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By Moody Marty | Opening Doorz Editorial | September 07, 2025 Mike Huckabee (US Ambassador to Israel)thunders like a preacher but reasons like a politician. The trouble is, when you […]
By Moody Marty | Opening Doorz Editorial | September 07, 2025
Mike Huckabee (US Ambassador to Israel)thunders like a preacher but reasons like a politician. The trouble is, when you dress geopolitics in Sunday best, the seams show.
Mike Huckabee? Until recently, barely a blip. Then I read one of his rants. I wished I hadn’t.
An old colleague, Condrad Prabhu (from The Indian Post, 1989), summed him up crisply on LinkedIn: “This ‘god’ he’s preaching is not the Almighty of the Holy Books, but more likely the principalities of darkness.” This line sent me down the rabbit hole of Huckabee’s latest sermon disguised as political commentary.
And what a discovery. Huckabee urged Christians to back Israel, casting Gaza’s carnage as a “spiritual conflict” between good and evil. That’s not theology; that’s geopolitics in Sunday clothes, indignation and political calculation dressed as divine mandate.
Israel’s war on Gaza has already killed tens of thousands and triggered investigations for genocide. Yet, Huckabee portrays this horror show as part of some cosmic struggle. He speaks as though God has chosen sides in a modern-day holy war.
In today’s world of perpetual outrage and fleeting news cycles, his statement stands out for its sheer tone-deaf dissonance. He does not sound like a preacher of compassion. Instead, he resembles an ambassador from a planet where the moral compass spins backwards. The most jarring bit? He shows a willingness to misuse the principles of Christianity. It is not a call to love but a weapon to justify destruction.
Israel’s war on Gaza has already killed tens of thousands and triggered investigations for genocide. Yet, Huckabee portrays this horror show as part of some cosmic struggle. He speaks as though God has chosen sides in a modern-day holy war.
This is where Huckabee collides head-on with Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain’s masterpiece, often dismissed as a dusty relic of American literature, suddenly feels like a parable for our times.
Huck Finn is caught between two worlds. One is the “sivilised” religion of Miss Watson, which is pious, judgmental, and convenient. The other is the raw humanity of Jim, a runaway slave. Miss Watson would attend church, preach about salvation, and still “own” another human being. Her faith was one of loopholes, one that sanitised sin under the guise of piety. This is the faith that is so often wielded today. It is a sanitised, politicised version. It conveniently overlooks the inconvenient, messy reality of loving one’s neighbour.
Doesn’t that sound eerily familiar? Huckabee and his ilk thunder from the pulpit. They praise a God of walls and borders. Meanwhile, they conveniently ignore the God who commanded, “Love your neighbour as yourself.”
Like Miss Watson, today’s loudest Christians believe their faith is measured by volume. Shout it louder. Declare it stronger. Tweet it often. Then it must be holy. Meanwhile, the policies they actively cheer for harm the very people their gospel calls them to love.
One wonders which edition of the Bible they’re reading. Is it the one where Jesus blesses peacemakers? Or is it a revised copy with a footnote: “Offer not valid for those you disagree with”?
Twain’s Huck wrestles with his conscience. Society tells him that helping Jim is both a crime and a sin. His faith, warped by Miss Watson’s teaching, warns he’ll “go to hell” for siding with a slave. Huck chooses compassion anyway: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.”
That’s real faith. A moral compass that points toward humanity, not political convenience. A decision born of love, not law.
This is the part Huckabee skips over. His God is not a father to all humanity but a general in a political war. His faith is less about compassion and more about conquest, less about grace and more about exclusion.
What a tragic misrepresentation of Christianity. At its core, the faith is a radical call to love: feed the hungry, clothe the naked, comfort the grieving. Yet, Huckabee’s brand of religion twists that call into something unrecognisable.
It’s like using a paintbrush to hammer nails. You damage the tool, distort the art, and leave the real work unfinished. Christians who live their faith quietly are left bewildered. They don’t recognise this loud, weaponised version of their religion. I certainly don’t.
The most human act is admitting when you’re wrong. That humility seems extinct in today’s public square. Dragging a faith tradition into political squabbles is an extreme form of hubris. It assumes a monopoly on truth, as though God himself were a card in your back pocket.
True conviction doesn’t need theatrics. It doesn’t need to shout. It sits quietly in the corner, feeding the hungry, forgiving the enemy, standing up for the vulnerable. Huck Finn understood that in his rebellion. He knew kindness was right, even if it cost him his soul.
That’s the faith worth having, one that elevates all, not one wielded to tear others down.
Huckabee urged Christians to back Israel, casting Gaza’s carnage as a “spiritual conflict” between good and evil. That’s not theology; that’s geopolitics in Sunday clothes, indignation and political calculation dressed as divine mandate.
And this is where Jesus’s warning to the Pharisees fits perfectly. They were meticulous about minor rules (straining out the gnat) while blind to systemic corruption and moral decay (the camel) [Matthew 23:23-26]
By focusing on the Gnat, Huckabee and his tribe have blinded themselves to the Camel, in all its enormous, undigested ugliness. That’s not faith. That’s theatre. And if Huck Finn were alive today, he’d probably shake his head and mutter, “All right then, I’ll go to hell.”
[Moody Marty: Sometimes funny, sometimes informative, always downright forthright!]
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