Young evangelicals embrace Huckabee

By David D. Kirkpatrick

updated 9:36 p.m. ET Jan. 12, 2008

WASHINGTON - Much of the national leadership of the Christian conservative movement has turned a cold shoulder to the Republican presidential campaign of Mike Huckabee, wary of his populist approach to economic issues and his criticism of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. But that has only fired up Brett and Alex Harris.

The Harris brothers, 19-year-old evangelical authors and speakers who grew up steeped in the conservative Christian movement, are the creators of Huck’s Army, an online network that has connected 12,000 Huckabee campaign volunteers, including several hundred in Michigan, which votes Tuesday, and South Carolina, which votes Saturday.

They say they like Mr. Huckabee for the same reason many of their elders do not: “He reaches outside the normal Republican box,” Brett Harris said in an interview from his home near Portland, Ore.

The brothers fell for Mr. Huckabee last August when they saw him draw applause on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” for explaining that he believed in a Christian obligation to care for prenatal “life” and also education, health care, jobs and other aspects of “life.” “It is a new kind of evangelical conservative position,” Brett Harris said. Alex Harris added, “And we are not going to have to be embarrassed about him.”

Candidacy threats to divide movement
Mr. Huckabee, who was a Southern Baptist minister before serving as governor of Arkansas, is the only candidate in the presidential race who identifies himself as an evangelical. But instead of uniting conservative Christians, his candidacy is threatening to drive a wedge into the movement, potentially dividing its best-known national leaders from part of their base and upending assumptions that have held the right wing together for the last 30 years.

His singular style — Christian traditionalism and the common-man populism of William Jennings Bryan, leavened by an affinity for bass guitar and late-night comedy shows — has energized many young and working-class evangelicals. Their support helped his shoestring campaign come from nowhere to win the Iowa Republican caucus and join the front-runners in Michigan, South Carolina and national polls.

And Mr. Huckabee has done it without the backing of, and even over the opposition of, the movement’s most visible leaders, many of whom have either criticized him or endorsed other candidates.

“Some of them have been openly hostile to him, and others merely lukewarm in their hostility,” said John Green, a scholar with the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Cultural conservatism to economic populism
If Mr. Huckabee can continue to galvanize evangelicals around his novel message while attracting other Republicans and perhaps independents, he will do more than advance his own campaign. He will also challenge the establishment of the Christian conservative political movement.

“To the extent that Governor Huckabee succeeds in advancing this new agenda that combines cultural conservatism with an economic and foreign affairs populism,” Mr. Green said, “it could undermine the existing Christian conservative political leaders and their organizations.”

After Iowa, many evangelical political leaders hailed Mr. Huckabee’s victory as a resurgence. “Not bad for a supposed bunch of demoralized, depressed, disillusioned and disengaged Reaganites,” James C. Dobson of Focus on the Family said in a statement.

But Dr. Dobson and most of his allies stopped short of commending Mr. Huckabee in particular, and Tony Perkins, president of the Dobson-affiliated Family Research Council, almost seemed to explain away the victory.

“What happened in Iowa was a strong reaction from social conservatives to the idea that the Republican establishment was pushing Rudy Giuliani, who is anathema” because of his support for abortion rights, Mr. Perkins said. “What we saw in Iowa was a shootout between the core evangelical base and the G.O.P. establishment, and unfortunately I think Mitt Romney got caught in the cross-fire.”

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