Glenn Beck’s American Ark

Beck has become a preacher. Turn down the sound and he is indistinguishable from the televised megachurch evangelists who hammer away at sin day and night. The relentless pacing of the stage, punctuated with pregnant pauses and abrupt stops; the impish “we know something they don’t know” grins; the fierce earnestness; the odd and inscrutable gazing into the distance; the weeping and wailing for the nation’s soul.

Beck has fashioned a faith that merges politics and religion—and he is its messiah. It is a faith that draws on and re-enacts the nation’s most enduring religious tradition: decrying a cancer within the body politic and calling for redemption and a return to wholeness. Think of witches, slavery, Catholics, Jews and blacks. Think of the John Birch Society and godless Communists.

What has replaced witches and slavery and minorities and Communism is the American state. Not the America that exists in Beck’s imagination, but “establishment” America, represented by the federal government’s bloated bureaucratic agencies, addiction to spending and secular humanism. “Those with the spiritual armor will save the republic,” Beck cries out near the end of Broke.

Of course, this is all an act: an act of faith. Faith is a conviction that goes beyond the available evidence and becomes true through the process of believing. Beck has constructed a story in which America is at war against itself—the “real” America against a usurper state. It’s the founders and their true descendants who believe in freedom versus the progressives—from Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama—who believe in the enslavement of individuals and the ever-increasing power of the state.

A century of progressivism—which is to say, treason—brought us to this point. Now, the battle is on.

via azspot.net

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