(Biblical) Illiteracy and Huckabee Allusions

All Things Considered the other day had a story about the biblical allusions that Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee sprinkles in his speeches. NPR played excerpts containing the biblical references to folks who were raised in Christian households and had attended Sunday school. Most of those interviewed had no clue to Huckabee’s meaning. How about you?

In November, as Huckabee surged in the polls, a student at Liberty University asked him what was driving his startling success. Huckabee responded, “It’s the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000 people.”

Wrong: “That’s when Moses … had to feed all the people, the multitude of people that left Egypt,”

For the next quiz question, we played a clip from Huckabee’s Super Tuesday victory speech: “Sometimes, one small smooth stone is even more effective than a whole lot of armor.”

Wrong: “Maybe something to do with the war.”

The next clip also came from Tuesday night’s speech: “We’ve also seen that the widow’s mite has more effectiveness than all the gold in the world.”

Wrong: “I have no clue, I thought a mite was a bug. Is it a spider?”

Professor Stephen Prothero of Boston University said:

“Half of Americans can’t name any of the four Gospels, and that includes the Christians, and half don’t know that Genesis is the first book of the Bible.”

“You could imagine that … this is his secret code way that he could speak to evangelicals without alienating more secular people, but the faulty part of that strategy is the evangelicals don’t even necessarily know these stories.”

It is truly sad to realize that Jay Leno’s ‘Jay Walking’ is not a put-on. Our culture has become so illiterate that unless it is a quote from “Lost”, or “Friends”, people have no clue what you are talking about.

I found this 20 question quiz online that you can use to test your knowledge. I got 19 out of 20.