In an interview with Martha MacCallum, Mike Huckabee claimed that a lack of spirituality is one of the reasons behind the many mass shootings in our nation.

MacCallum first interviewed Warren Farrel who wrote the book “The Boy Crisis”. In that book, he explains the negative social effects of absentee fathers. MacCallum then brought out the former Arkansas governor to elaborate on the crisis. MacCallum called her audience to consider the loss of many positive institutions such as “churches, rotary clubs, Girl and Boy Scouts.”

Huckabee agreed that these institutions going disappearing is a part of the problem, and echoed Farrel’s beliefs.

“There are so many boys who are growing up who are lost, they’re lonely, they feel a sense of rage because perhaps their fathers have left them. They’d love to identify with their fathers but they can’t because their father has disappeared, and they take it personally. They feel like maybe they did something wrong,” Huckabee explained.

The Southern Baptist minister also explained that the lack of father figures cause young boys to shy away from spirituality. This leaves them vulnerable to be drawn towards hateful, fringe ideologies. They do not feel a sense of family and God.

“Those of us who would try to say, ‘Well, look for spiritual answers.’ How can you tell a young man that God wants to be your father if his image of a father is someone who abandoned him or beat up his mother? This is why we have to rethink, but recognize at the same time, that ultimately the hole in the human heart can never be filled just by human things. It has to be filled ultimately by spiritual things that give people a higher sense of who they are, what their identity is, and why they matter.”

When asked about Hillary Clinton’s tweets that blamed guns as the nation’s problems, rather than mental illness and video games, Huckabee dismissed her.

“I don’t remember anybody blaming Bill Clinton, her husband, or Barack Obama. We had mass shootings when they were presidents. It is not a president’s fault, whether it’s Trump, Obama, or George W. Bush.”

“It’s our cultural fault,” Huckabee continued. “And part of what we have done, we’ve created a culture in which we said there is no God and human life isn’t really worth that much, and life is expendable, and there are lives that are disposable. And when a young man believes his life is disposable and expendable, he thinks the lives around him are, too. So why are we so shocked that he would be taking mass killings as his avenue of expressing his rage?”