A Challenging and Interesting Perspective on Glenn Beck

Andrew Walker over at Mere Orthodoxy has posted a video clip featuring the often iconoclastic, but always interesting, Doug Wilson offering what I think is a profoundly true and challenging perspective on Glenn Beck.

Basically, Wilson is asking why Reformed people are failing to fight the pretentious statism so rampant today and leaving the field to a poorly educated Morman to fight the dragon that we (of all people in the world) ought to be fighting. He is surely right in saying that those who sit back and snipe at Glenn Beck and never get around to joining the battle need to be called out. My suspicion is that a secret yearning for cultural approval and status lies at the root of this reluctance to engage the enemy. What do you think?

Ask Doug: Glenn Beck from Canon Wired on Vimeo.

I know that not all Evangelicals and Reformed Protestants have been sitting on the sidelines. Credit should be given to those leading the Manhattan Declaration movement and those who are are willing to stand up and be counted. Yet, Wilson is still right (in my view) in implying that Evangelicalism is largely lethargic and confused and the Reformed are holding back inexplicably. What say you?

Attacks on Glenn Beck Don't Make Sense

I am frankly still making up my mind about what to think about Glenn Beck. I don't watch TV except a few excerpts from shows that appear on blogs so I have barely heard him speak more than a few times. But I do admire anybody who uses a chalkboard on TV and I especially admire anybody who riles up liberal elititists so effortlessly. I think he is in Jim Wallis' head and I think he alternates with Sarah Palin in Barack Obama's nightmares. But the flimsiness and totally off base attacks on him from the liberal media make me suspect that he is more than a mere entertainer. Whatever he is or is not, they don't seem to understand him.

A case in point is this hit piece by Al Hunt at Bloomberg News. Hunt tries to tie him to Father Coughlin and Fascism and in the process demonstrates his gob-smacking ignorance of history, Father Coughlin and Fascism all at once. If this is the best they have to use on Beck, they haven't got anything. Hunt writes:

Glenn Beck, at his successful “Restoring America” rally in Washington, wrapped himself in the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. He fits much better with another religious-political figure, the late Charles E. Coughlin, the Catholic priest who led a populist-right crusade against President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s.

Beck and King, the erudite civil-rights legend, share little in common. Beck and Coughlin share a great deal: as mesmerizing broadcasters able to articulate the anger and frustration of a flock frightened by economic hard times. . . .

Beck has brilliantly parlayed his pitch to fame and fortune. More than the other right-wing talk show provocateurs, Beck’s devotees see him as a teacher. Jason Chaffetz, a Republican congressman from Utah, calls him a “great educator.” He’s likely to energize some of his following to help Republicans in the November congressional elections.

Yet the Coughlin parallel remains instructive. The priest was brought down when it became apparent his gospel was based less on faith and hope than on fear and prejudice. This also is why the Glenn Beck gospel won’t appeal to most Americans or endure politically.

Notice the Marxist analysis: Beck's whole appeal can be explained away by reference to economic factors. One wonders if Hunt even knows that he is utilizing a Marxist theory based on materialism and economic determinism. Robert Wargas at NewsReal Blog has little difficulty showing the complete failure of the Beck-Coughlin comparison.

Even a superficial knowledge of Charles Coughlin is enough to dispel Hunt’s theory straight away. Coughlin was essentially an American spokesman for European fascism, an anti-Semitic, anti-capitalist firebreather who believed, as did Hitler, that Jewish bankers were behind everything from the Russian Revolution to the crust you find in the corner of your eyes when you wake up.

False comparisons between fascists and conservatives usually arise from a tendency to regard both as “right wing.” Since the term “right wing” has, historically, been the victim of far more imprecise usage than “left wing,” it remains an amorphous grab-bag into which leftists dump whatever views they don’t like so they can bask in their inability to make distinctions.

Coughlin represented a peculiar political breed that is largely dead nowadays but that was burgeoning noticeably in the interwar period. His views combined extreme racist nationalism with anti-capitalist economics. Such a combination of views is indicative of, to a greater or lesser degree, fascism. There is much more to fascism than this, but one can tell a lot by these two views alone.

Beck is a classical 19th century liberal (i.e. a believer in economic freedom or capitalism) and a big supporter of Israel and opponent of anti-semitism. Sounds just like Coughlin and Hitler, right? Wrong. Classical Liberalism is what both Fascism and Communism must destroy in order to take over. Wargas elaborates on Coughlin:

Though he initially supported Franklin Delando Roosevelt, Coughlin grew tired of what he believed was FDR’s subordination to business interests. An acid-tongued populist, Coughlin pushed for welfare benefits for the poor that far exceeded Roosevelt’s New Deal. He even started a newspaper that focused on this fight for national restructuring.

He called his paper “Social Justice.”

Oh, there is a delicious little irony - can anyone imagine Beck entitling his newspaper "Social Justice?" Well, maybe Al Hunt can; he seems to have a fertile imagination that he uses to bash conservatives instead of historical facts and a basic understanding of political theory. But when you are out to play to the liberal gallery, this sort of rot apparently will do just fine. Wargas again:

Today, we have been fooled into thinking that racism equals right-wing and therefore capitalism, and that tolerance equals leftism and therefore socialism. This distinction has never been true. Racists throughout history have been both socialist and capitalist and everything in between. Socialism’s sordid history regarding racial matters can even be seen in the writings of its secular high priest, Karl Marx.

Moreover, what is consistently left out of any discussion of fascism is that it was originally culled from the body of socialist thought. Mussolini was, in his younger years, a leftist who imbibed the work of Georges Sorel and Vilfredo Pareto. Hitler spends the entire first section of Mein Kampf railing against the plight of the Viennese worker and constructing a worldview based on fighting “Jewish” economic hegemony.

In reality, Fascism is a dead ideology today. To the extent that anything resembling it exists today, one would need to look at contemporary liberalism, or as Jonah Goldberg terms it, liberal fascism. And if there is anything Beck is against, it would be that.

Wallis versus Beck on Social Justice

Stu Burguiere, executive producer of the Glenn Beck Show, defends Beck against Jim Wallis' accusations in the Washington Post in an article entitled: "What Glenn Beck Meant About Social Justice." Here is an excerpt:

"Like everyone else in America, Glenn Beck thinks "social justice" ---if its defined as charitable outreach to the poor----is a good idea. He supports it, he believes in it, he does it.

So, what's the problem? I mean, "social justice" seems like such an innocuous phrase, right? It paints a picture of fairness. I guess that's why Father Charles Coughlin used it when naming his National Union for Social Justice and his publication Social Justice Weekly. Coughlin was an anti-Semitic religious broadcaster in the 1930s, and he used the banner of social justice to attack capitalism, warn of Jewish plots against "Christian civilization", and to promote his adoration for Italian Fascist Benito Mussolini.

This is part of the information Glenn revealed in a special TV show about American extremism of the 20th century. In the context of promoting that special, he began talking about how the far left was once again using this terminology to politicize churches. The specific example he named was Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

He told his listeners that if they were in a church that preaches Jeremiah Wright-style social justice, they should leave--or at least get educated on what exactly that means. It took him all of eight seconds to clarify the type of church he was speaking of, but that was long enough for most in the media to end the transcript.

Suddenly, Glenn was accused of attacking the central tenets of the bible, because he supposedly believed that any church that wants to help the poor should be immediately evacuated. This absurd narrative is mainly the product of Rev. Jim Wallis.

To restate the obvious, some simply use the term "social justice" as a substitute for "outreach to the poor." This is not the kind of "social justice" Glenn was talking about. The fact that this term has been utilized for purposes other than good Christian charity is well documented. One scholar explained it quite clearly: "it is true that term [has] been used by the right and the left for all kinds of ideological purposes that aren't necessarily the purposes of Christ." That scholar was Jim Wallis.

Read the rest here.

The issue between Beck and Wallis is not whether Christians (and all decent people) should give to charity. Everyone agrees we should.

But it is one thing to advocates charity and quite another to despise it as too little and too ineffective. Wallis advocates government assuming the power to confiscate everybody's income and redistribute it according to the dogma of equality of outcomes as administered by a bureaucratic class of experts. Beck says that people have a moral obligation to give to the poor. Wallis says they have a moral obligation to vote for political parties that will redistribute wealth by coercion. So it is really a "Private Charity versus Social Democracy" debate.

Do we only have "social justice" when we have a social democracy in which the income is redistributed by the government so that everyone is basically equal economically regardless of how productive each one is? If that is social justice, then Beck opposes it and so most Americans.

And so do most Christians, because while we follow Jesus' teaching and render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, we don't believe that everything belongs to Caesar. Only those who have sold out to Caesar believe that.