A Higher Power

His mother, Mae, was a clerical worker at the local gas company. Every Sunday morning, she would take Mike and Pat to Garrett Memorial Baptist Church -- a small Missionary Baptist congregation that stressed the inerrancy of the Bible, the memorization of Scripture and the importance of saving souls through mission work. Huckabee was taught as a child that Adam and Eve were real people, that God created the Earth in seven days, that evolution is a false doctrine and that homosexuality is a grave sin -- all views he still holds today.

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A young Mike Huckabee reads his Bible.(Family Photo)

Huckabee says he was shy and insecure as a youngster. That began to change in fifth grade when he received a guitar for Christmas and, coached by an Assembly of God preacher, tackled basic chords and his fear of performing in public.

At 14, he got a job at the local AM radio station, where the station manager, a passionate, deeply conservative Republican, became his first political mentor. Haskell Jones gave Huckabee a copy of Phyllis Schlafly's 1964 book, "A Choice Not an Echo," written in part to promote Barry Goldwater's presidential bid. Schlafly railed against the moneyed East Coast elites who she argued were diluting the Republican Party's core values. Huckabee found the ideas in the book electrifying.

His work at KXAR was equally transforming. He became a minor celebrity in Hope by announcing high school sports, reading the news and giving away tubes of Fostex acne cream to callers who answered trivia questions he made up.

"I didn't have to see my audience," Huckabee, now 52, explains, "but I had one. And it helped me develop a sense of confidence -- a sense that I could do this."

But nothing supplied the confidence he found in Philippians 4:13, which he first read at 15. "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me," it says. God was telling him, he says, "that there were really no limits to what was ahead of me."

Soon after that, he preached his first sermon, titled "Watering Down the Blood of Christ," and he illustrated his message by holding up a pitcher of bright-red liquid and pouring plain water into it. "The point of the sermon was Jesus had died, and his blood was there to cover our sins," says his sister. "But because sin kept creeping in, it watered down his blood and diluted the purity of Christ, and we became less because we let sin in."

Huckabee's budding gift for oratory carried over at school. He was such a star in speech class that fellow students took him out in the hall at one point and asked him to quit volunteering to go first.

In 10th grade, he was elected class president. He started the Christian Student Union because he was concerned about the spiritual lives of his peers. It wasn't so much that he viewed them as sinners, he insists. "It was really to encourage Christian behavior," he says. "It was an 'anything goes' world at that time. And this was to offer an alternative to the alternative."

In his book "Character Makes a Difference," Huckabee describes 1968 as the year that marked the death of American innocence. "From that year onward," he writes, "we have lived in the age of the birth control pill, free love, gay sex, the drug culture and reckless disregard for standards."

But Huckabee had little firsthand exposure to the excesses of the 1960s. By all accounts, the strife that erupted across much of the nation after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy bypassed Hope. The high school there integrated fairly smoothly in 1969-1970. Drugs were unheard of.

It didn't occur to Huckabee that not everyone went to church until he won a scholarship to a two-week space camp at Cape Canaveral in the summer of 1971. The camp drew top high school sophomores from all over the country. "I was shocked by how many of them had no belief in God at all," recalls Huckabee, who was singled out by one boy as the camp's sole "Jesus freak." Huckabee says he didn't retreat from his beliefs or chide the doubters. "I was the one kid who would explain why it was important."