For the record, I do not hate Glenn Beck. Honestly, I try hard not to hate anyone. Secondly, I am not sure I have watched enough Glenn Beck to hate him. In full disclosure, I can really only tolerate a few minutes before I have to turn the channel. It’s like country music for me. Further, Glenn Beck (and these political talk-shows) are forms of entertainment that I do not enjoy and I typically abide the motto, “If you don’t like it – change the channel”. But here’s where it got tricky for me. You can’t change the channel on your fellow brothers and sisters in the Lord. So this post is an expression of a problem that I feel we as evangelicals are having.
You may have caught that in the first paragraph that I equated political talk shows as entertainment? Indeed they are. CNN, FoxNews, The Daily Show, all of them – are not created to inform the public necessarily. Sure they give us news but there is something else going on. Rather, they are created to entertain, to inspire you to get you keep watching, to anger you with carefully edited information to insure you tune in tomorrow. All this to pay the network sponsors and we do that every time we got to Burger King, pick up DiGiorna’s Pizza or even buy a car. If you are still having trouble following me, consider reading the amazing book, Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. It’s an eye-opener.
I am not against Glenn Beck per say – he’s just doing his job. He’s getting people to tune in and clearly he’s doing a great job at that. My real concern is that the evangelical obsession with him (and other FoxNews personalities). They seemingly speak our language – love your family, protect America, honor God and fight against the things that grieve Him like terrorism and socialism. It’s a great shtick – “We need to bring this country BACK to its values!”. “We need to guard our families from those who intend on harming us!”. “We need to give back to the hard-working family that are trying to raise their kids right, put food on the table and one day send them to college!”. “Let’s give our children a chance!” … I could go on but you get the idea right?
Let’s face it, who can argue with that? No one I know is against hard-working families. Nor do I anyone I know wants Americans to be harmed. And I don’t know anyone who is against “values”, though we may disagree on what they are and how far would we should go to get them.
Let me tell you who Glenn Beck is – he’s the first televangelist of the post-911, cable news era. What King Saul was to the people of Israel, Glenn Beck is today’s conservative evangelical. Just like Saul was not Israel’s first “leader” and Beck not the first Fox News personality to make it big, Beck has emerged to be today’s evangelical leader (Yeah consider O’Reilly and Hannity to be like the “judges” of old ;-).
But Beck seems to be the evangelical’s choice. It’s an odd pick, since you know, he’s a television superstar, his shifting views on gay marriage, and he’s not an Evangelical – he’s Mormon!!! Yet he’s leading evangelicals in a God and Country rally at the Lincoln Memorial. (I won’t even get into the arrogance of doing this on the 47th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” given on the March to Washington for Jobs and Freedom). Pardon the exclamations but I can hardy stand the Billy Graham comparisons.
I am not saying that evangelicals should not watch his show but some are more faithful to watching then worshipping at their local churches. Some quote and share his words more than their own pastors’ and the worst – some know his message better than Jesus’! I am also not suggesting that we cannot agree that honor, values, principles are indeed noble and important practices for us as individuals and as a society – of course they are. What I am saying is that he is not a leader for evangelicals. We ought to seek that wisdom from actual evangelicals (preferably not on primetime television) like many of our fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, our pastors, godly people throughout our communities, our great writers living and non-living and the true characters that our faith and church have celebrated throughout the ages. Let us, as evangelicals, be inspired by them as we follow Christ.
Am I right that Beck in the first televangelist of the post-911, cable news era? You are welcome to disagree or reframe it in another way.
More tomorrow …
I’m tweeting this.
Well said!