Huckabee’s Sermons Off Limits

The Huckabee campaign has refused to give the media much more than scraps of the candidate’s religious speeches, leaving his 12 years as a pastor relatively shrouded in mystery. We already know he doesn’t believe in evolution, thought at one time that AIDS patients should be quarantined and isn’t ashamed “to let you know that I believe Adam and Eve were real people,” so what is he hiding?

Mother Jones:

When asked for copies of the sermons Huckabee delivered at Immanuel Church, an employee there claimed none could be found. A Beech Street Church pastor’s assistant maintained that much of the archival material from Huckabee’s tenure as pastor had been destroyed during a remodeling. The rest, she said, was not available to the press.

When Mother Jones contacted the Huckabee campaign and asked if it would help make his previous sermons available, the campaign replied in a one-sentence email that it had received multiple requests for such material and was “not able to accommodate” them.

Only a small sampling of Huckabee’s early speeches are publicly available. While the pastor at Beech Street, Huckabee became president of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention. (At 34, he was the youngest person to ever preside over the 490,000-person group.) He held the office from 1989 to 1991. Several of his sermonlike speeches were featured in the convention’s publications. In a 1990 speech to his fellow state Baptists, Huckabee urged the audience to hold to what he called “The 10 Commendations,” including “Thou shalt love like a family” and “Thou shalt be found faithful.” Huckabee also said, “It doesn’t embarrass me one bit to let you know that I believe Adam and Eve were real people.”

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