If Mike Huckabee is Right About Sandy Hook Shooting, God is Hopelessly Evil

Culture

Former Arkansas governor and 2008 Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee took to the air once again to blame Friday's Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre carried out by Adam Lanza on a lack of religion in U.S. public schools, and society in general. "We ask why there is violence in our schools," Huckabee said on Friday, "but we’ve systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage because we’ve made it a place where we don’t want to talk about eternity, life, what responsibility means, accountability?"

Undeterred by the inevitable and well-deserved backlash he endured, Huckabee went on his weekend show on Fox News to explain further:

First of all, Huckabee's "tax-funded abortion pills" are a total fiction. In accordance with the Hyde Amendment, federal money cannot be used to provide abortions, either medical or surgical. 

Secondly, the god Huckabee is describing — if it actually existed — would be one of the most abominable entities conceivable. Not only would it be a god not worth praying to in schools, it would be a god worth actively rebelling against. If Mike Huckabee honestly thinks that the secularization of society has prompted god to engage in (or even just allow) the killing of six and seven year-old children by a crazed gunman, Huckabee serves a malicious god that is morally inferior to a common street thug. 

Huckabee himself is an evangelical preacher whose affability masks what is otherwise an obscene fire-and-brimstone religious worldview. After James Holmes gunned down movie-goers in Aurora, Colorado in July, he made similar comments, blaming the violence godlessness in society.

Of course, far be it from Huckabee the gun enthusiast to blame these tragedies on the ready availability of firearms in the U.S. That might be a theory that could actually be tested. 

The penchant that the Mike Huckabees and the Pat Robertsons and the Bryan Fischers of this world have for invoking a lack of god in our culture as the reason for horrendous disasters is shallow and lazy. Blaming (a lack of) god is merely a lame excuse to skirt the responsibility of forming solutions to the problems our society faces. For Huckabee and others, talking about how we can do a better job of keeping guns out of the hands of mentally disturbed people, and getting those people the help they need, is simply too difficult a task. It's far easier for them to blame our ills on perceived cultural depravities and ask rhetorical questions about where god was during all of this.