Mike Huckabee: A Scary Dispensationalist Huckster
by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. He pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years, after which he served as interim pastor of ABC USA churches in Illinois, Kansas, New York, and Pennsylvania. He is now a full-time writer, and lives in Louisiana. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, was the focus of this rightingamerica interview. And there are more books to come!
The New York Times daily word game of Connections asks participants to match four words that fit the same category. Here are four words that might not seem to fit the same category, but they do: Zealots, Mike Huckabee. red heifers and the rapture. All of them belong to the genre of false prophecy.
Zealots
The Zealots were a violent political party of Judaism in the first century. They believed violence was the only acceptable response to Roman rule.
In his most explicit statement about the futility of Zealot violence, Jesus said: “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?” (Luke 23:28 – 31).
Jesus, the “green wood” of peace and nonviolence, is the polar opposite of the “dry wood” – the violent Zealots.
The Zealots lived and breathed the toxic fumes of anger, resentment, and revenge. The word “zeal” means “hot under the color.” The root of “zeal” means “dark red” and it connotes the face when it is enraged. Red, therefore, is the perfect color for MAGA Republicans.
The last stand of the Zealots occurred at Masada – a mountain fortress. According to Josephus, when the walls were breached in 73/74 CE, the Romans found nearly 1,000 inhabitants had died by mass suicide—a claim that remains debated among historians.
MAGA evangelicals dream of the final battle of Armageddon (Megiddo). Armageddon is, according to the dispensationalists, the site of the climactic battle in the world – “the mother of all wars.”
The distance between Masada and Megiddo is 138 miles, but the distance in political and theological miles is immense. Zealots always live on the edge of suicidal tendencies. They cannot abide this world and would rather leave it if they can’t control it.
Our current batch of Zealots – MAGA evangelicals – burn with zeal against immigrants, gays, transgenders, university professors, minorities, and an array of alleged enemies of America. They dream of Jesus returning “soon and very soon” to destroy in flames all their enemies.
They have no idea that their final moments are more likely to resemble Masada than fictional victory at Armageddon.
Mike Huckabee: A Modern Zealot
Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador to Israel, is a Zealot. He is also a Southern Baptist preacher who holds to and promotes end times dispensational theology.
Historian Paul Boyer’s When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy in Modern American Culture should be required reading for anyone trying to understand what has gone wrong in America in the past ten years. How America has fallen under the influence of crazed, right-wing “prophets and apostles” seizes the mind. Boyer reminds us, “Prophecy belief is far more central in American thought than intellectual and cultural historians have recognized …. The popularizers of a specific belief system – dispensational premillennialism – have played an important role in shaping public attitudes on a wide range of topics ….”
President Trump sent a man filled with theological nuclear material to the most explosive region in the world. Huckabee, in full dispensationalist mode, has visited Shiloh, an ancient site of God’s tabernacle. He held an official meeting in Judea and Samaria. This marks the first time in history that an American ambassador has held a meeting in Judea and Samaria with a representative forum of Israeli authorities beyond the Green Line, which demarcates the area captured by Israel from Jordan during the Six-Day War.
Ambassador Huckabee said, “I cannot imagine coming to Israel and not seeing Shiloh, because it is one of the most important biblical sites that validates the Jewish connection to the homeland, going back 3500 years.”
Huckabee seemed oblivious to the history of Shiloh. Psalm 78:60 notes that God “abandoned his dwelling at Shiloh.” The house at Shiloh fell down. Caryle Marney said in a sermon, “For 900 years in a long, slow way the waters of Shiloh trickled downhill until Samuel’s early days when old Eli was really old, his sons defected, and the ancient holy man fell, broke his neck, and someone named the newborn baby Ichabod. The ‘glory of the Lord’ had gone away.”
Huckabee has claimed “there is no such thing as a Palestinian.” He has insisted there is plenty of land outside of Israel for a Palestinian state. In addition, Huckabee opposes the two-state solution. He supports Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank: “There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria (the territory’s biblical name). There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities, they’re neighborhoods, they’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation.”
Believing he can wipe away history with denials suggests Huckabee is more humbug and huckster than holy man. And his Christian nationalist, dispensationalist spin on Israel’s history makes a mockery of Paul’s claim that Christians are “ambassadors for Christ.” Instead, Huckabee offers a revisionist history of Israel that rivals David Barton’s fictional history of America.
Ambassador Huckabee sent an exceedingly sycophantic and dangerously explosive text to Trump:
Mr. President, God spared you in Butler, PA to be the most consequential President in a century—maybe ever. The decisions on your shoulders I would not want to be made by anyone else. You have many voices speaking to you Sir, but there is only ONE voice that matters. HIS voice. I am your appointed servant in this land and am available for you but I do not try to get in your presence often because I trust your instincts. No President in my lifetime has been in a position like yours. Not since Truman in 1945. I don’t reach out to persuade you. Only to encourage you. I believe you will hear from heaven and that voice is far more important than mine or ANYONE else’s. You sent me to Israel to be your eyes, ears and voice and to make sure our flag flies above our embassy. My job is to be the last one to leave. I will not abandon this post. Our flag will NOT come down! You did not seek this moment. This moment sought YOU! It is my honor to serve you!
Along with the fawning flattery of President Trump, the Christian nationalism and pseudo patriotism, and overweening theodicy, this message crawls with theological inconsistencies and contradictions that would require a book length refutation.
I have compared the words of Huckabee with the words of Ezekiel, a true prophet. No prophet had more firsthand experience with false prophets than Ezekiel. His prophetic counterparts attempted to twist the truth, tried to discredit Ezekiel’s credentials as a preacher of the word, and caused great trouble for his work among the exiles.
Huckabee, like the false prophets in Ezekiel, has been irresponsible by exceeding his commission and giving a message dictated by his own caprice. Huckabee entertains the absurd idea that God directs the decisions of President Trump. “I believe you will hear from heaven.” Ezekiel: “They have envisioned falsehood and lying divination; they say, ‘Says the Lord,’ when the Lord has not sent them, and yet they wait for the fulfillment of their word!” (Ezekiel 13:6). “Its prophets have smeared whitewash on their behalf, seeing false visions and divining lies for them, saying, ‘Thus says the Lord God,’ when the Lord has not spoken” (Ezekiel 22:28)).
Huckabee feeds Trump’s illusions. Yet Ezekiel warns, “For there shall no longer be any false vision or flattering divination within the house of Israel” (12:24). The audacity of Huckabee’s claim that God will speak to President Trump unravels in the light of Ezekiel’s condemnation of false prophets claiming to have a word from God when God has not spoken at all. Where are the prophecy police when you need them? Never has a preacher more needed someone with a badge, wearing a mask, to arrest Huckabee, slap handcuffs on him, and lead him away.
Huckabee couches his message in the language of religious war. Like most MAGA evangelicals, Huckabee has replaced truth and faith with a sickening nationalism. Here are Will Campbell’s word regarding such nationalism:
It is the insistence that what we have done is sacred. It is that transference of allegiance from what God did in creating the whole wide world to what we have done with a little sliver of it. Patriotism is immoral. Flying a national flag – any national flag – in a church house is a symbol of idolatry. Singing “God Bless America” in a Christian service is blasphemy.
The Red Heifer
Huckabee’s dispensationalist view moved into the category of exceedingly weird when he visited a farm in the occupied West Bank where five red heifers are penned. The five red heifers came from Byron Stinson, a Texas rancher.
Hoping to hasten the End Time a group of ultra-Christian Texas ranchers helped fundamentalist Israeli Jews breed a pure red heifer, a genetically rare beast that must be sacrificed to fulfill an apocalyptic prophecy found in the biblical Book of Numbers. The Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying, “This is a statute of the law that the Lord has commanded: Tell the Israelites to bring you a red heifer without defect, in which there is no blemish and on which no yoke has been laid. You shall give it to the priest Eleazar, and it shall be taken outside the camp and slaughtered in his presence” (Numbers 19:1 – 3).
There is nothing here about end times, but dispensationalists find biblical evidence even where none exists. When our nation’s foreign policy involves “red heifers,” we should know we have a problem.
The red heifer is supposed to be the first animal sacrificed on the altar of the new Temple when it is finished. The problem: the second most sacred holy site of Muslims – the Dome of the Rock – currently stands where the Temple will need to be built. This would, of course, mean total war between Israel and the Muslim world.
The idea of the world’s fate wrapped in a perfect red heifer seizes the mind.
The Rapture
Millions of Americans believe that we are approaching the day when Jesus will rapture his Church. MAGA prophets are making wild claims that Trump is a prophet sent by God to usher in the End Times, and that attacking Iran is necessary to bring about the end of the world and the return of Jesus Christ.
White evangelical Christian fundamentalists have a perverted relationship with Israel. On one hand, they believe that Jews are damned to eternal hell because they don’t accept Jesus Christ as the Messiah; on the other hand, they consider themselves very pro-Israel because of the role they think Israel will play in the End Times.
Ambassador Huckabee sits in Jerusalem with what he thinks is the plan of God and the timetable for the return of Jesus. His position in Israel makes him the most dangerous false prophet in the world.
