The Beck Who Would Be King
The Beck Who Would Be King
Michael Kazin: The Beck Who Would Be King
On Saturday, Glenn Beck held a Christian revival meeting on the Mall for a few hundred thousand of his disciples. As such events go, the ?Restoring Honor? event was remarkably subdued. The average age of the participants was somewhere in the fifties or older: white and gray hair and spreading midriffs predominated in the nearly all-white crowd. This may have been the first Washington rally in history at which a majority of the participants rested on portable folding chairs.
And the message delivered over and over again from the podium on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial would have pleased that nonagenarian Billy Graham: ?restore American values in the name of our Savior,? ?use Jesus as your model,? ?revive the true message of Christianity.? Occasionally, a speaker would make a reference to ?saving unborn children? or claim that ?true charity? comes from the heart and not from government. But the biggest cheers came at more pietistic moments, such as when Albert Pujols, the great first baseman for the St. Louis Cardinals, declared, ?My job as a believer is to share the gospel of Jesus Christ? by, among other things, financing a foundation for children with Down Syndrome.
Not surprisingly, the rally also had a more secular purpose. Since evangelical believers began swelling conservative ranks in the 1970s, they have managed to be both angry protestors and visionary moralists: ban gay marriage and preserve ?family values?; attack ?secular humanism? and send missionaries to cure AIDS in Africa. Although Beck asked his flock not to carry protest signs, he did not ask them to refrain from wearing t-shirts and buttons that accused President Obama of bankrupting the nation into socialism. So the double message of attack the Left and praise the Lord was as clear on the Mall in 2010 as it has been since the heyday of the Moral Majority three decades ago.
The most novel aspect of the day was Beck?s attempt to claim the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. for himself and his followers. For some time now, conservatives have used King?s phrase about judging a person ?not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character? to oppose affirmative action or any social program explicitly intended to benefit black Americans. But, on the forty-seventh anniversary of the March for Jobs and Freedom, Beck praised King alongside George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Abraham Lincoln as a moral exemplar, an icon of ?equal rights? to be honored by every true American. A brief clip of King?s ?I Have a Dream? ran on the megatron screens?as, in a bizarre touch, did one of him in intimate conversation that same day with union leader Walter Reuther, whose social democratic aims King ardently supported and whose UAW was a main sponsor of the 1963 march.
That Beck was able to harness King?s memory to his own mission demonstrates how little conservatives like him who claim to revere the ?truths? of the nation?s past really care about the realities of history. Ronald Reagan knew better. He originally balked at dedicating a national holiday to the civil rights leader because he knew that King, throughout his public life, had been a determined man of the Left: calling the United States an imperialist nation and the ?greatest purveyor of violence in the world?; proposing the distribution of wealth and a guaranteed job and health insurance for every citizen; and arguing that the United States had a responsibility to deploy its vast wealth ?to wipe poverty from the face of the earth.? But Beck, shielded by the presence of one of King?s nieces on his speakers? list, was able to avoid such uncomfortable truths.
As I walked away from the rally, I came upon a lone participant?seated in a rather tiny folding chair next to the Washington Monument?who had refused either to obey the injunction against protest signs or the admiration Beck, the Right?s latest media hero, bestows on the martyred hero of the black freedom movement. ?The Bold Truth: M.L.K. was pro-Communist,? the hand-lettered sign read. His charge was not quite accurate: King admired democratic socialist regimes and thinkers but abhorred Leninist ones. But you had to give the guy some credit: he knew that the man who gave the 1963 speech that has become one of the most famous orations in American history would have detested nearly everything Glenn Beck says and believes. I have a dream that one day all those other people who gathered down by the Reflecting Pool will realize that.
