Glenn Beck recently sat down with Rev. Billy Graham for a three hour meeting. The differences in worldviews can be summed up in this one line:
“I spoke of a growing darkness and evil,” Beck said of his meeting with Graham. “He spoke of a greater growth of light.”
So did Graham’s optimistic vision make a lasting impression? Of course not. This is Glenn Beck we’re talking about.
“In sitting there and speaking to Reverend Graham, I thought, here is a man who has been all around the world,” Beck explained on his website on Tuesday, apparently a transcript of comments made on his radio show on Monday. “Here’s a man who has seen it all. Here’s a man who’s done profound good. One of the first to stand in Alabama as a white preacher and stand and say we must come together.”
“My message to you,” Beck continued, “is we must come together. Evil has ‑‑ the left has stood ‑‑ is standing now with profound and clear evil and they’ve connected from evil all the way to the average Democrat and everything in between.
As Peter Wehner writes in a post titled “The Most Disturbing Personality on Cable Television,”
One cannot watch [Beck] for any length of time without being struck by his affinity for conspiracies and for portraying himself as the great decoder of events. Political movements are not just wrong; they are infiltrated by a web of malevolent forces. Others see the shadows on the wall; Beck alone sees the men casting them. The danger when one paints the world in such conspiratorial terms is that it devalues the rational side of politics. It encourages a cast of mind that looks to expose enemies rather than to engage in arguments.
February 25th, 2011 | 8:31 am
Perhaps Mr. Beck needs to read Eph. 6:12 as I’m sure Mr. Graham has. That and the end of the story that makes it plain the Lamb wins. But if Mr. Beck’s hope is in someone other than the Lamb, it likely wouldn’t matter to him.
February 25th, 2011 | 8:38 am
Which is more relevant? Billy Graham was the last gasp of the mainstream “tent-revival” form of protestantism. Usually he seems to be a chaplain for the famous who then proceed to ignore him. I think on reading this many people are surprised he is still alive.
Beck unfortunately is keyed in to a lot of people. Conservatism seems to be gathering more of a paranoid and slightly anarchic edge, and he makes a good spokesman for it. Oh, he wont last: Pat Robertson didn’t, despite covering a lot of the same things albeit from more of a fundamentalist bent. But I don’t see Graham as being even the least bit relevant now, and it’s a bit silly to have an optimistic vision when most of the impact of his crusades has sank into the waters of cultural forgetfulness.
February 25th, 2011 | 8:44 am
I haven’t seen enough of the Beck show to opine on this observation. From the occasions that I have watched Mr. Beck, he has pretty consistently urged his audience to check what he says for themselves, to do the research. Of course, the cynic might say this is a rhetorical gambit and they may be right. And then, they may not.
February 25th, 2011 | 9:21 am
I wouldn’t dismiss some of Beck’s ideas on conspiracies. Consider the slow political shift in Turkey with the Islamic leaning political party in control. Ever wonder about the murder of Catholic clergy, and the refusal return churches to the Orthodox people.
In many parts of the world, people have a great deal of patience in order to get their desires, and use several divergent ways to achieve their ends.
I don;t think many people, especially now and in the West, realize when the “long game” is being played. To many “long term” is 24 hours.
February 25th, 2011 | 10:11 am
Conspiracies as a rule don’t succeed, because only two people can keep a secret, if one of them is dead. More often, there is no formal conspiracy, just a convergence of interests that appears to be one to the casual observer. Nonetheless, the effects of such convergences are real. Just because Beck sounds like a paranoid whack job (actually, to me he sounds more like Moliere’s “Bourgeois Gentilhomme”, who suddenly discovered he was “speaking in prose”) does not mean he is not accurately identifying trend lines.
February 25th, 2011 | 10:45 am
I don’t see Graham as being even the least bit relevant now, and it’s a bit silly to have an optimistic vision when most of the impact of his crusades has sank into the waters of cultural forgetfulness.
Couldn’t we say the same thing of Charles Finney? Graham brought many souls to Christ, and as Jonathon pointed out, he’s on the side of history.
Beck is hardly the only conservative addicted to wild, ad hominem conspiracy theories. Just yesterday I heard Sean Hannity approving of caller talking about “Obama’s ties with the Muslim brotherhood.”
February 25th, 2011 | 11:06 am
I never watch Beck. Well, okay I do – but only when I’m in an already irritable mood and yelling at the television is likely to make me happier.
February 25th, 2011 | 11:59 am
[...] meeting with Graham. “He spoke of a greater growth of light.”More on the Beck and Billy over at First Things.Posted in Great links | Tagged Billy Graham, Glenn Beck | No Comments Trackback URI | Comments [...]
February 25th, 2011 | 12:18 pm
People like Beck and Hannity on the right or Rachel Maddow and Kos on the left traffic in conspiracy theories for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks. Because that’s where the money is. I seriously doubt sober discourse and informed debate about the compelling issues of the day would get a terribly big audience (see H.L. Mencken on the intelligence of the American public). However, to the degree Beck, Rush, Hannity, et. al. help to rid the country of the disaster of liberal rule, they are to that degree at least a good thing.
February 25th, 2011 | 12:23 pm
I never watch Beck. Well, okay I do – but only when I’m in an already irritable mood and yelling at the television is likely to make me happier.
LOL. I’ll have to try that.
February 25th, 2011 | 12:42 pm
More intramural finger-wagging from Carter and Wehner. It’s insufferable.
Beck isn’t my cup of tea. He is promiscuous with his emotions. He is prone to shallow analysis masquerading as depth. But it is clear that these regular run-him-out-of-the-movement lectures, such as the one above, are the triumph of style over substance. Beck’s reflexive critics should appreciate that he gets otherwise complacent allies engaged and informed, despite a sub-academic, less-than-refined method.
Beck is not imploding, as Wehner suggests. He is more popular than ever. He has located an underserved niche and is serving it. So he concentrates a little more on the “dark” side of political developments than Wehner or Carter think is tasteful. That alone does not make Beck a paranoiac or conspiracy theorist. His critics complain about certain turns of phrase or cheesy chalk-board visuals, but they rarely bring a substantive critique to the table.
If we missed the devastating takedown, please direct us to a link. These periodic bouts of the vapors do not constitute a legitimate criticism of an otherwise energetic and positively influential member of the Big Tent.
“I spoke of a growing darkness and evil,” Beck said of his meeting with Graham. “He spoke of a greater growth of light.” Carter sniffs that’s all we need to know. It “sum[s] up” Beck’s “worldview.” And yet, the celebrity-commentator’s public admission of such a contrast bespeaks a greater self-awareness than his critics give him credit for. He is advertising his own comparative deficiency — which otherwise would not have come to Carter’s attention without such a frank inventory of conscience — a deficiency that Carter uses to discredit him. This volunteered and gratuitous act of confession is greater than the underlying deficiency and, by its very deed, demonstrably contradicts the spirit of despair for which he is faulted.
Beck is a one-man super-content provider. He is a showman. It is an occupational hazard for such people to occasionally dip into hyperbole. Yes, he should be scrutinized when he does. But the sheer volume of his daily output will provide enough material for anti-conspiracy conspiracists themselves to string together pointillist impressions that feed their prejudgment of the man. The prejudgment is not accurate and it has become grating.
I will again express again my own distaste with Beck’s style, lest my own reaction be lumped in with so superficial a critique. But Carter is grasping at straws. We require something more substantial than an upturned nose to condemn a man so thoroughly and regularly.
February 25th, 2011 | 12:47 pm
I seriously doubt sober discourse and informed debate about the compelling issues of the day would get a terribly big audience
It gets a significant audience on NPR and PBS, which Beck and his ilk want to cut out all funding for.
February 25th, 2011 | 1:45 pm
Ken,
“It gets a significant audience on NPR and PBS, which Beck and his ilk want to cut out all funding for.”
Yes – because we’re past the day when we should need a government agency to channel tax dollars to produce “sober discourse and informed debate”.
Ken, what you might want to realize is that many people (ilk?) object to the funding, not necessarily the idea. Now I grew up on Nova, This Old House, and don’t even get me started about the Boston Pops Christmas and Fourth of July concerts – there’s good content there. I’m sure it will find ample “viewer support” to continue.
On the other hand, this is the same PBS that, upon the arrival of a favorable Administration, decided to discontinue its decades-long broadcast of Daily Mass – for which there was an enormous homebound audience.
And I’m afraid NPR lost me a few years ago with its abysmally transparent political manipulation of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. When a produced, polished radio segment – not a ‘man-on-the-street’ interview – spends ten minutes concluding in angry terms that the President has intentionally left blacks to die in the streets, one knows for sure that they are no longer getting their dollar’s worth of sober and informed discourse and debate.
And now…back to Billy Graham.
February 25th, 2011 | 1:46 pm
I like Stuart Koehl’s take. I almost never watch Beck but have nothing against him. If people like him, so what? That’s the market.
I’m also one of that ilk that would cut NPR and PBS funding. They produce good shows but always larded with liberal agit-prop. It gets very annoying. Maybe Congress should order that to keep its money these liberal organs must now and then let a conservative or Republican near the mike. Or even let one debate with a liberal. What a change that would be!
February 25th, 2011 | 1:46 pm
*I seriously doubt sober discourse and informed debate about the compelling issues of the day would get a terribly big audience
It gets a significant audience on NPR and PBS, which Beck and his ilk want to cut out all funding for.*
If that’s true, then why do they need federal funding?
February 25th, 2011 | 1:52 pm
I happen to watch Beck everyday, almost. I have been amazed by what I have seen on video. Beck seems to be sincere in his beliefs, and what he shares, most of which is given to him by anonymous contributers within the establishment. How would we have known about the avowed communist, Van Jones, the green jobs czar. This was shown dramatically in their own words by video. The videos that Beck shows his audience are revealing and does cause concern for many. There are too many videos and people to mention here. Darkness and light are not mutually exclusive. Beck is actually shedding light on these people, and they don’t like it. They actually hate him with tremendous vigor. Where does hate come from?
We all choose to be informed or not. “A people are destroyed for lack of knowledge”.
February 25th, 2011 | 1:56 pm
My issue with Beck is that for every viewer he “engages” he leaves another one with the impression that conservatives are deranged whackjobs. Yes, in some abstract sense there may not be anything technically wrong with his emotive approach if you have the patience for it, but appearances do matter if you really want people to take conservatism seriously.
February 25th, 2011 | 2:14 pm
I don’t have cable TV, so don’t watch Beck’s show, but I’m a bit confused about the critique here. Is thinking that there is “growing darkness and evil” in the world somehow supposed to be objectively crazy? Because then it seems to me that, for example, the whole St. Michael’s Prayer story demonstrates that the Catholic Church is one big collection of loonies. And Churchill in the 1930s was nuts. And anti-Communists should have been drummed out of polite society.
Or are you just assuming that we’re supposed to see “Glenn Beck” and immediately think “bonkers” no matter what thin gruel you put before us, relying on what is at root a simple ad hominem attack (Glenn Beck said X, and he’s crazy, therefore X is crazy)? Because I have no opinion about or interest in Glenn Beck, and I sure as heck think that is “growing darkness and evil” about, as there always has been and always will be (while also thinking they’ll be defeated in the end, as has always been inevitable).
February 25th, 2011 | 2:25 pm
Brian Is thinking that there is “growing darkness and evil” in the world somehow supposed to be objectively crazy?
No, not necessarily. But for Beck, the growing darkness and evil is always the result of some conspiracy of Bad People who are trying to ruin the world. Sometimes the Bad People are Catholics (Beck doesn’t like “social justice”) and sometimes they are Jews (Beck recently had to apologize for comparing rabbis of Reform Judaism to radical Islam) and sometimes they are Commies but they are never the good folks that follow him.
And I don’t think Beck is “bonkers,” I think he’s a shallow opportunist. I won’t say that he doesn’t believe what he’s spouting because that would imply that he has thought about and/or cares about the crazy stuff he says. I think he cares less about Truth than he does in getting attention. For Beck attention is like air, he couldn’t live without it.
February 25th, 2011 | 2:35 pm
Mr. Carter: All of that well may be true, but then it makes your introduction (“The differences in worldviews can be summed up in this one line”) too broad, and indeed misleading, since the line you quote says nothing at all about conspiracies or anything else, so I had no reason to know what you were referring to in Mr. Beck’s oeuvre, which as I said, I have no personal experience with. And now I shall go back to not caring one whit about him.
February 25th, 2011 | 2:49 pm
Jeez, Joe, your own opinions often sound similarly “extreme.” The line between strong opinions and slander is thin. Deal Hudson doesn’t like “social justice” either, so is he crazy?
Beck has written a couple of novels that got some good reviews. The reviewers said they’re well written. If he’s crazy, it’s like a fox.
You have a tendency to psychoanalyze those you dislike. I think Beck believes what he says, and cares about what he thinks is true. His luck is that many many people buy it.
You do FT and yourself a disservice by using it as a platform for personal attacks. Dispute what Beck says, but leave his morals alone. What you say about him others could say about you. But where does that get us?
February 25th, 2011 | 2:53 pm
Beck doesn’t like “social justice”
Neither do I–I guess that makes me “anti-Catholic, too. Social justice a fatuous, meaningless term that is generally molded to fit someone’s socialist agenda or other. There is only justice, so speaking of social justice is just redundant.
February 25th, 2011 | 2:55 pm
“(Beck recently had to apologize for comparing rabbis of Reform Judaism to radical Islam) ”
It’s a false comparison, because the radical Imams actually believe in something. I usually compare Reform Judaism to Unitarianism, but without the theological rigor. As a member of the Tribe, I have the right to do that.
On the other hand, Beck has a point, if he means that Reform rabbis and radical imams don’t have much time for Israel, and don’t particularly like Jews. I know it’s a paradox, but it’s also true.
February 25th, 2011 | 3:11 pm
I read with interest the assertion by Jonathan and Ken that Rev. Graham is “on the side of history,” though to be fair, only the latter said it in that way.
Better to say that the Reverend has faith in the Christian eschatology. Given that Christianity either has been replaced by conquest or has decayed and become moribund over most of the territory and among most of the populations it once dominated, it is far from clear that future Christian triumph is demonstrated by history. China and Africa could be characterized as positive indicators, but it seems just as likely that they will convert in the next hundred years, only to apostatize in the two hundred after that. Compare the histories of the various barbarian conversions throughout the Middle Ages.
Of course, it is also untrue that history demonstrate such a fate for Christianity to be inevitable. The question may be phrased, “Will Christianity prove to be Judaism, or Zoroastrianism?” True, the New Testament provides an answer. But then, so did the Denkard.
February 25th, 2011 | 3:50 pm
we’re past the day when we should need a government agency to channel tax dollars to produce “sober discourse and informed debate.
We shouldn’t have ever needed it, but the reality is that it’s hard to find it elsewhere on radio or TV. And while I agree that both skew liberal, they have plenty of conservative voices on as well. That guy in that man-in-the-street interview represented a significant sector of the African-American population, so he deserved to be heard. Birthers have made their case on NPR as well.
February 25th, 2011 | 4:08 pm
JDD wrote:
I almost never watch Beck but have nothing against him. If people like him, so what?
Then they buy into ridiculous ad hominem conspiracies theories, and that harms conservatism and Christendom.
Paul J wrote:
I read with interest the assertion by Jonathan and Ken that Rev. Graham is “on the side of history,” though to be fair, only the latter said it in that way.
Better to say that the Reverend has faith in the Christian eschatology.
Much better said, and what I meant. Thanks.
February 26th, 2011 | 4:20 am
“I usually compare Reform Judaism to Unitarianism, but without the theological rigor.”
Now THAT is best theological one-liner I’ve heard since the answer to the old joke:
Q. What do you get when you cross a Unitarian with a Klansman?
A. A guy who burns a question mark on your lawn.
February 26th, 2011 | 8:54 am
In Beck’s comment on ““I spoke of a growing darkness and evil,” Beck said of his meeting with Graham. “He spoke of a greater growth of light.”
Beck seem to echo the growing plight of Christians in the Middle East. Joe, if you lived in Tunis, Baghdad, Kabul,Jakarta, or Nazareth now days, how would you feel? Don’t you think his comments would resonate with those Christian?
Many of your comments are similar to members of our Bible study group. But when pressed for specifics, the hand waving begins.
Yes Beck is a showman, but he also had some of the most interesting economics discussions, I have seen in years (i.e. Hayek vs Keynesian ).
The other thing is, people laugh on his show, not sneer or have the intense I am smarter, listen to me. At least Beck encourages people to THINK for themselves, instead of the spoon feeding.
February 26th, 2011 | 9:03 am
Ken:
I don’t think so. It would make a good thesis for a paper, but you’d have to compare Finney with a comparable political popularist. Revivalism as an idea is dead in the water outside of pentecostal churches, and even with them it’s treading water. For the longest time the only real revivals you’d see would be outside the USA. The days of revivals actually touching the business and educated classes are long over.
Paul:
Neither really sound good. One is a dead religion, the other is a near-dead religion followed mostly due to blood ties as opposed to believing its tenets. Judaism to me seems dangerously close to being Shinto.
Mormonism though, that provides a very worrying example. A religion that is patently false in its history that is still followed culturally due to its similarities with another.
As an agnostic, I throw my hands up. I think out of all the religions, Christianity is needed the most and is the most capable of resisting the coming dead secular culture. I don’t know if it can though.
February 26th, 2011 | 12:17 pm
Dblade, I agree that comparisons of the histories of various religions are perhaps most effective at demonstrating the limits of the utility of historical analogy. Certainly, it can mislead nearly as much as it informs.
By some measure, it may be fair to refer to Zoroastrianism as a dead religion, although it is hardly as totally dead as those practiced by completely extinct traditional cultures; see the Parsees or Iranis of India, for examples. Tiny remnants cling to this religion, thousands of years after it has lost its cultural vitality. Surely a hypothetical “dead” Christianity would in actuality leave such remnants in out-of-the way places, such as sub-Saharan Africa and rural Georgia, rather than passing as thoroughly out of practice as the cults of Ra and Astarte.
Regarding Judaism, your comments seem most relevant to the Western Reform, Conservative, and “modern” Orthodox movements. To the Haredim and the Hasidim, among others, they seem to me completely inapplicable. The comparison with Shinto is interesting, though I would offer that the great difference in the understanding and practice of matters “religious” in East Asian cultures, as opposed to cultures arising from the ancient Near East and Mediterranean, complicates the issues involved enormously.
The Mormons are an interesting case; an uncharitable observer might compare their history and theology with those of the Scientologists, while more charitably conceding that the supposed Mormon revelation took place at a point in history at which the falsity of the historical and linguistic assertions made by the founding prophet was not unambiguously obvious. Of course, that same observer might note that it is “obvious” that the New Testament records the case of a Jewish messianic preacher, one of many active at the time, executed on trumped-up charges of sedition by fearful traditional elites, whose dedicated followers then made him the center of a successful Hellenistic mystery cult similar to many sweeping the Mediterranean world at the time. The founding prophet’s own words, one might say, even in the accounts offered by these founding followers, do not unambiguously support the claims made for him, nor the complex theology elaborated over the following centuries in an effort to reconcile these claims with the course of history. But then, any religion based on revelation finds itself open to these criticisms from any who did not themselves receive the revelation directly.
The plaint expressed in your final paragraph is a common one, to which I am not unsympathetic. But realize that Christianity, and most particularly the Protestant Christianity which shattered Latin Christendom and gave birth to the modern world, also gave birth, perhaps inevitably, to the “coming dead secular culture.” For if in the first step, we reject what has come to be called the magisterium, the traditional corpus of Christian belief, and base our faith on rational interpretation of the Bible alone, then in the next step, our successors will surely reject the apparently arbitrary selection of the Bible as the only portion of that tradition which is to be accepted as intrinsically valid and beyond question.
February 28th, 2011 | 12:10 pm
Ken,
In one of your posts, you attributed a quote to me that was from another poster.
And in your second response to me you wrote, “That guy in that man-in-the-street interview represented a significant sector of the African-American population, so he deserved to be heard.”
Aside from the question of how exactly you presume to know the very radio segment I’m referring to…
I said it *wasn’t* a ‘man-on-the-street’ interview. Did you read my posts?
February 28th, 2011 | 3:43 pm
I tried to respond to this earlier, but I’d lost my Internet connection:
Did you read my posts?
Not very carefully, apparently. Please accept my apologies.
February 28th, 2011 | 6:07 pm
Ken,
Apology accepted – thank you.
Now that’s something I’m not used to – flat out humility. I feel slightly woozy.
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