles—he was the number one DJ in Baltimore and MC’d some Beatles events in those days. Buddy in fact was the inspiration for the film ‘Hairspray’ and had a cameo role in the movie. Yes, I remember that day very well.”23
The 1970s were definitely over.
CHAPTER 18
A PASTOR FOR ALL SEASONS
1980–1985
The church . . . finally said, “Why don’t you just stay and be our pastor?” And I did.1
—MIKE HUCKABEE
BY THE TIME CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN BURGER SWORE Ronald Reagan into office in January 1981, Immanuel Baptist Church in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, had called Huckabee as its pastor. Although he had been an organizer and attendee of key political events within the newly formed Religious Right, he did not get pulled into political office or the Moral Majority movement. Though opportunity presented itself, Huckabee did not work in any formal capacity within these types of organizations during the 1980s. And it would be another ten years before he announced a campaign for public office.
So naturally, a question that comes to mind is, why did Huckabee go back to Arkansas and spend a decade pastoring churches after the euphoria of all these events and the election of Reagan? Was the pastorate the reason he went home? What options did he have?
First, while working for Robison, he made such a strong impression on influential people who saw him that doors of opportunity began to fly open. If he had ever considered a career in law, a wealthy and very powerful Texas lawyer offered to pay his way through school. Why didn’t Huckabee take the offer? Was it a tough decision? “No, not at all. I didn’t want to be a lawyer,” said Huckabee.2 Obviously, the bottom dollar of future salary played no part in Huckabee’s decision-making process.
What about being a full-time pastor? Huckabee has said in numerous places that he wasn’t completely interested in that career path. His true passion was Christian communications.3
So did he consider Christian broadcasting? Certainly, but you don’t just go into broadcasting without an immense base of financial support. Preachers entered broadcasting only if they already had a revenue stream coming in the mail based on their crusades. As for being a full-time operations man, working for a Christian broadcasting station, Huckabee’s better option for doing that would have been to remain in Dallas. Central Arkansas was not exactly the epicenter of the Christian broadcasting world.
What about combining pastoral ministry with Christian broadcasting? Well, that might work at a large church in a major urban area, but to plan on doing so in a small-town Baptist church, in Arkansas, in 1980—that didn’t make much sense. At the very least, such a trail would have to be blazed by a pioneer. It would take the right church (some might say, a desperate church) and the right pastor, who both understood the operations side of the work and had the giftings for standing in front of the camera. Besides, Huckabee clearly said he was not thinking about full-time pastoral ministry.
What about serving in both Christian broadcasting and itinerant evangelism (crusades and revivals), as James Robison did? Yes, that option was very much on Huckabee’s mind. As he recounted in a 1990 interview, “I had every intention of being in full-time evangelism-communications. The two complement each other greatly.”4 But to succeed to the point of being able to support a family, you would have to get a good base of support established fairly quickly. You would need to create an “evangelistic association” through which the income and expenses flowed. Your calendar would need to be filled up quickly with preaching engagements, and a good portion of those would need to be at sizable churches that could give a larger amount of “love offering.” You would need to hire staff who could help with the logistics of the ministry. The question was whether your support could stay ahead of your expenses. Sure, Robison had wealthy benefactors in Texas who believed in his ministry and put money
into the organization. But Huckabee had seen other evangelists attempt to go out on their own, only to have the operation fold due to a lack of funding. The communications side of his work could help pay the bills if the work remained regular, but how many “ifs” could a family man take before the burden of the unknown became too great? The son of Dorsey Huckabee knew how to work hard, but he also was averse to bills not paid on time. Without a sense of divine leadership, there would be no wisdom in positioning your family in such a risky path.
Finally, what about the vision of going into Christian broadcasting and itinerant evangelism, but knowing that you would keep an eye open for a move into politics? Would such a plan be evidence of double-mindedness? Could those two worlds overlap? Was it a pollution of the pulpit?
Consider the words of James Robison, from the May 1979 rally, coming just before Huckabee left his mentor and returned to Arkansas: “Someone said, ‘Preachers ought not mess with politics.’ Brother, when a preacher does his business, he messes with everything.”5
Robison charged the preachers in his audience to both preach the Bible and speak on issues that could fall under the label of “politics”—issues that preachers had too often avoided, in Robison’s opinion. Though there are some who conflate the kingdom of God with the kingdom of man—and make a mess of both—Robison seemed to understand the difference between the two. And yet, he urged pastors, the spiritual leaders of their community, not to allow an artificial dividing line to be constructed between the two spheres. They were to pull the muzzles off their mouths and start using their oratorical gifting to influence both kingdoms simultaneously. Huckabee heard Robison loud and clear. The mentoring of Haskell Jones and James Robison mingled together into a united vision for what Huckabee was to do with his life. As a result, Huckabee would move to Arkansas to serve Jesus and his fellow citizens—and he didn’t plan on getting hung up on the particular vocational label he would be wearing in the process.