When Maurice Clemmons became the lead suspect in the shooting of four officers in the state of Washington, many people gleefully condemned Mike Huckabee for commuting the 108 year sentence Clemmons received in Arkansas. While some on the Left might have imagined that this would be a blow to Republican discourse about being tough on crime, they are missing the fact that many conservatives do not embrace Huckabee's position on many issues. This incident actually provided an opportunity for some conservatives to more firmly articulate why the former presidential candidate is not a good brand for the party. Huckabee's religious convictions led him to show mercy to Clemmons, a position that Conservative Underground founder Tim Dunkin calls "soft Christianity." For Dunkin, all that woolly-headed liberal Christian thinking produces things like the  social gospel and liberation theology, pushing Christian practices that should be individual—such as forgiveness and sympathy for the poor and oppressed—into social policies.

But it is hard to blame Huckabee for being confused on this point, as the complex mapping of public and private expression of Christian belief in relationship to social policy is not easily discernible. Do we believe that all the stones thrown in public discourse are cast by the sinless, or that they just refrain from casting stones in their private lives? Jeff Sharlet tells us in The Family that some U.S. Christian power brokers believe that Jesus only said the meek were blessed in order to sell people on the idea of Christianity while "the elect" could go about the business of running the world.

Forgiving those who sin against us is nonetheless institutionalized in our justice system, albeit inadequately. But as a culture, we have a much harder time with that practice, and for good reason—it is difficult, and in extreme cases, it can sometimes pose a risk to ourselves or others if you forgive someone, as Jesus requires, "seventy times seven." A glance at some of the message boards discussing recent murders in the U.S. will reveal four typical evocations of God: the victims have found a place in heaven; bless the family; God has a plan; and in a few cases, the disturbing suggestion that God makes a division between the deserving and undeserving. Forgiving the offender is rarely evoked in the everyday  political parlance of the Christian Right.

Thus the story of Huckabee's mercy and Clemmons' crime is not necessarily a good example of the Right not calling their own to task. It is more interesting as an example of a Christian conservative upholding principles that should be consistent with the theological mandate of the Republican party.  But these principles have fallen outside of public policy and into private life in a political party that has, over the last three decades, increasingly relegated "soft" virtues like forgiveness to the private sphere. Journalists should closely scrutinize the Christian Right's policies in relationship to crime and punishment in the wake of this incident, not because a prominent Christian conservative violated the law-and-order narrative, but because he upheld the Christian principles of mercy and forgiveness, and the Republican Party cannot tolerate forgiveness and mercy in relationship to its crime-and-punishment doctrine.

Rebecca Wanzo is an associate professor of English and Women's Studies at the Ohio State University. Her first book, The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling, looks at how citizens frame stories about suffering to make their claims intelligible to the state. Her current book project, The Melancholic Patriot, examines representations of African American citizenship in comic art.