Huckabee Page 10

  At the end of the week, Huckabee returned to Hope victorious as the “governor.” Hope celebrated his success with a parade and great fanfare, taking pictures and writing up a story for the newspaper. “Several area Hope citizens were responsible for organizing the committee which met and formed a caravan in Emmet to escort the ‘governor’ into Hope.”20 As you read the text and look at the photo of Huckabee standing there with his 1970s-style Boys State T-shirt and a mop of hair, you have to wonder if even he realized just how historic that week would become in his life. In the span of five days, he had gone from being a nameless face in a crowd of one thousand high-achievers, to being one of the best-known young men in the state. Even as Huckabee rolled back into Hope, influential men across the state, including then governor Dale Bumpers, were dictating congratulatory letters to be sent to Huckabee—encouraging him to pursue a vocation where his talents would best be used: law and politics, of course.

  In a bit of historical irony, on that very same page of the Hope Star, directly butting up against the photograph of Huckabee, ran a story about the death of Saul Alinsky, a political activitist who pioneered the role of the community organizer. His Hope Star obituary reads: “ ‘Life is too short not to be full of passion and conviction.’ The words are those of Saul David Alinsky of Chicago who spent more than a quarter of a century practicing what he preached as one of the nation’s leading organizers of community-action groups.”21 Alinsky’s death came only two years after he published his now-famous Rules for Radicals. And it had only been four years since Hillary Rodham wrote her senior thesis at Wellesley College: “There Is Only the Fight . . .: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.”

  From where does Mike Huckabee’s optimistic outlook come? In response to overwhelming evil and brokenness in the world, why isn’t he a cynic, a pessimist, or at least an Alinsky-style Machiavellian, ready to jettison principle in order to establish and maintain power?

  Why does Huckabee choose to care at all? After all, many in his “late boomer” generation simply checked out altogether, opting to drown out the messiness of the world through physical pleasures.

  By contrast, Huckabee seems to chew on an Everlasting Gobstopper of hope. Many people find his optimism inspiring. An equal number find it nauseating. Either way, those are value statements about his optimism, but we’re asking a question about origins. From where does Huckabee’s optimism originate? Part of the answer to that question is found in the next road trip Huckabee undertook, two days after he got home from Boys State.

  PART 3

  THE CITY OF GOD

  CHAPTER 10

  THE CHRISTIAN WOODSTOCK

  Summer 1972

  You can experience this revolution. In fact, you can help bring it to pass.

  —BILL BRIGHT, FOUNDER OF CAMPUS CRUSADE FOR CHRIST

  MIKE HUCKABE ARRIVED BACK HOME FROM BOYS STATE on a Saturday. He had just experienced a life-transforming week and had flown across the radar of important Arkansas leaders. He was only sixteen, but his future trajectory now seemed to have more definition to it than did those of the vast majority of young men walking around in 1972. But Boys State was only the first of two life-changing trips he experienced that summer, and the second came right on the heels of the first.

  The following Monday, Huckabee and Lester Sitzes loaded up into a car and drove three hours south to Dallas, Texas, where Billy Graham and Bill Bright were hosting an event several years in the making. Tens of thousands of Christian teens and college students were all arriving for the International Student Congress on Evangelism, also known as Explo ’72. Indeed, eighty thousand would show up for the week’s culminating event, a worship service in the Cotton Bowl on Saturday, June 17.

  Bright had founded Campus Crusade for Christ in 1951 on the UCLA campus as an organization for Christian evangelism and discipleship. In 1952, he wrote an evangelistic tract called Have You Heard of the Four Spiritual Laws?, which aided Christians in their communication of simple gospel truths. Bright knew that tracts could help strip away the fear Christians expressed when thinking about sharing their faith with others.

  The student protests and drug culture of the 1960s concerned Bright. Church leaders with a heart for the students—Bright, Graham, and Francis Schaeffer, to name just a few—recognized that the younger generation were calling for an answer to the existentialist question: Does my life have meaning or purpose?

  Bright had heard expressions of spiritual longing from students all across the United States. He began to formulate a new approach, which did not go without controversy in the established church, to refrain from focusing on the morally neutral expressions of the rock-and-roll culture. Instead, he would focus on giving students Jesus. In 1969, Bright published a book titled Revolution Now! as a challenge for students to ground their desire for a purposeful life in the person and work of Jesus Christ. He wrote:

  We live in the most revolutionary period of human history. Campus disorders have assumed epidemic proportions! . . . What does the future hold? Is there a hope for a solution? . . . Social band-aids and reform antiseptics give little hope for a cure or even an improvement. A revolution is needed. I have seen men and women from all walks of life commit themselves to this Revolutionary. The result? A complete transformation, resulting in true freedom, happiness and purpose. The greatest Revolutionary gives release from the guilt and frustrations of the past. He offers a challenge and a cause worth living for. He provides the only hope for the mortal ills of our society.

  The world needs a revolution—the right kind of a revolution. One that will build, not destroy. One that will propagate love, not hatred. A revolution that will bring equality, not suppression. One that will restore man to God’s image, rather than debase him to a bestial level.

  You can experience this revolution. In fact, you can help bring it to pass.1

  Bright recognized that genuine revival needed to take place within the church, but that the youth culture, with its longer hair and rock music, was not finding a home within the institutional church. As historian John Turner explains, “Mr. Bright’s son Zachary remembers telling his father: ‘You can have a conservative view of music and keep what worked for you, or you can win [young people to Christ].’ ‘I’d rather win,’ Campus Crusade’s president responded.”2 Bright chose to risk, and he began showing the youth of America that Christianity had a future, not just a past—and that the youth themselves could be a vital force of energy for revival and renewal of the church. And for teens like Huckabee, Bright also gave off an aroma of positive, forward-looking Christianity that was discontent to focus on petty issues.

  Bright knew that many of the teens needed to respond in faith to Jesus Christ for the first time. But he also understood that, more than a pep rally alone, the long-term effects of a crusade-style event would be most felt if the youth were taught to be disciples and to make disciples.

  Bright had written another paperback in 1970, titled Come Help Change the World.3 With all those action verbs, Bright’s vision appealed to Huckabee. “Suddenly, I’m one of nearly 100,000 very young evangelical Christian believers who had a very fervent faith and wanted to change the world,” Huckabee said in describing his week in Dallas. “Suddenly, I was confronted with a feeling of ‘Wow! There are a lot of people like me, too.’ ”4

  And he was not alone. That week, many of the students at Explo ’72 were born again—that is, they responded to the work of God in their souls, leading them to an expression of faith, repentance, and commitment to Jesus Christ.

  And the impetus for action-oriented spirituality came with an outward focus: the world in need of the gospel. Because the students found little hope or home in the institutional church of the day, their feet turned instead toward taking Christ outward. A decade later, as this generation began to find itself in the leadership of existing chur
ches, new forms of church life would bring fresh approaches and life to the church. The impact of the “Jesus generation,” or “Jesus freaks,” on the church continues to this day. It is no coincidence that pastor Rick Warren, born one year earlier than Huckabee, wrote bestselling books titled The Purpose Driven Church and The Purpose Driven Life.5 Christianity that seeks to impact the world was the desire.

  Space does not permit a full recounting of all the events of Explo ’72, but there is an abundance of published material chronicling that fascinating week. Paul Eshleman, the director of the Explo’s events, penned an instant-history recap aptly titled The Explo Story: A Plan to Change the World.6 Again, you hear that language of revolution, that “Christians can change the world” vision, that permanently impacted so many of the attendees. Eshleman himself went on to lead the world-altering JESUS Film Project, sending the gospel throughout the world through the medium of a film that many estimate has been seen by more people than any other film—upwards of two billion.7 Revolution indeed.

  You will look in vain for any historian, whether a Christian or not, who fails to attest to the long-term significance of this one, singular event. People now in their early sixties who took part in Explo ’72 as students still recall that week as being a spiritual turning point in their lives. The six days in Dallas offered them a chance for intense Bible study, prayer, and training in disciple-making. And there was music—good music their own generation enjoyed. Mainstream artists, like Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson, sang alongside Randy Matthews, Larry Norman, and a number of groups who would go on to pioneer the genre known as “contemporary Christian music.” Cash performed his song “I See Men as Trees Walkin’ ”—a reference to the biblical story of Jesus healing a blind man (Mark 8:22–26).

  Billy Graham served as the honorary chairman and also spoke six times during the week. As he was already a household name by this point in his ministry, Graham elevated the press coverage and credibility of the event beyond what would have been possible without his involvement.

  The Saturday night worship event took place in the Cotton Bowl. At the conclusion of the service, Graham lit a candle. Then he used his candle to light the candles of the people standing next to him onstage. They repeated the action to others, who did likewise. In short order, the entire stadium was glimmering with candlelight. Years later, Mike related the experience to a reporter:

  Two things made an impression. Even though I was extremely far away, that tiny flickering of the one candle penetrated the darkness, and I saw it. That told me that even a little bit of light in the midst of darkness is worth something. . . . The second thing that happened was, as those candles began to accelerate—because obviously it happens pretty quickly through the principle of multiplication—this light just starts expanding around the stadium, faster and faster, until the stadium is aglow. It had a big impact on me—the rapidity with which something can spread, good or bad, and the impact that one life, and one light, can make. That’s when it really sunk into me that one person can make a difference.8

  Earlier in the year, President Richard Nixon’s administration had courted an invitation to address the students. The Explo leadership declined to offer such an invitation, not wanting to disrupt the evangelistic goals by politicizing the event. However, a telegram from Nixon was read to the attendees on that Saturday night, June 17, 1972. The president reminded them, “The way to change the world for the better is to change ourselves for the better.”9

  That very same night, in Washington, DC, local police arrested five men within the Democratic National Committee offices located in the Watergate building.

  Coming off the thrill of his victory at Boys State, Huckabee could have gone home and laid out a road map for a life of public service and political activity. Given his Republican Party inclinations, he would have joined right on in with the GOP. Had he done so, Huckabee may have spent the remainder of the 1970s in a political wilderness brought on by Nixon’s transgressions.

  Instead, on the very same night as the Watergate break-in, Huckabee felt a stirring to make a more direct impact on the kingdom of God—more direct than the lawyer or political careers being pitched to him because of his Boys State victory. Coming off the thrill of Explo ’72, Huckabee turned his eyes away from the political world and toward a much different vocational path.

  CHAPTER 11

  LIVE AND LET LIVE

  1972–1973

  I say what I mean and I mean what I say.

  —MIKE HUCKABEE

  MIKE HUCKABEE’S SENIOR YEARBOOK DEPICTS HIS BOIS d’Arc Boogie Band performing at a school event, with the guys dressed in the fashion of the hit movie from that year—American Graffiti. Huckabee resembled “the Fonz” from Happy Days, the hit show that had piloted a few years earlier but now shot to fame as nostalgia for the early 1960s ran high.

  A decade earlier, in the spring of Bill Clinton’s senior year, the Beatles sang for Ed Sullivan a ballad about wanting to hold a girl’s hand—etching a shared cultural memory of saccharine, teen innocence. “I remember being an 8-year-old kid in a little town in south Arkansas that no one had ever heard of,” Huckabee wrote on his Facebook page the day of the fiftieth anniversary of the Beatles playing on Sullivan. “I watched the Beatles with my family on our black and white TV that got its signal off our housetop antenna, all the way from Shreveport, Louisiana. As our parents screamed, ‘Turn that noise down,’ we turned it up. Who would’ve thought that 50 years later, we’d be telling our grandchildren, ‘Turn that music UP! It’s the Beatles!’ ”1

  But by the time Huckabee graduated high school, the Beatles had already been dissolved for three years, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono were fighting deportation charges. Paul McCartney’s new band, Wings, released “Live and Let Die” that spring, written as the theme song for the new James Bond movie of the same name. This would be the first 007 film starring Roger Moore, and the villain was a narcotics dealer who dabbled in voodoo, not an almost-comical megalomaniac attempting to conquer the world. The times were changing.

  You don’t have to be a cultural Luddite to recognize the shift that had occurred in the space of ten years. In the early 1960s, “the music was as innocent as the time,” wrote film critic Roger Ebert. “Songs like ‘Sixteen Candles’ and ‘Gonna Find Her’ and ‘The Book of Love’ sound touchingly naive today; nothing prepared us for the decadence and the aggression of rock only a handful of years later. The Rolling Stones of 1972 would have blown WLS [the radio station of Ebert’s youth] off the air in 1962.” Ebert, born in 1942, penned those lines in a 1973 review of American Graffiti. He thought the film captured the essence of his generation: “When I went to see George Lucas’s ‘American Graffiti’ that whole world—a world that now seems incomparably distant and innocent—was brought back with a rush of feeling that wasn’t so much nostalgia as culture shock. Remembering my high school generation, I can only wonder at how unprepared we were for the loss of innocence that took place in America with the series of hammer blows beginning with the assassination of President Kennedy.”2

  Even in the midst of vast cultural upheavals, the final year of Huckabee’s living at home continued to provide the same reliable stability and lack of drama it always had. Dorsey celebrated his twentieth year of employment as a fireman for Hope, though he did make the newspaper in October when his fire truck flipped over after being clipped by a cement truck. Tough as nails, Dorsey walked away from the accident unhurt.3 Mae, now promoted to supervisor, continued her work at the Louisiana-Nevada Transit Company, a natural gas supplier. Huckabee’s sister was beginning her second year at Ouachita Baptist, studying to be a teacher. He would join her the following year, making them the first two Huckabees in their father’s lineage to attend college. And Huckabee’s two grandmothers and one grandfather still plugged along, alive and active in Hope. So not only did Huckabee’s parents not divor
ce, separate, or die young, but they also maintained the same employment and employer throughout his entire time in their home. An immense amount of family stability surrounded him. Again, though he can’t take credit for the home life into which he was born, he does speak with firsthand knowledge when he talks about the benefits of such intactness.

  Huckabee’s senior year capped off an accomplished high school career with a flourish of activity: he was in the Quill and Scroll Society (journalism), the Beta Club (academics and community service), the National Honor Society (scholarship and academics), the French club, Future Teachers of America, the Key Club (Kiwanis), and the Student Christian Union, and he was the president of the Hope High School student council. Of course, one should never “join a club just to say you are in it but join to actually do something positive,” he later wrote. “And at all times, keep in mind your spiritual heritage, and be the different one in the group that doesn’t always conform to everyone else’s ideas. Because Christ has saved you, you are different from those who aren’t. And you should be different enough (not weird, though) to where your peers could see a definite difference.”4

  As leader of the student council, Huckabee oversaw the big annual events, like homecoming and the powder puff football game. He also led the school to continue a third year of his Operation Goodwill program of Christmas charity for needy children. And when the Hope student council officers attended the meeting of the Southern Association of Student Councils, his peers from across fifteen states elected him as their vice president.