BECK

With my family out of town this week I have been spending an increased amount of time bathed in the blue glow of my television. I don't know how many channels we have with our cable package, but I basically only watch a handful of them- Fox News, The NFL Network, ESPN, A&E, National Geographic, Discovery, and The History Channel. Occasionally I will pay a visit to MSNBC or CNN and I will also occasionally troll through the other channels on the off chance that a good movie or something is showing. Between the Discovery Channel (278) and MSNBC (356) is a vast wasteland of cartoons and music stations which I simply never visit.

Last night I was skipping through the channels, but was not having any luck finding anything to pique my interest. I had already gone around the horn, CBS to the Weather Channel and back, three times without finding anything when I decided to commit to an episode of Glenn Beck.

I have been critical of Beck in the past, only once here on the BFZ, but quite regularly in private conversation. Every time I make a statement that is critical of Mr. Beck, however, I feel a pang of guilt because, in truth, I have never actually watched his program all the way through. I had watched O'Reilly, Maddow, and even the odious Keith Olberman, but I had never given Beck a fair shot. So I settled on the weather channel for a moment to cleanse the intellectual palate, then I punched 3-6-0 into the remote and jumped over to FOX news to give Beck a fair hearing.

I'm still not a fan.

Beck reminds me of a spinning tire- all noise and flying mud without any forward progress. His appeal is too heavily weighted toward the emotional. He talks like a man who thinks everyone in the room agrees with him. His posture is panicky and not persuasive in the least. A good argument will wed emotional appeal to intellectual substance, and, in my opinion, Beck lacks intellectual gravitas. Beck and I would agree on what’s wrong I think, but perhaps not on how to fix things. To put it another way, we would likely agree in substance, but not in spirit. I wish he were not such a prominent champion of conservative ideals.

At least I can criticize him now with a clear conscience.

In my mind, Beck is guilty of the same sort of feeble rationale that is becoming all too common among my fellow Christians. Have you ever noticed how often Beck appeals to the founding fathers to support his arguments while sputtering impotently at the current state of things. American Christians have taken to doing the same thing with alarming frequency. They trot out quotes from Jefferson and Franklin that demonstrate our nation’s Christian heritage, and hold them up like they ought to mean something to Bobby Bag-O-Doughnuts off the street.

Who cares?

Whether or not the likes of Jefferson and Franklin were even Christians is debatable, but they certainly were shrewd politicians who wisely packaged their radical ideas in the language of a culture that was deeply, and I believe sincerely, religious. That’s the whole point. Americans seem to believe that it was our visionary founding fathers who shaped the country, but I believe it is closer to the truth that the nation’s earliest leaders were shaped by a public that demanded they make their argument through the lens of faith. That is the history of our people, a good beginning to be sure, but that is a sword that swings in both directions. Today’s irreligious public is shaping our leadership and providing us with a new direction.

I have always thought that politics is a better reflection of society than art. Art is often ahead of society, but politics are usually spot on. The trajectory of things may not seem encouraging for the U.S.A., and that is an understandably emotional conclusion for those of us who hold a special affection for our people, but I fear there is little to gain by invoking the founding fathers and sputtering about what used to be. Bobby Bag-O-Doughnuts doesn’t care.