Mike Huckabee is running for president. He will not win. But when he inevitably bows out of the Republican primaries, it will only be one more loss in a greater, longer defeat in America's culture wars.

Prior to his post as the governor of Arkansas, Huckabee was a communications director for James Robison, one of those quintessential televangelists of the 1970s and '80s with the long dense sideburns and an ever-present sheen of stage-light sweat. Robison, along with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, were among those enterprising evangelicals who managed to convert Billy Graham’s right-wing-funded gospel empire into the confederation of conservative Christians known as the Religious Right. In the ensuing romance between the evangelical voting bloc and the Republican Party, Robison and President Ronald Reagan enjoyed a cozy relationship, the sort that typified all the GOP believed it could get out of evangelical voters, and all evangelicals supposed they could accomplish through Republican leadership. Together, they were on the offensive in the culture wars, which they were determined to win.

This bond of mutual expectations lasted well into the Bush era, with President George W. Bush continuing the tradition of getting tight with celebrity pastors by taking Ted Haggard, the superstar pastor then at the helm of Colorado megachurch New Life Church, into his confidence. (Haggard in turn did a great deal to endear Bush to the millions of evangelicals who formed the National Association of Evangelicals, over which the pastor presided from 2003 to 2006.) Bush received his highest level of support from any demographic group from white evangelicals in 2004, earning 78 percent of the white evangelical vote. And, even when things got bad, when no weapons of mass destruction turned up in Iraq and grotesque pictures from Abu Ghraib prison hit newsstands and nearly two thousand people died in Hurricane Katrina, evangelicals still approved of Bush at higher levels than the population at large. But their confidence was slipping.

Looking back on this period is a strange thing. Jesus Camp, the 2006 documentary by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, seems now a kind of time capsule, the entire religious texture of the Bush era condensed into a couple hours’ footage of evangelical kids at worship. In a now-infamous scene, a youth pastor brings a cardboard cutout of then-president Bush before a throng of swaying evangelical children, who are then instructed to bless the president in effigy, and perform spiritual warfare over him.

What is curious now is the enthusiastic certainty that permeates the whole film, attached to Bush and the Republican establishment but not exclusive to it; at that time, evangelicals really believed that the reclamation of America for God was at hand. As Huckabee proclaimed in his 2006 Values Voters Summit speech, “I was not a person of politics who embraced faith, I was a person of faith who decided that we needed more of us in politics, and that's why I'm here.” He concluded his speech by saying, “I would suggest that we need an evangelical version of ‘shock and awe.’”