The Upper Register Blog

If you doubt whether Huckabee’s use of “vertical” is a homing signal for religious right voters, then go to the official Huckabee site and take a look at his Vertical Day Blog. It’s pretty clear what “vertical” means:

Recently, out on the campaign trail, a voter asked if my personal faith informed my decisions. My answer was simple, just as it always has been: my faith is my life - it defines me. My faith doesn’t influence my decisions, it drives them.

Or take these quotes from a video of his “Pastors and Pews” speech addressed to a gathering of evangelical pastors:

The pulpits cannot be a reflection of culture, they must be the change-agent of culture …

Let’s make sure we don’t lose this great land of ours because we [pastors] were more interested in being on the stage than we were in being on our knees to salvage the great, great land, given by God, entrusted to us …

The spiritual quality of the nation is really the quality of the nation, period …

I’m  not here today … in my capacity as a candidate or even as a politician. I’m here today to speak to you, one pilgrim’s heart to another, and if you will allow me, to speak to you pastor to pastor rather than politician to pastor.

At one point he states that he is “running for God.” It sounds like Pat Robertson redivivus. Huckabee isn’t a candidate who just happens to have been an ordained minister in the past, but one who is running as an ordained minister. One who is running with the express goal of “salvaging” so-called Christian America, of restoring “the spiritual quality” of the nation, and of being a “change-agent of culture.” Talk about confusing the two kingdoms!

When picking a doctor or a car mechanic, I want the most competent person I can find. His or her religion is irrelevant. When we were recently looking for a good real estate agent, we didn’t ask what church he attended. We wanted to know if he was qualified to do the job. We called his previous clients to see if he was trustworthy, worked for his clients, knew the real estate market in his area, and had good referrals. Likewise, when deciding on a presidential candidate, I’ll pick the candidate I think is most qualified to tackle what I perceive to be the salient issues of the day. I’m not in the market for a pastor.

is that he wants to be a Christian Leader.

See Kim Riddlebarger’s comments.

UPDATE: check out these links on Huckabee’s use of the code-word “vertical.”

This post is a grab-bag of different links related to God and politics. 

First, my friend T. David Gordon has a cool article critiquing Constantinianism. In response to those who complain about the alleged decline of Christianity in the west, he turns the tables:

Indeed, if there is any real evidence of the decline of Christianity in the West, the evidence resides precisely in the eagerness of so many professing Christians to employ the state to advance the Christian religion. That is, if Ellul’s theory is right, the evidence of the decline of Christianity resides not in the presence of other religions (including secularism) in our culture, but in the Judge Moores, the hand-wringing over “under God” in the pledge of allegiance, and the whining about the “war on Christmas.” If professing Christians believe our religion is advanced by the power of the state rather than by the power of the Spirit, by coercion rather than by example and moral suasion, then perhaps Christianity is indeed in decline. If we can no longer say, with the apostle Paul, “the weapons of our warfare are not fleshly,” then perhaps Christianity is indeed in significant decline. If we believe we need Christian presidents, legislators, and judges in order for our faith to advance, then we ourselves no longer believe in Christianity, and it has declined. Christianity does not rise or fall on the basis of governmental activity; it rises or falls on the basis of true ecclesiastical activity. What Christianity needs is competent ministers, not Christian judges, legislators, or executive officers.

Second, on the assumption that it is critical that our next president be an anti-Federalist social conservative, James Dobson is still looking for his ideal candidate for ‘08. He expresses his dissatisfaction with Fred:

Isn’t Thompson the candidate who is opposed to a Constitutional amendment to protect marriage, believes there should be 50 different definitions of marriage in the U.S., favors McCain-Feingold, won’t talk at all about what he believes, and can’t speak his way out of a paper bag on the campaign trail? … He has no passion, no zeal, and no apparent ‘want to.’ And yet he is apparently the Great Hope that burns in the breasts of many conservative Christians? Well, not for me, my brothers. Not for me!

(HT: Andrew Sullivan) 

Third, I just discovered that one Republican presidential candidate is an Evangelical Presbyterian. Isn’t that wacky? Not that it matters, but I thought it was interesting. I can only hope that his fellow EPC-ers cringe when they hear him recommend bombing Mecca as a nuclear deterrent. And I thought the crusades were over.

Diana Butler Bass has a nice commentary on the passing of PCA pastor D. James Kennedy that pretty accurately sums up my feelings too.

Born in 1930, Kennedy lived in a world so distant from our own that it may well have been possible to believe in a Christian America. Churches stood on every public square; members of the clergy shaped public opinion on every issue; schoolchildren uttered Protestant prayers and read Protestant scriptures daily. Many people from Kennedy’s generation remember—or imagine they remember—a vanished Christian world, an ordered society with Protestant faith at the center. Much of the Religious Right’s energy derives from a desire to restore that world, or to “reclaim America for Christ.” To that end, Kennedy mixed evangelicalism with classical Reformed theology and a kind of soft Christian Reconstruction, creating the spiritual fuel for a right-wing political and media empire that meshed with the longings of a certain age.