Musings of a Former Fundamentalist (IFB) Renewed by Reformed Theology
As the election approaches, John Piper shares some gospel-centered thoughts on how a Christian should think about politics and this vote. Please watch this video! A related clip with additional perspective from Pastor Piper is available here.
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I was stunned by Romney’s withdrawal from the race. Pleasantly surprised but stunned nonetheless.
But rather than Huckabee’s chances improving, it seems that the pundits and media are ready to declare McCain the winner. Romney didn’t want to prolong the primary stage of the campaign, and it is feared that Huckabee would just be slowing things down, too.
But did anyone else notice that the Dems are still in a 2-manperson race? And it doesn’t look like either of them are backing off soon.
With Romney in the race, I admit the rhetoric seemed quite high. And the conservative purists or the metropolitan conservatives, or whatever else you want to call the conservative talk show and pundit entrenchment, were all about preserving their last truly conservative guy. But now with Romney gone, Huckabee and McCain can legitimately fight to win the race. And it doesn’t have to be a messy spectacle. Rush Limbaugh has bemoaned both candidates so having them both in the race doesn’t really change much.
Maybe people just want this over. But think about it, if by early March, Huckabee is on an incredible Huckasurge, and the conservatives are beginning to realize he is capable of winning the nomination from McCain, then you’d think another month would seal the deal. Likely the Dems wouldn’t have sealed it on their side any sooner. And more realistically, come March, Huckabee will bow out against impossible odds. Lets give Huck a chance and not call the race too early, now.
As for his chances, Wickle gives an educated guess. It’s a long shot, but it’s still possible. Especially if voter-based realities start to break more toward Huckabee, now that the choices are fewer. Plus, evangelicals now have James Dobson’s endorsement of Huckabee to consider, as well as other reasons for backing Huckabee. It’s a good bet that should they throw their united support behind him, Huckabee would emerge as a very strong alternative to McCain yet!
As for the party, Joe Carter gives some helpful thoughts on how to “save” conservatism. And to him, as with me, the Party doesn’t come first, conservatism does. I’d go one step further and say my commitment to Christ trumps conservatism. Still, I hope Joe’s wrong about McCain’s inevitability.
Anyway, this political cycle has been fun and interesting. And who knows, maybe Huckabee will prove to have some more magic up his sleeves!
Wow. Is January 2008 half way over already? My how time flies!
I’ve been blogging now for 2 years and 2 months (mid November 2005 was when my blogging really started in earnest). In that time this blog has seen 437 posts, over 2800 comments, and anywhere from 104,000 (Statcounter/Sitemeter) to 150,000 (WordPress‘ calculations) pageviews. (My stats start from when I switched to WordPress in July of 2006).
Blogging has definitely been fun. I’ve discovered hundreds of great blogs and been discovered by scores of like minded bloggers. I’ve received encouragement and thanks for what I do, even as I’ve occasionally been criticized or discouraged by others. Through this whole process, I’ve made online friends and I’ve explored many topics I would not have otherwise. It’s been great.
The new year provides an opportunity for me to step back and assess my blog. Some of you are wondering if I’ve really been assessing my blog since it is now mid January and my new year post has only just appeared. Truth be told, we’ve been battling 2 rounds of sickness since Jan. 1 in our house, and life has been busy. Which brings me back to my purpose.
2007 was a year of multiple blogging personalities for me. In April, I jumped on the Mike Huckabee bandwagon, eventually creating a tumble blog accumulating Huckabee links and videos — Go Huckabee! (On a side note, tumble blogs promise to be the best way for many of you still on the fence — Larry! — to create and maintain a blog with almost no effort. Check out this post about tumble blogs.) Then in the summer, I started a team missions blog, Kingdom Surge.
The competing blogs hindered my focus on this blog, as did daily life with 3, and now 4, kids. With sometimes serious and prolonged debates, this blog can wear me out at times. My own character flaws have also contributed, resulting in the many loose ends left unfinished around here in 2007. I started a series on The Bible and the King James Only Debate, only to get about 1/2 way thru and stop. I have only blogged through 1/5th of Piper’s What Jesus Demands of the World. And I’m not yet finished with my series blogging through my church’s confession of faith. Add to that my series on man-centered Christianity that is stuck in the middle, and my entry into the atonement debate which never actually panned out. (The debate has continued without me).
My mind has always been a haven of loose ends and a hodge podge collection of thoughts. And my blog has reflected this. The dual nature of my blog complicates things as well. On the one hand, my blog chronicles my journey out of extreme fundamentalism and spends a lot of time dealing with various positions and issues related to fundamentalism. But on the other hand, I blog about general Christian topics, Reformed themes, and (now) political ruminations — like most normal Christian blogs.
So here comes 2008 and a chance for me to do a better job blogging. To do this I’ve determined to try to focus more on my own blog’s content. I’ll continue sharing posts that I’ve read and enjoyed (check my sidebar for “My Latest Blog Finds“). And I will interact with other blogs out there from time to time. But I am purposely not going to 1) interact with every comment left on my blog, 2) follow every blog I’d like to as closely as I would really like to, and 3) get drawn into fruitless debates in other venues as often as I have in the past.
If I can restrain myself in this way, then I can try to tie up the loose ends this year. I aim also to continue fine tuning the design and user-friendliness of my blog (which means completing my “topics” page, and perhaps explaining what I think about fundamentalism better). I also hope to deal with other topics that haven’t been thoroughly addressed here but which bear on my general theme. Oh, and I’d love to do some work on my KJV Only Debate blog.
Besides continuing with my missions blog (which needs some work and focus too), I still plan on continuing to blog for fun. That means I will continue to be spontaneous, and I’m sure some people appreciate that from time to time. But in 2008 I hope to finish some unfinished business, with the possibility of gearing my blog up for a transition away from dealing with fundamentalism so much and focusing more on Reformed matters and general Christian themes.
One more note of caution. As I try to become more intentional with my blog, I may post less frequently. I can’t let my blog consume me and take me from matters I really should attend to. I must nourish my spiritual life and lead my family first, and blogging can be detrimental to this.
Before I finish, let me encourage other bloggers to assess your blogging. Be sure you are using blogs and not being used by blogs. No one will be perfect, but we can’t be afraid to focus on real life and let our virtual realities slip.
In my next post, I’m going to highlight the best and the worst of Fundamentally Reformed‘s 2007. I’ll try to be as self-serving as my first post of 2007 was, because hey, this is my blog and it’s fun to look back!
Congratulations to Huckabee! He won Iowa by 9 points, 34% to 25% over Romney (with 95% reporting).
You will want to listen to his victory speech. It’s good, and only about 5 minutes long.
Plus this is a good bonus 5 minute interview clip from FoxNews.
Way to go, Huckabee! May the momentum continue.
Before I go, let me provide an excerpt from David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times and regular commenter for PBS’ The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. In a column entitled The Two Earthquakes, Brooks has this to say of Huckabee’s win.
On the Republican side, my message is: Be not afraid. Some people are going to tell you that Mike Huckabee’s victory last night in Iowa represents a triumph for the creationist crusaders. Wrong.
Huckabee won because he tapped into realities that other Republicans have been slow to recognize. First, evangelicals have changed. Huckabee is the first ironic evangelical on the national stage. He’s funny, campy (see his Chuck Norris fixation) and he’s not at war with modern culture.
Second, Huckabee understands much better than Mitt Romney that we have a crisis of authority in this country. People have lost faith in their leaders’ ability to respond to problems. While Romney embodies the leadership class, Huckabee went after it. He criticized Wall Street and K Street. Most importantly, he sensed that conservatives do not believe their own movement is well led. He took on Rush Limbaugh, the Club for Growth and even President Bush. The old guard threw everything they had at him, and their diminished power is now exposed.
Third, Huckabee understands how middle-class anxiety is really lived. Democrats talk about wages. But real middle-class families have more to fear economically from divorce than from a free trade pact. A person’s lifetime prospects will be threatened more by single parenting than by outsourcing. Huckabee understands that economic well-being is fused with social and moral well-being, and he talks about the inter-relationship in a way no other candidate has.
In that sense, Huckabee’s victory is not a step into the past. It opens up the way for a new coalition.
A conservatism that recognizes stable families as the foundation of economic growth is not hard to imagine. A conservatism that loves capitalism but distrusts capitalists is not hard to imagine either. Adam Smith felt this way. A conservatism that pays attention to people making less than $50,000 a year is the only conservatism worth defending.
Will Huckabee move on and lead this new conservatism? Highly doubtful. The past few weeks have exposed his serious flaws as a presidential candidate….
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Huckabee probably won’t be the nominee, but starting last night in Iowa, an evangelical began the Republican Reformation.
One other worthy link is Michael Medved’s “Told You So” at Townhall.com.
Again, congratulations to Huckabee and his many supporters. We can pull this off! Go Huckabee!
Okay, I have to vent here about Romney. From the get go, he’s struck me as smooth, fast-talking and the quintessential politician. He says what we want to hear, and he says different things to please different groups of people. I’m sure there is more to him than this, and I’d probably even vote for him if he won the nomination, but my suspicions endure.
Before I air out the dirty laundry here, let me make one thing clear. Huckabee is not my choice because I’m a fundamental Christian. Videos like this one, make me cringe. America is not the Christian land the Bible speaks of. We are wrong to spiritualize politics and I disliked Bush’s many attempts to do just that.
Huckabee, in my view, doesn’t do this. He takes his faith and its morals and applies them to big issues like poverty, health and education. He aims to do what is right, but he isn’t out trying to spiritualize America as the last Christian nation on earth. He may use Biblical tales as metaphors and figures of speech, but he is not trying to win America for the hard Religious right. (They don’t even support him fully.) Sure he is pro-life, and he is a former pastor. But with 10 years of gubernatorial experience, and a record of accomplishing important things in a highly democratic state, Huckabee’s record proves that he aims to bring America up, not into the grips of one particular ideology.
Okay back to Romney. You’re ready to hear me say “flip-flop” right? And Romney supporters roll their eyes.
But wait, let me stress, I welcome conversions to pro-life views and other conservative positions. I genuinely give Romney some benefit of the doubt. But upon looking more closely at other issues, it becomes clear that this conversion may well be a little too politically motivated.
In the news recently, Romney has taken flack for claiming to have seen his father march with Martin Luther King, when in fact the evidence strongly points to the contrary. Worse, Romney then tried to spin his former clear statements into literary devices quibbling over the definition of the word “saw” (in Clintonesque fashion).
This reminds us of Romney’s past statements that he was a lifelong hunter, which turned out to be false. And his more recent claim that the NRA endorsed him as a candidate for Governor, when in fact they didn’t.
In light of these convenient mistakes — convenient in that the statements scored points for him at the time, even though they were doubtful in veracity — this excerpt from a Washington Post blog entitled “Mitt Romney’s Flip Flop Flip” should alarm you.
Romney announced his conversion to “pro-life” views in an editorial in the Boston Globe on July 25, 2005, the day after vetoing a bill expanding access to the so-called “morning after” pill, which required that it be made available to rape victims….
That was not the end of the story, however. The controversy over “emergency contraception” continued to haunt Romney. In October 2005, another bill came to his desk, seeking a federal waiver to expand the number of Massachusetts citizens eligible for family planning services, including the “morning after” pill. Romney signed that bill over the objections of his new anti-abortion allies. On this occasion, he was applauded by “pro-choice” advocates.
The issue came up yet again in December 2005. After weeks of agonizing, Romney instructed all hospitals in the state to comply with the terms of the emergency contraception law, and make the morning-after pill available to rape victims. He acted on the advice of his legal counsel, over the objections of half a dozen Catholic hospitals, which had previously refused to provide emergency contraception on the grounds that it conflicted with their religious views.
“Flip,flop,flip,” editorialized the Boston Herald, on December 9, 2005. “Yes, Gov. Mitt Romney has now executed an Olympic-caliber double flip-flop with a gold medal-performance twist-and-a-half on the issue of emergency contraception.”
This raised my eyebrows because it shows that Romney was flip-flopping on the pro-life issue even before he was seriously running for president. And it should cause even more concern in light of his recent and repeated claims that on every bill that came across his desk concerning abortion, he came down firmly on the side of life. “Abortion” maybe, but “pro life issues” not necessarily, or so it seems.
Yet even on abortion, there is cause for concern. On the campaign trail, Romney has repeatedly traced his conversion to a November 2004 meeting with a doctor regarding stem cell embryos. But this ABC News article points out that:
Within two months of his epiphany on this issue, Romney appointed to a judgeship a Democrat who was an avowed supporter of abortion rights.
Notice this wasn’t a “bill” so Romney may be technically correct, yet this is not what a genuinely pro-life governor does. And to add another twist to that story, the doctor involved has publicly disputed Romney’s version of the facts.
Hold onto your seat, because there are even more evidences of flip-flopping for good ol’ Mitt.
On Reagan
On His Desire to Serve in Vietnam
On SCHIP
Other instances could be given, but many of those could properly be credited to legitimate growing and changing his mind. But all in all, when you add all of this up, the picture becomes fairly convincing that Romney is all talk. Especially when you consider his underhanded (our outright dishonest) campaigning.
So, there you have it. Romney’s Mormonism in no way prejudices me against him. The above mentioned history of political pandering does. And his record on judicial nominations seals the deal.