Contrary to most others on the Christian Right, Mike Huckabee doesn't believe that the absence of state-enforced Christian prayers is responsible for all of America's ills. According to Mike Huckabee, children who pray with their families outside of school don't need to worry about praying in schools with their teachers. Moreover, he recognizes that it's not part of a school's job description to teach children how to pray or what they should pray. While these views hit all of the right notes, they don't tell the full story of what Mike Huckabee believes regarding prayer and the relationship between prayer and schools.
Sadly, he does think that the absence of school prayer is involved in the changes he believes are wrong with America. In his book Character Makes a Difference, Mike Huckabee wrote:
How did we move in one generation from a society with a shared, confident sense of right to a society of relativism and moral decay? The first step to answering that question is to admit there isn't just one answer. I've heard that it all started when we took prayer out of schools. That's a simplistic answer. It wasn't just prayer in schools; it wasn't just TV; it wasn't just Watergate; it wasn't just welfare.
If any force is going to overcome a free, prosperous country like America, it won't happen all at once. America has a solid foundation of liberty, personal dignity, and opportunity.
The only way to destroy something with that kind of foundation is to chip away at it, one value at a time. Take away its heart and essence. Bring doubt to what used to be confidence, denial to what used to be faith, death to what was life. I think that is what has happened.
It seems clear that Mike Huckabee does believe that an absence of prayers in public schools has played a role in what he and other Christian Nationalists regard as the "moral decline" of America. More than that, though, he sees the absence of school prayer as one of many pieces of a larger problem: the chipping away of traditional Christian privileges in American culture, politics, and society. The "values" which Mike Huckabee writes of here are those constantly pushed by Christian Nationalists in their "culture war" against modernity.
On the one side, Huckabee promotes liberty, personal dignity, and opportunity as American values. Against these he postulates an array of enemies: welfare, even though it may help bring families out of poverty and provide them with the opportunity to better themselves; doubt, even though the liberty believe something necessarily includes the liberty to doubt what you are being told; denial of faith, even though you can't have personal dignity unless you can stand up for yourself and reject what others insist you take on faith.
The Christian Nationalist agenda which Mike Huckabee represents stands in direct opposition to the values he correctly identifies with America. Christian Nationalism opposes personal dignity and autonomy by seeking to restrict people's reproductive rights and sexuality, it opposes opportunity by promoting Christian privileges and exceptionalism over full equality for everyone regardless of religion or race, and it opposes liberty by pushing a variety of authoritarian measures designed to force people into behaviors and practices which conform to Christian traditionalism.
