Beck’s America

I must say I was impressed with the turn out at Glenn Beck’s Restore America rally at the mall in DC yesterday, but I’ll also admit, I’m a bit uncomfortable.  The event has all the earmarks of the early days of the Moral Majority – a well meaning conglomeration of Catholics, Evangelicals and others seeking a moral high ground for America in a political context.  Beck’s “get back to God” falls into this category in my humble opinion, but it also begs an important question or two: “Which God?”  “Whose God?”

Some time ago I was confronted with the very well thought out and well written Manhattan Statement.  Frankly, for me, it has all the right ideas.  But those who sign the statement claim to agree with one another on some basic tenets of faith, and the unfortunate thing about the Manhattan Statement is that some of the signers really do not agree about the nature of God, though they claim to, so in good conscience I could not sign it , and though one of my most favorite Christian authors,, Chuck Colson, endorses the Statement, another of my most favorite Christian writers, R. C. Sproul, could not and did not, and for the reasons I have also come to.

So if I can’t sign something as excellently thought out, comprehensive, well written and in the right direction on all matters social and political as the Manhattan Statement, I find myself all the more at odds with the very broad, very generic “get back to God” theme touted in DC yesterday.  In fact, it gives me kind of a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach because I see so many who, with good intentions, are getting swallowed up in something so shallow.  And when it dissipates, they will be disillusioned.

Beck is a Mormon, and as a Christian I say Christ was the God-Man sent by the Father, foreshadowed in the Old Testament as the “Son of Man” as mentioned in the Book of Daniel; Immanuel and the suffering servant in the Book of Isaiah.  Mormons do not agree with Christ’s claim to diety, that as Christ claimed, “Before Abraham, I Am,” and that Christ was / is the God-man, the Second Adam, who paid humanities debt with His own flesh and blood and justified His flock.  We are millions of miles apart on tenants of faith, though we may have agreement about culture, social issues, government intrusion, taxes, but let’s be honest, we do not agree on who is God.

So I’m a bit uncomfortable about Beck and those flying under his flag right now, including Sarah Palin.  Oh it’s nice to hear public figures make professions of faith in public, it encourages their fans to do likewise, but give me Billy Graham for that kind of thing. 

I know this is a departure from the many of my compatriot conservatives with whom I find myself in general agreement on the tactical issues, but let’s just agree to disagree about this fundamental, strategic concept for conservatism in America.  My God is a lot bigger than what Beck and co. are making Him out to be.  He is not a vague moral choice.  He is God.  And don’t mess with Him.  Don’t use Him like this please.  He just might not like it, and might let you know in some of the ways He showed it in His word.  Be careful with this.

When you have your rallies, I might smile wryly as I hear the ideas with which I may have some agreement, and perhaps chuckle embarrassingly a bit when I hear something hollow said about a generic god, and you might find the likes of me going along for the ride for now.  But let’s be clear, as the President would say in a his typical patronizing manner, I am not one of you.  I march to a different Drummer, and if and when the going gets us into the slough of despond, I will not be standing with you on getting back to God.  Your God is too small.

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Rod Dreher: Glenn Beck’s world order endangers the right

I usually discover that the Projo is off its rocker.  But here is an op ed piece that appeared in today’s printed version of the Projo that I agree with.  As a conservative, Glenn Beck concerns me when starts heading for deep waters.  Dreher is with the Dallas Morning News, affiliated with the Projo:

YOU CAN SAY THIS for Glenn Beck: He’s charismatic, he was right on ACORN and Van Jones, and he’s correct to point out that the government in Washington doesn’t work for the common good. The affable Beck articulates the legitimate anger and frustration that millions of Americans feel when faced by the fact that the country is in a hot mess of trouble.

But here’s the thing: Beck is a white Jeremiah Wright, a crazy-pants conspiracy theorist whose world-view is rooted in the paranoid teachings of a far-right Mormon political guru named W. Cleon Skousen. Before signing up as a recruit in Beck’s army, conservative Becketeers had better think long and hard about where their affable leader is taking them.

A few weeks back, the red-hot Fox News Channel phenom spent nine minutes on the air leading a seminar on public artwork in New York City. By the time he was finished, Beck had illuminated a propaganda conspiracy linking communists, fascists, the Soviet Union, the Rockefeller family and the United Nations. This is the sort of weirdo rant you expect to encounter on fringey Web sites. You don’t expect to see it on national television.

But that’s a big part of Beck’s shtick. He’s always carrying on about sinister Obamaite conspiracies threatening to overthrow the constitutional order. On the Fox & Friends morning show, Beck declared: “The Manchurian Candidate couldn’t destroy us faster than Barack Obama. If you were planning a sleeper to come in and become president of the United States, this is how he would do it.”

How is it that a man can call the American president a traitorous subversive and not be laughed, or booed, off the national stage? He’s a happy-go-lucky Howard Beale (from the movie Network). Paddy Chayefsky, you should have lived to see this moment.

Beck’s paranoia doesn’t come from nowhere. His man Skousen was a fanatical Mormon reactionary so far to the right that the Latter-day Saints Church finally felt compelled to distance itself from his teaching.

Beck, an enthusiastic Mormon convert, pushes Skousen’s 1981 book, The 5,000 Year Leap, a tendentious pseudo-history of the U.S. that interprets the founding in religious terms. Texas Gov. Rick Perry recommended it at the recent Values Voter Summit in Washington. And if the pious nationalism of that book were all you knew about Skousen, you would be hard-pressed to see what the big deal was.

But Skousen wrote many less anodyne books about politics — and held views far darker than revealed in the hokey but harmless Leap. In a 1976 lecture, the audio of which is available on the pro-Skousen Web site AwakeAndArise.org, Skousen rails like an Old Testament prophet, quoting Mormon scriptures and detailing how Satan is working with “secret combinations” — a Mormon theological term — within political parties, churches, labor unions and the wealthy elite, especially the Rockefeller family, to bring about the “One World Order.”

Skousen, like his follower Beck, is obsessed with the idea that these secret combinations are conniving to overthrow the U.S. Constitution. Though it is not part of official LDS doctrine, some Mormons believe in an apocalyptic prophecy attributed to church founder Joseph Smith, who supposedly taught that the Constitution would one dark day be hanging by a thread and that Mormon elders would rescue it.

The pudgy, sweet-natured Beck offers a more palatable form of this paranoia — but all his fruit and sugar can’t hide the Skousenite firewater. How ironic that conservative Christians who unjustly dunned conventional Mitt Romney because of his LDS faith are uncritically backing the squirrelly Beck, who looks like he’s casting himself as hero of a prophetic Mormon melodrama.

There are conservatives who know perfectly well that Beck is an unhinged buffoon who traffics in crude, ridiculous ideas. But unlike the hapless GOP, he’s popular and effective in the political war against Obama. So these conservative cynics adopt a “no enemies to the right” approach to Beck, even though he’s mainstreaming the ooga-booga worldview of a crank prophet who believed, with the John Birch Society, that Eisenhower was a closet commie.

This is foolish. Not every enemy of Obama is a friend to conservatism. In 1962, in a time when conservatives needed all the help they could get, William F. Buckley nevertheless published in National Review a lengthy denunciation of paranoid Bircher Robert Welch. How long, Buckley asked, can the right tolerate his malicious gibberish without losing credibility? National Review eventually sidelined the Birchers for good over their “psychosis of conspiracy,” thus doing the right an enormous service by making conservatism more credible with the American mainstream.

Today, poor Bill is in the grave, Glenn Beck’s ratings are soaring, and most conservatives don’t see what the problem is. One way or another, they will.

Rod Dreher is a columnist for The Dallas Morning News ( rdreher@dallasnews.com).

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Concerned Women for America supports Rhode Island House bill H5044A

HT: Donna Hughes from the University of Rhode Island:

Concerned Women for America supports Rhode Island House bill H5044A and urges lawmakers to pass it in order to close the loophole that allows indoor prostitution in Rhode Island. Prostitution, whether it occurs indoors or outdoors, is devastating to those exploited by it, the community exposed to it and the culture that glamorizes it.

The House bill leaves in place the existing laws against pandering and the recruitment and transportation of people for prostitution while defining prostitution to include indoor venues.  It goes a step further by adding an affirmative defense for a prostituted person who was forced to commit a commercial sex act.  The House bill will enable the police to investigate possible crimes because the offenses are misdemeanors. 

The Senate bill makes the first offenses for prostitutes and johns a violation.  According to the Rhode Island Office of the Public Defender’s website,  “There are several types of offenses, some of which are relatively trivial. First, there are offenses called VIOLATIONS which are not considered ‘crimes’ in the ordinary use of the word.”  Some of the examples they cite as violations are parking tickets, broken headlights and illegal shell fishing.  The website says, ‘MISDEMEANOR offenses are more serious than violations.’  The examples of misdemeanors given are driving while intoxicated, stealing property worth less than $500, and simple assault.

The House bill recognizes the buying and selling of sex as a crime worthy of police attention and investigation and that the prostituted are frequently victims of those who pimp them and purchase them.  The Senate bill deems buying and selling access to orifices for periods of time as no worse than parking at an expired meter. 

Prostitution crimes are not found in a vacuum.  Where there is prostitution there are other crimes, the worst of which are child sexual exploitation and sexual trafficking.  Please support H5044A to give the victims of the commercial sex industry a fighting chance to be rescued and have their dignity restored and law enforcement the ability to investigate these crimes.

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