The surprising success of Mike Huckabee in the Republican primaries forced pundits to confront the power of the Republican Party's base of evangelical Christians and produced a variety of explanations. Mike Huckabee believed that the explanation is simple: God wants him to do well. Many political, social, and religious leaders around the world and throughout history have claimed a divine mandate for their actions, policies, or agenda. In most cases, there is significant resistance from the people — this is what makes having a divine mandate so necessary. It's harder for people to resist authoritarian leaders who claim to have God on their side.
Mike Huckabee's claim to have God on his side was direct and unambiguous:
There's only one explanation for it, and it's not a human one. It's the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000 people and that's the only way that our campaign could be doing what it's doing.
And I'm not being facetious nor am I trying to be trite. There literally are thousands of people across who are praying that a little will become much and it has, and it defies all explanation. It has confounded the pundits, and I'm enjoying every minute of their trying to figure it out. And until they look at it from a just experience beyond human, they'll never figure it out. And that's probably just as well. That's honestly why its happening.
Later Mike Huckabee seemed to understand just how arrogant this claim would appear to so many people, so he backpedaled just a little bit by saying that "when people pray, things happen" and that he isn't trying to claim that "God wants me to be elected." Of course, if he doesn't get elected then he can't claim that, but that's the implication of this words above.
It's certainly an implication which many conservative evangelicals would find appealing — the belief that George W. Bush was placed in the presidency by the will of God, not by the will of the voters, has been popular with them. It's an idea that contradicts basic democratic principles, but Christian Nationalists have adopted many policy position which are contrary to democracy. Theirs is an authoritarian religion, and authoritarian religion is not entirely compatible with a free, liberal society.
