Arkansas Baptist pastor Wendell Griffin, who serves the New Millenium Baptist Church in Little Rock, and who recently retired as a circuit court judge, gets the credit for one of the best critiques of what has to pass as the "Republican response to the State of the Union" given by Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders. I say, what must pass as the response, because it wasn't really as much of a response to anything, and I mean anything that President Biden said, but more a revisiting of old conspiracy theories and problematic political themes that caused the GOP's "red tsunami" to come up virtually empty after the mid-term elections.
Note that this response comes from a Baptist pastor, and appears in a Baptist publication.
Sanders is the daughter of Mike Huckabee, whose record as governor of Arkansas is equivocal at best, and lacking any significant political success except playing to the biases of conservatives, including some in the Democratic party whose campaign help he borrowed to win both the Lieutenant Governor position and also serve as governor. Sanders' childhood was spent as a Baptist preacher's kid, as her father worked for the fundamentalist firebrand evangelist and fundamentalist James Robison, and then served as pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church in Pine Bluff, and Beech Street First Baptist Church, the largest Baptist congregation on the Arkansas side of the city of Texarkana.
Among those of us raised in Baptist churches, the behavior of preacher's kids was always a topic of discussion. Some of them had earned for the whole group the reputation of being the worst behaved kids in the church, leaving members endless opportunity for gossip and speculation, along with an avenue available for direct criticism of the pastor, as church members are prone to do. In the church in which I grew up, there were some prime examples of this stereotype. Two of my best friends growing up were the children of pastors of other churches in town, one a Church of Christ, which was a group even more conservative than the Baptists, and the other from an Assembly of God, whom my mother approved of heartily, because her assumption was that he would be a good influence.
Of course, as a Southern Baptist, I knew about all of the denominational politics in the 80's and 90's, and about Mike Huckabee as a "rising star" among megachurch pastors, serving a term as President of the state convention of Southern Baptists in Arkansas, more of a peer recognition than a position of real power. The Baptist Press featured his transition to politics in Arkansas prominently, and when he stepped into the governor's office after a scandal, they crowed.
So when Sanders, raised as a Baptist preacher's daughter, with a political science and mass communications degree from Ouachita Baptist University, stepped into national prominence as the Trump administration's press secretary, following the Sean Spicer disaster, with the responsibility of repeating his outrageous lies and trying to justify them, my thoughts instantly turned to the stereotype about preacher's kids. That's exactly what we got. Her appointment was obviously a political favor to his Evangelical constituency. She's not articulate, has an annoying habit of attempting to over-ride an accent, is a dull, expressionless public speaker and was repeatedly backed into corners or verbally flattened by reporters. She earned, and solidified a public reputation as a denier of facts and a purveyor of outrageous lies. She was nicknamed, appropriately, "Sarah Pinocchio."
Sanders, as a newly elected governor of a deep red state, with a degree in political science that should have helped her discern the kind of opportunity she was being given, not only to reset a narrative that cost her party dearly in the midterm elections and raised optimism of a sweep election for the Democrats in 2024, but which also had the potential, God forbid, of launching her own possible bid for higher office. She chose neither of those possibilities, opting instead to simply repeat tired culture war themes that were at the top of reasons which moved independents and some moderate Republicans to the left, allowing everything the President said to stand unchallenged, including calling out GOP attempts to cut Social Security and Medicare, which he has raised to the level of a sonic boom across the country.
Thank you, Pastor Griffin, for your editorial, which is right on target.
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