How do we make sense of US Ambassador Mike Huckabee’s fervent support for Israeli genocide? How do we grapple with a man so devoid of compassion, reason and basic human decency that he would cleave to the most murderous and racist elements of Israeli society? Well, we have to understand the evangelical Christian culture he emerged from.

I am familiar with this culture. I grew up in it, although I would classify my parents as Jimmy and Rosalind Carter kind of Christians. They were people of faith, but it guided them to be fair, kind and loving. They took the best parts of Christ’s message, the beatitudes, and they tried their best to live by them.

Others I knew weren’t so enlightened. Their puritanical sensibilities drove them to judge everyone but themselves. They invented a god that took great pleasure in causing ordinary people enormous suffering. They conjured demons everywhere to explain why anyone would dare disagree with their spiritual or worldview. And they were drunk on the notion of vengeance and in destroying a world they viewed as irredeemably wicked.

Huckabee comes from such a culture. He views the world through an eschatological prism where Christ is chomping at the bit to return to a lost and devastated earth. One where only people of his particular faith and denomination are saved. Where the return of Jesus is heralded by the destruction of God’s “enemies.” And those enemies, not by coincidence, happen to be the same ones of the American Empire. It isn’t a stretch to think that Huckabee believes he is an instrument of this fantastical “End Times” plan. That he sees himself as a “vessel of the Lord.”

I knew men and women like Huckabee. I went to church with them, sat in their Sunday school classes, and was put on their prayer lists when I “backslid” in my faith. When I began to see through the veil of their supremacist theology I saw a group of terrified and willfully ignorant bullies. Ones who used their faith as a bludgeon against anyone who they deemed sinful, defiant or a heathen. Their racism, or homophobia, or misogyny, or Islamophobia, or anti-science beliefs became their god’s beliefs. Their narrow and culturally prescribed interpretation of Biblical stories and myths became the sacrosanct and inerrant “Word of God.” And anyone who had a different view was cast as being blinded by Satan.

When I was growing up, I saw many religious tracts penned by the infamous Jack Chick. He was a master at drawing human beings he disliked as grotesque caricatures with twisted faces and usually followed by ghoulish demons sitting on their shoulders. Looking at them now gives me a chuckle, but I remember the fear they instilled in me as a child. And I began to realize that this was the worldview of so many people around me. A cartoonish and deeply cynical understanding of the world and its people. A spirituality grounded not in love or understanding, but hatred and sadism. Devoid of curiosity and wonder and full of sanctimonious preachiness. Huckabee makes me think of those tracts. And his worldview seems to be like a page from one of their fear-laden issues on sin and wickedness.

It is the only thing that can explain how evangelical Christians can adore a man who, by their own definition, is sinful, full of pride and ungodly. One who delights in cruelty. Who has fornicated and committed adultery, both grave sins in their theology. But he is fulfilling their end time dreams. So, everything else can be overlooked or even forgiven.

It is the only thing that explains how they can stomach the burning, bombing and imposed starvation of millions of people, including hundreds of thousands of children. It is all part of God’s plan. The Jews must return to Israel for Christ to return. But it isn’t out of any kind of love for them. On the contrary, they believe that two-thirds of all the nation of Israel will be cut off and die. The rest will supposedly “come to the light” and accept the American evangelical version of the messiah as their lord and savior. The Palestinians, in their worldview and as Huckabee has stated publicly, simply do not exist.

Huckabee is in a cult of death. Scary in and of itself, but even more so because this cult is in charge of the most powerful empire in history. And its mission is to bring about the end of the world. In truth, we are all being held hostage by its unhinged and maniacal policies, machinations and plans. We can only hope that this cult is dissolved before it embraces a final solution for us all.

Kenn Orphan, 2025