Micah Tillman

Recently, it was announced that Mike Huckabee is going to be getting a new book published. I found the following sentence from the announcement striking:*

Governor Huckabee offers straight talk on how we can renew America through limited government and a sense of national community.

I never liked Huckabee. Part of it had to do with the fact that I didn’t think he understood how to properly separate religion and politics. Part of it had to do with the fact that I didn’t think he was actually a conservative.

But now I have something else.

He thinks that he can give us a sense of national community?! (Sounds like Obama, when you think about it.)

There are two problems:

(1) As Goldberg has argued, the tendency to equate government and community (or at least to try to use government to create community) is Leftwing. And I’m not a Leftwinger. Furthermore, as Goldberg has also argued, community at the national level is simply impossible.(2) I have no desire to say “Heil Huckabee” upon greeting my fellow citizens.**

At the moment, I see other people in terms of the fact that (among other things) they belong to the same nation as I do. However, if Huckabee wants to add on top of that a sense of “national community,” what he wants is for me to begin seeing my fellow citizens as belonging to the same community as I do.

But if we don’t have that sense of community now, Huckabee is going to have to be the one who leads us to it. And that means my seeing other people as part of my national community will be intextricably intertwined with the idea of Huckabee.

In other words, with Huckabee as instigator of our new national community, it would become impossible for me to see my fellow citizens except in terms of Huckabee. We will all see each other as people-who-belong-to-the-community-which-Huckabee-initiated (-and-to-which-we-ourselves-belong).

The subordination of the Other to Another is disturbing. The idea that we would all begin to see each other in terms of a single person, and that the Community Leader would become ever present (because the community he created would be ever present), is fundamentally frightening.

Think about a parallel: We Christians see each other as belonging to the community which Christ initiated. We see each other in terms of Christ. We are Christ-ians.

Now imagine what would happen if an American leader came along and told us we needed to all belong to the same group — over and above our belonging to America — and that he could help us start this group.

We’d become Huckamericans. (Or Tillmericans. Or whatever.)

Since I believe in the deity of Christ, I’m okay with seeing my fellow Christians as belonging to one group under (or initiated by) Him. But I’m not okay with seeing my fellow citizens as being one community under some Commander-in-Chief.

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*By the by, notice how the second sentence in this post separates “found” and “striking,” even though the two words belong together. That’s got to be a relic of German. All German sentences are like that. What a strange language.

**I know, that’s strong. But it’s the most concise way to express the issue.

Tags: Christ, Christians, Community, Jonah Goldberg, Mike Huckabee