Huckabee walks fine line amid pulpit, podium

Mr. Huckabee has not always been so graceful. Speaking to a not-particularly religious crowd near Detroit on Monday, before the Michigan primary, he slipped into an argument to amend the Constitution to ban abortion and same-sex marriage, “so it’s in God’s standards, rather than try to change God’s standards.”

“Does it mean that the Constitution does not measure up to God’s standards? Is the Constitution anti-God?” asked Ted Olsen, an influential online commentator for an evangelical standard-bearer, Christianity Today. “Honestly, I’m thinking that this quote probably cost Huckabee more evangelical votes than it won him.”

By Friday morning, Mr. Huckabee had backed away from his comments, saying in an interview with CNN that he understood the Constitution as a “secular document” and had described his support for those amendments “a little more awkwardly than I have in the past.”

In debates and other interviews, Mr. Huckabee has frequently complained he is unfairly singled out for theological questions. “Everybody says religion is off limits, except we always can ask me the religious question,” he said in the recent Republican debate in Myrtle Beach.

And he has deflected some religious questions like his views about the eternity awaiting non-Christians. He has definite views about that, he said, but they are not relevant to public office.

In another debate, though, he interrupted Rudolph W. Giuliani for a chance to answer a religious question.

“Can I help you out, Mayor, on this one?” Mr. Huckabee volunteered.

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But although his closing speeches barely mention religion, his final commercials here, on television and Christian radio, have entirely focused on his Christian credentials. “Faith doesn’t just influence me,” Mr. Huckabee says in one commercial. “It defines me.”

He has indeed made an art of escaping politically delicate questions about theology. He has said he favors the biblical account of creation over Darwinian evolution, but he also said he considered the two approaches largely compatible, with God’s potential role limited to the original jump-start, a view many liberal Christians endorse.

“Did he take the rib out of Adam?” Mr. Huckabee told Charlie Rose in an interview. “I have no reason to believe he didn’t. But I don’t know.”

He said there was “a strong body of science that really can put forth the argument for an evolutionary process,” but also “room for believing” in God as “a prime mover” in the process.

Such answers may not be complete statements of Southern Baptist orthodoxy, Mr. Smith of the Palmetto Family Council said, but a fuller statement of a “judgmental” faith is not likely to win Mr. Huckabee many votes outside the evangelical world.

The real question, Mr. Smith added, is, How does he decide when to say, ‘‘I am not going to answer that,’’ and when to do his Houdini routine?

David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Washington, and Michael Powell from South Carolina.

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