By Mike Huckabee

December 31, 2023
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BY MIKE HUCKABEE

Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team!

Mike Huckabee

DAILY BIBLE VERSE

Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

1 Thessalonians 5:18 NIV

PROGRAMMING NOTE!

I hope you all have a safe and happy Christmas and New Year’s holiday with your family and friends, and don't get stuck at the airport. To allow my staff to spend the holidays with their families, we’ll be taking a break next week from the news which (I hope!) will slow down between Christmas and New Year’s.

But keep checking your email box and the Internet because we’ve prepared plenty of material in advance, including our holiday tradition: sharing some of the amazing, moving, hilarious and inspirational family Christmas stories sent to me by my radio listeners and inspired by my book, “A Simple Christmas.” Rest assured that if anything does happen in the news that cries out for comment and reportage, we’ll put down our candy canes and pumpkin pie and rush to our keyboards to cover it.

From me, Pat, Laura, David, Chris and everyone at the Huckabee Newsletter, and all my crew from "Huckabee" on TBN, have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

“Huckabee” Preview

I hope you had a great Christmas-New Year’s week! We’ll be back on Monday with a recap of this week’s news and all the latest headlines.

In the meantime, be sure to join me tonight for a very special New Year’s Eve edition of “Huckabee” on TBN! We’ll see out the old year with a couple of my all-time favorite guests, Dr. Phil McGraw and the king of celebrity impressionists, Rich Little. I’ll take a look back at the best of 2023 (yes, there were some “bests," on our show, at least), and laugh with the final “In Case You Missed It” of the holiday season. The First Lady of Southern Cooking, Miss Daisy King, will share a black-eyed pea recipe to get your 2024 off to a lucky start. And we’ll welcome in the new year with a fantastic musical performance by Tre Corley and the Music City Connection.

The celebration gets started tonight at 8 and 11 EST, 7 and 10 CST, and Sunday at 9 EST/8 CST on TBN. To find out how to watch TBN, from local cable and broadcast channels to streaming, visit https://www.huckabee.tv and click on “Channel Finder” on the top menu. You can stream previous episodes, highlights and online-only “Digital Exclusives,” including extended interviews, “In Case You Missed It” and “Facts of the Matter” segments, plus extra performances by our great musical and comedy guests and links to all their sites, at https://www.huckabee.tv. You can also find past shows, highlights and digital exclusives on YouTube and my Facebook page.

My latest trip to Israel

The week before Christmas I traveled to war-torn Israel to meet with Israeli officials, soldiers in the battle, survivors of the unprovoked Hamas terrorist massacre of civilians, and families of hostages taken by Hamas on October 7.

I’ve been traveling to Israel for over 50 years with my first trip there in July of 1973, been there close to 100 times and have taken thousands of people there on pilgrimages. I’ve been there during conflicts including an Intifada and the 2014 war with Gaza. But this trip was unlike any other I’ve taken. Joel Rosenberg, best-selling author and host of the Rosenberg report here on TBN co-hosted a small delegation that included former Senator and Governor of Kansas and US Ambassador Sam Brownback, former US Ambassador Ken Blackwell, Samaritans Purse Board Member and pastor of one of the largest churches in the US Skip Heitzig and Lenya Leitzig, a noted author and speaker.

While on the flight there on El Al Airlines, the only airline flying into Israel from the US right now, a flight attendant recognized me and hugged me for traveling there to show support. And a couple whose 22-year-old son and American citizen has been held hostage since Oct 7 came to me to thank me for going and standing with Israel and gave me a dog tag in honor of their son who they had not heard from or about in over 74 days at that time. I have worn it since then and will until he comes home to them. Hostages from over 25 countries and every religion were taken hostage by Hamas.

A hostage village was set up in Tel Aviv, where families can gather, and people of Israel can go and pray. I found the poster for Omer Neutra, the son whose parents I had met the day before on the flight and sent a picture of me with a poster of their son and sent it to them. We met with several families whose loved ones are being held hostage. It was heartbreaking to hear first-hand their grief, uncertainty and bewilderment as to why their children, brothers, or parents had been taken from them. They all hoped for the best, but understandably feared the worst.

We visited the front lines of the war zone and walked through the devastated kibbutz of Kfar Aza, one of the first communities savagely attacked by Hamas. The barbarian atrocities inflicted upon babies, little children, young families and elderly people are unmentionable on TV. You’ve heard of some of the ways Hamas sought to murder, mutilate, rape, and humiliate civilian Jews simply waking up on a Shabbat morning to the sound of bullets, bombs, and rockets. But it actually was much worse. The uncivilized and crazed killing was made worse by the fact that the terrorists of Hamas wore cameras on their bodies to record the slaughter and celebrate it with great glee. Imagine how depraved one must be to place a live baby in an oven in front of its parents and to joyfully murder the entire family—children first and then the parents, but only after violently raping the females and mutilating their bodies. With body parts and dead bodies strown about the blood-stained homes, demon-filled Hamas terrorists then casually raided refrigerators and cabinets for food or their homes for possessions of value. And when the so-called peaceful Palestinians from Gaza knew that the villages had been neutralized from any living Jew, they themselves crossed over and looted the homes with the corpses of the families still there, having to step across the mutilated bodies to grab what valuables they could from people the monsters they voted for had just hours earlier killed.

I met with an Israeli major who I had met last August when he escorted me through the military base where military dogs are trained. The highly trained dogs are a major part of the forward operating mission to root out Hamas cowards hiding in the tunnels of Gaza.

I met with my dear friend and CEO of the International Fellowship of Christian and Jews, Yael Eckstein who you see on our show as IFCJ is one of our show’s faithful partners. While at lunch in Tel Aviv, sirens summoned us to the bomb shelter where we were having lunch even as we heard overhead the Israeli Iron Dome defense system intercept rockets from Hamas intended to kill Jewish civilians. Thank God, the Iron Dome worked. Israelis deal with that several times a day, every day. Once was enough for me!

I also met with my longtime friend and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. I assured him of the support of the Christian community of America for Israel and the Jewish people during a time of need. I can’t think of anyone who could better lead Israel during this critical threat to their existence than this Prime Minister.

The trip was so intense, I didn’t have time to process all I had seen and heard. Not until I got home did the emotional impact begin to sink in. Throughout the Christmas festivities with my church and family, I sometimes suddenly was filled with unexplained emotion and fought back tears hidden deep in my soul that were there for many of my Jewish and Israeli friends who were going through a living hell that erupted from the very heart of Satan. We are witnessing something that isn’t political, social, economic, or geographical. It’s a spiritual war of Evil vs. Good, and my only comfort is in reading the end of the book and knowing that in the end, God overcomes. Evil, death, and hate is forevermore relegated to an everlasting hell, and those of us who have placed our trust and our very lives in the hands of the one God will forever experience an everlasting life.

“The Separation of Church and State”

“The Separation of Church and State” is one of the biggest rallying cries among the left in the US. It’s like the Easter Bunny of Constitutional principles: Everybody’s heard of it, but it doesn’t really exist.

Everything said in the Constitution about religion is contained in the First Amendment, which protects five different fundamental rights in one sentence. Here’s what the Constitution says about religious rights, in its entirety:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”

Note that it doesn’t say you can’t bring your Bible to school, or say a prayer on public property or put Christmas decorations in a public park. In fact, all those things would fall under NOT prohibiting the free exercise of religion.

As for banning the establishment of religion, that doesn’t mean banning any expression of faith on government property. Leftists have cited that fallacy to demand that prayers be removed from public meetings, chaplains removed from the military, and even barring Christians from holding federal office. But what that “establishment” clause means is that there can be no official state religion, like the Church of England. It doesn’t mean all religious expression must be banished (or “separated”) from government, it just means the government can’t say, “This is the one true religion” and favor it above others.

Back before they “canceled” him for being a slaveowner, liberals loved to claim that Thomas Jefferson himself coined the phrase “a wall of separation between church and state.” That’s true, but he wasn’t talking about barring people of faith from government or expressions of faith from the public square. That phrase came in his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, affirming to them that “religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God,” and the First Amendment’s “wall of separation” barred the government from making any laws establishing a state religion or interfering with the free exercise of religious expression.

This was made clear by the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1853, when it explained that the phrase “establishment of religion” “referred, without doubt, to that establishment which existed in the mother-country…endowment at the public expense, peculiar privileges to its members, or disadvantages or penalties upon those who should reject its doctrines or belong to other communities…They intended, by this amendment, to prohibit an ‘establishment of religion’ such as the English Church presented, or anything like it. But they had no fear or jealousy of religion itself, nor did they wish to see us as an irreligious people.”

Can you even imagine that a people who risked everything to take the dangerous journey to America to seek religious freedom, or their second-generation descendants, would create a government that banned people of faith?

Yet since the 1960s, we’ve seen liberal Supreme Courts ridiculously declare it unconstitutional for a student to pray aloud over his school lunch (that violates both freedom of religion and speech); or to erect a war memorial in the shape of a cross; or to display religious-themed artwork in schools even if it’s classic art; or to ask a kindergarten class whose birthday Christmas celebrates; or for a public cemetery to have a planter in the shape of a cross because if a non-Christian sees it, it might cause “emotional distress” and constitute an “injury-in-fact.”

If you can’t have religious-inspired art or books about religion in public schools, then you’ve just eliminated basic education about vast swaths of the entire history of humankind, as well as one of the most important influences on modern society. Students who attend such schools will come out of them as ignorant of art, history and civilization as anti-religion activists are about the Constitution.

A Judeo-Christian nation

One of the big hot button issues on the left these days is any suggestion that America is a Judeo-Christian nation built on Biblical principles. To them, America is all about “diversity,” which means any religion is welcome except that of the majority of Americans since the beginning of our history. They will also argue that the Founders were not Christians, even if it means grabbing the thinnest reed of circumstantial evidence and waving it like a baseball bat. I think this is evidence that they learned even less in history class than they did in economics class.

In my book “The Three C’s That Made America Great,” my co-author Steve Feazel and I compiled a mountain of evidence of the importance of the Bible and Christianity to America’s heritage. Not just in the many Christian sects that came here in the early days seeking religious freedom, but deeply rooted in the culture and the foundations of our government and school system. Here are just a few examples. See if this sounds like the thinking of a group of closet atheists…

Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote that “The Bible…should be read in our schools in preference to all other books from its containing the greatest portion of that kind of knowledge which is calculated to produce private and public temporal happiness.”

Fellow signer Samuel Adams wrote of the importance of “inculcating in the minds of youth the fear and love of the Deity…In short of leading them in the study and practice of the exalted virtues of the Christian system.”

The “Father of American Scholarship and Education,” Noah Webster, wrote, “In my view, the Christian Religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government, ought to be instructed…No truth is more evident to my mind than that the Christian Religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people.”

While the Revolutionary War was raging, it was nearly impossible to import Bibles. Philadelphia Magazine publisher Robert Aitken requested that Bibles be printed in America to be used in schools. So in 1782, the Continental Congress approved the printing of what became known as the Aitken Bible, the first English Bible printed in America. That’s right: CONGRESS…printed the BIBLE…so it could be used in SCHOOLS! I can already hear liberals’ heads exploding at that revelation. The Bibles even included a statement that the US Congress “recommend this edition of the Bible to the inhabitants of the United States.”

In 1787, Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, laying the groundwork for Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin to become states. It includes this statement on education: “Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

Today’s leftists and atheists would dismiss these as the opinions of some early American figures that were somehow swept away by the Constitution and its nonexistent “separation of church and state” clause. However, even after the Constitution was ratified, none of that was rescinded and the Bible continued to be used in public schools.

Among those outside of government, there was little disagreement about the importance of religion, the Bible and Judeo-Christian morality as the bedrock of American culture. In 1831, French historian Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in the US to write his landmark work, “Democracy in America.” He declared that the first thing that struck him was “the religious aspect of the country,” and the longer he stayed, the more he perceived “the great political consequences” resulting from it.

De Tocqueville wrote that “there is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America,” and it “must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions,” “for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of it.” He said he was certain that Americans “hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizens or a party, but it belongs to the whole nation and to every rank of society.”

He further noted the unique importance of Christianity in making freedom the foundation of America’s government: “In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country.”

Maybe that’s why, throughout the 1800s, no legal challenge to the Bible or morality being taught in public schools was ever raised. It took nearly 200 years for liberals to “discover” that the Founders weren’t really Christians, the nation wasn’t really built on Biblical principles of morality and justice, and the writers of the Constitution actually meant to ban Bibles from public schools.

I’ve shown my evidence for my argument. What’s theirs, other than “We feel that’s how it should be, and we found some activist liberal judges who agreed with us”?

(Partially adapted from “The Three C’s That Made America Great” by Mike Huckabee and Steve Feazel)