A specious leftist belief that the criminal justice system is racist has undoubtedly led to more disastrous criminal justice decisions than a specious religious belief that one is in touch with one’s favored divinity. And perhaps Mike Huckabee’s high rate of sentence commutations resulted from his best efforts to empirically evaluate the evidence presented to him by parole boards, rather than, as has been speculated upon, religious inspiration. Still I am never reassured to learn that an elected representative may be praying for guidance or consulting the bible in making political decisions. Though this line is impossible to enforce and certain not to be followed, the only valid materials for political decision-making in my view are publicly-enacted laws and as much actual knowledge about the world as a politician can get his hands on. I doubt whether a Christian would take much comfort in learning that a politician with power over his life is consulting with Allah in deciding upon a public line of action, since he does not regard the Koran as a valid source of either divine revelation or political authority. Nor would the Christian be wholly confident that the Allah-inspired politician was moved by rational evidence in constructing his belief system or in reaching the conclusions that he drew from it. Though prayer may merely consolidate a leader’s existing inclinations, it could also give them a zealotry or dubious certitude that they do not deserve.
A few years ago, one of the neo-con-theo-con movement’s most revered religious figures lectured me on overincarceration, a subject he clearly knew noting about, during a black-tie dinner. It was hard to escape the suspicion that his prim self-righteousness about the prison rate was fueled in large part by his belief that he had a particular in with God, though perhaps I do him an injustice.
Heather,
I’m not sure how asserting that identity politics has done more harm than what is usually a superficial acknowledgement of a higher power serves to further your argument which goes something along the lines of, “currently incarcerated black people belong in prison and, undoubtedly, many more should join them if the epidemic of black-on-white (and black-on-black) crime is to be ended.”
enlightenment?
His religiosity played a role according to his own account:
“I would not deny that my sense of the reality of redemption is a factor,” Mr. Huckabee told KUAR in Little Rock in 2001. “I don’t know that I can apologize for that because I would hate to think of the kind of human I would be if I thought people were beyond forgiveness.”
“I don’t know that I can apologize”–such a nasty combination of folksy and smug.
Mike Huckabee’s situation with regards to this is identical to that of Mike Dukakas’s Willie Horton scandal, which effectively shut down his presidential campaign in ’88. Indeed, its worse for Huckabee because, not only is he from the party of “law and order”, but he represents the faction (social conservative) that has the greatest obsession with law and order. I think Huckabee’s political career has just self-destructed.
Heather Mac Donald writes:
The “publicly-enacted laws” is a strange restriction (what about customary and natural law?), but the “actual knowledge about the world” is just question-begging. What’s counts as the “world”, and what is “actual knowledge” about it? The most theocratic Islamist will say that he is acting on actual knowledge about the world, and that atheists, Christians, et al. are not. When atheists say “actual knowledge about the world”, they mean my knowledge about the world and not yours. They should be direct enough to say so.
That’s often true but pretty silly in this instance. The “actual knowledge about the world” available to him includes all arguable external evidences and precedent. Barring if-he-floats-he’s-guilty tests, there’s no way to make redemption into an external evidence even on baptist terms. We just have to take Huckabee’s word for the internal confirmation he got from wherever.
Your contempt for all things even hinting at the supernatural is distracting.
Is it possible for you to make a point without fortifying your own smug attitudes based on anecdotes? A rational world view must take a lot more information into account besides your brief social encounters on the cocktail circuit. Maybe THAT’S the problem here after all.
You’ve also provided no evidence that Christian politicians – as a class and through the millennium – deliberately and irrationally reject knowledge in favor of prayer. Don’t many of your columns complain that secular leaders are doing that already??
As Larry Auster said, you sound like the village atheist.
@Ethan
If this is true then it makes Huckabee’s application ridiculous, not Baptist doctrine.
And in fact Aaron is more correct then you want to admit, since he’s not divining the governor’s intention in this specific case unlike you.
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@JimP
Hilarious, you read into my comment that I was calling baptist doctrine ridiculous? I’ve been trying to decide whether the hermeneutics of the internet (discard the text, respond vociferously to perceived subtext) A) results from amplifying the effects of an uncommon personality type, or B) reflects how most people have always read, a fact hidden by the filtering effect of limited publishing facilities and assortative socializing, or C) is how most people are all the time, but that it’s usually obscured by a falsely integrating interpretation of the usual lacunae and contradictions in conversation. I really hope it’s A.
The latter is troubling for obvious reasons, but the former is wholly innocuous. When religious people sit down to think a morally difficult problem through, it often takes on the form of prayer. In this particular circumstance, there’s little practical difference between appealing to God and one’s own conscience.
I like how the logical consequence of Mike Huckabee’s alleged religious inspiration in this case is that God wanted those cops to die. His god is an awful god.
There are plenty of religious governors who openly flaunt the influence of their religion on their thinking and political motives yet don’t grant much in clemency/commutations etc. Huckabee is on the far end of the spectrum on this issue.
Huckabee’s position is no different from that of any social liberal who sees all criminals as victims who just need to be given a second chance…and a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth… Huckabee and Dukakis just worship at alternate altars, that’s all. Huckabee believes in heavenly redemption via prayer; Dukakis believed (and still does, I’m sure) in earthly redemption via social programs.
The main difference is that your chances of forgiveness are best with liberals if you are part of a minority and come from as terrible a background as possible, with Huckabee the chance of a pardon increases proportionally with the amount of times you mention Jesus in a sentence.
@Mike H
Sure, but the end is the same, which is why I referred to it as worshipping at different altars. You get the exact same crapola result.
Huckabee had a piece in yesterday’s (Dec. 7) Washington Post in which he states his reasons for the commutation of Clemmons’s sentence. He didn’t cite belief in redemption; no mention of religion was made, as far as I can recall. Actually, the explanation was pretty reasonable. But it did take Huckabee–or whoever wrote the piece for him–a week to come up with it.