Many Americans, including me, first got to know former Gov. Mike Huckabee when he ran for president in 2008. He showed remarkable strength and resilience in his campaign, finishing second only to John McCain as the Republican Party’s candidate against Barack Obama, who of course won the election. But Huckabee, who now hosts a popular talk show on TBN, has some deep concerns about the leftward direction our nation is headed—and he says it means we’re rejecting God and the authority of Scripture.
“The country has gone through some pretty serious and dramatic changes,” Huckabee says on a recent episode of the Strang Report podcast. “And I would quickly say they’re not good ones. The biggest change is that we’ve gone from a society that believes in the power as well as the responsibility of the individual, to more of a focus on collectivism, which is really the heart and foundation of socialism, or communism.”
Huckabee realizes that’s a bold assertion, but he doesn’t pull back from its truth. “When people see their identity not as an individual, but as part of a group that they had nothing to do with, whether it’s their race, or their gender, these are God-given characteristics that we have. But they don’t define us. They simply describe us. And that’s a big difference.”
He also says that right now, our nation is moving further away from individualism and further into collectivism. “What we’re seeing now is a rapid move toward the notion that I’m really not an individual. I’m not a specific creation of an Almighty God, who made me for a purpose. I’m just a piece of the puzzle. My existence is there for the purpose and the benefit of the state. And my existence is largely utilitarian, and not personal.”
But this isn’t a political debate, Huckabee emphasizes. “It’s not so much a Democrat, Republican, left, right issue. I know it may seem like that. This is far bigger than a political divide. As I’ve often said, this is not horizontal; this is vertical. This is not just left and right. This is up and down. This is whether or not we are a God-centered or a me-centered world. And that’s what I fear the most.”
Although he hasn’t run for office since withdrawing early in the 2016 presidential race, he hasn’t avoided controversy. “Right now, I’m in some controversy in Arkansas because I’m speaking at the Martin Luther King Prayer Breakfast this coming Monday, which for me is a noncontroversial thing. But the Arkansas Democrat Black caucus has protested, and they have said that I should be disinvited.
“They called me a racist, which is absurd,” Huckabee says. “When I was a young pastor of an all-white church, I led the church in admitting its first Black members; I received death threats for that. But it stood my ground and said, ‘You know, if people of color are not welcome in this church, neither is Jesus. And I don’t want to be somewhere where He isn’t.’ So we stood our ground; the church actually exploded in growth after that. I was told by some angry people that the church offerings would dry up. Well, in fact, we had the best giving record we’d ever had in a 100-year-old church after that.
“My point in all of that is to say that of all the things that I’ve been accused of, racism is the most laughable,” he says. “But this is the world we’re living in today. But as far as you know, I don’t think I go around angry, I don’t yell at people. It’s not my style. I have strong views. I express them as strongly as I possibly can. But I don’t do it with anger and with hostility.”
Huckabee says our nation’s downturn comes largely from those “who genuinely want to erase the notion of moral absolutes in our culture. That’s really the goal of wokeism. It’s the goal of cancel culture, the notion that some things are right and some things are wrong. And so that’s why you have prosecutors who are saying, ‘Well, it’s really not a crime if somebody only steals up to $1,000.’ Or if someone commits even a violent crime on the street, we’re not going to prosecute them, because they may have had some really bad circumstances in their lives.
He also says that today, we’ve transformed the definition of right and wrong. “And when even the Supreme Court, or as I call them, the ‘Extreme Court,” decides that they can overturn the God-given definition of marriage, a lifelong relationship between one man and one woman, and they can just do it because there’s cultural pressure for that,” he says. “I just find that people are not understanding that these are spiritual issues. They’re not political. They take root in political outcomes, but at the heart of them, they are spiritual issues where people are rejecting the standard of God and the standard of His Word.
Huckabee gives an analogy from the world of music. “The fact is, before one can play a song, you have to tune the instrument,” he says. “And if you don’t tune the instrument, I don’t care how good a musician you are, it’s going to be noise and chaos, not music. Now, the question is, what do you tune it to? … you tune it to a fixed, rigid, very rigid standard. And that’s called a tuning fork or key. And if you don’t tune to the same thing, and every instrument tunes to what the musician thinks, feels or believes, it’s a train wreck.
“What we’re living in today as a society, is like the time as it was in the time of the judges, when ‘every man did what was right in his own eyes,'” he says. “So we have all these people and cultural entities tuning to what they feel what they think, what they believe. And the disaster of that is what we’re seeing with not just cancel culture and wokeism, but it’s the notion that there are no standards, there is no absolute. And all of us get to sort of make up our rules, according to what we think they ought to be rather than what God says they are.”
For much more from Mike Huckabee on our country’s leftward turn and how you can stand up to combat it, listen to this entire episode of the Strang Report podcast at this link. Be sure to subscribe to the Strang Report on Apple Podcasts or on your favorite podcast platform, and share this article and podcast with friends and family who may benefit from Huckabee’s insights. {eoa}
For more information on how you can fight back against cancel culture, make sure to get a copy of what Charisma founder and CEO Stephen Strang says is his most important book yet. God and Cancel Culture, released Sept. 7, is now available wherever fine books are sold. Order it at stevestrangbooks.com.
Read articles like this one and other Spirit-led content in our new platform, CHARISMA PLUS.
