Huckabee Lauds Christian Education, Decries Declining Morality
Posted Oct 9, 2014
Fox News host and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee spoke about personal morality and teh value of Christian education at Union University's 17th Annual Scholarship Banquet Oct. 7 at the Carl Perkins Civic Center.
Huckabee said he was delighted to assist Union because he gradauted from another Southern Baptist liberal arts college, Ouchita Baptist University in Arkansas.
As the first male in his family to attend college, Huckabee was dependent on scholarships.
"i didn't have a trust fund," he said. "All I could do was trust God to help me fund it, and that was my trust fund." Huckabee also worked full time as a disc jockey at a local radio stations, studying while the record played. HIs hard-earned education has paid off, he said.
Students who go to a school like Union will have an education that put them on par with students whogo to any Ivy Leage University in America," Huckabee said, citing his personal experience debating Harvard Law graduates.
Union students will have an additional advantage over their secular peers, HUckabee said: "A person is far better off if they are prepared not only in their minds but in their spirits . . . We're living in an age where people have utterly rejected God's truth and are proud of it."
Huckbaee said students need to be able to defend their faith in an increasingly secular world, as skill Union will give them.
A former Southern Baptist pastor, Huckabee also stressed the importance of personal morality.
"The best government we will ever have . . . is when we are governed by peopel who understand taht the best government is self-government: people who govern themselves according to their conscience and the law," he said. "A country built on the idea of personal liberty cannot survive without an equal emphasis on personal responsibility and personal morality. The reason why government is so big is because people's morality has gotten so small.
Huckabee said the cost of putting a person in jail for a year exceeds the cost of putting him or her through four years of college, complete with room and board, books, and spending money. He also said a high school teacher with a basic college degree would contribute $250,000 of value to the state during his or her lifetime, while a frequent guest of the prison system would cost the state $1.5 million.
"If we don't have morality, we can't afford the economics of immorality, and that's why righteousness will save a nation and unrighteousness will kill it," Huckabee said.
The antidote to this unrighteousness, Huckabee said, is to raise up a generation of skilled Christian youth who can defend their convictions and are willing to suffer for them.
"We need to get back to an understanding that some things are right and some things are wrong," Huckabee said, "not because we voted on them, but because God established them in his Word."
The annual Scholarship Banquet has become one of the premiere events in West Tennessee each year, and is Union's primary fundraising event for its student scholarship fund. Previous speakers have included George H. W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Condoleeza Rice, Ben Carson, Mikhail Gorbachev, Laura Bush, Tony Blair, adn Robert Gates.
Article by Kate Bendetti of Union University News and Relations