by Michelle Goldberg Info
Michelle Goldberg is the author of The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World and Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism. She is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and her work has appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, Glamour, and many other publications.
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Glenn Beck held hands with faith leaders at his "Restoring Honor" rally on Aug. 28, 2010. (Alex Brandon / AP Photo) Evangelicals have never accepted Mormonism as Christianity, but the Beck rally brought them together. Michelle Goldberg on a newly powerful political force—and how Mitt Romney could benefit.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the “Restoring Honor” rally is its establishment of Glenn Beck, a Mormon, as a major leader of the Christian right. After all, for most evangelicals, Mormonism remains a great heresy. Yet last weekend, Beck managed to surround himself with the leading lights of the Christian right, including the Texas-based Christian Zionist John Hagee and the Southern Baptist Convention’s Richard Land.
The more Mormons and evangelicals team up in the cause of Christian nationalism, the more their political agreements will trump their theological differences.
How did Beck convince tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of evangelicals to turn out for a religious revival on the National Mall? Writing about the rally, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat noted, snidely, that “a suspicious liberal could retort that all the God-and-Christ talk and military tributes were proof enough that a sinister Christian nationalism lurked beneath the surface” of Beck’s movement. Douthat was wrong: Beck’s Christian nationalism isn’t beneath the surface at all. It’s right on top.
It’s long been obvious, at least to those of us who follow the religious right, that the ostensibly secular Tea Party movement is deeply imbued with the ideology. In my 2006 book, Kingdom Coming, The Rise of Christian Nationalism, I tried to describe the worldview of the Christian right—its belief that the United States began as a Christian nation, blessed for its piety, before sinking to unimaginable lows as secularism gained ground. In the Christian nationalist imagination, the true catastrophe started with the New Deal, which brought socialism to America and turned government, rather than churches, into guarantors of social welfare. The Christian nationalist mind-set is apocalyptic: Time is always running out, a Satanic, hideously powerful enemy is always on the verge of instituting tyranny, and only a brave band of utterly committed believers can restore the nation to its lost glory.
Beck’s rally made the connection between the Tea Party and Christian nationalism explicit, as he called for Americans to go to “God boot camp” in preparation for a coming “global storm.” He drew heavily on the work of David Barton, a revisionist Christian nationalist historian and staple of Christian right literature. Barton specializes in combing through history and stringing together out-of-context quotes to argue that the founders intended for Christianity to serve as the basis of American government. In the early ’90s, as I reported in my book, he spoke at white supremacist events, but has since climbed into the Christian right mainstream. Beck has been championing Barton all year, and Barton spoke at Beck’s Divine Destiny pre-rally event on Friday at the Kennedy Center.
There’s not much new in Beck’s ideology. A lot of it is familiar from the John Birch Society, a group founded in the 1950s by rabidly anti-communist businessmen given to elaborate conspiracy theories and religious fundamentalism. But if Christian nationalism isn’t novel, it has never before had a Mormon at its head. In some ways, the religion is too Christian nationalist for the Christian nationalists, as it relocates essential parts of Christian history from the Middle East to the United States. According to Mormon doctrine, an ancient Hebrew tribe traveled to North America before Christ’s birth. It split into the good, fair-skinned Nephites and the Lamanites, “a dark, and loathsome, and a filthy people” who eventually slaughtered the Nephites. (Mormons believe that the Lamanites are the forefathers of today’s Native Americans.) Evangelicals might see the United States as a providential nation, but only the Mormons believe that the Garden of Eden was in Missouri and that Jesus Christ visited North America after his resurrection.
Evangelicals have never accepted Mormonism as a branch of Christianity. Indeed, in the early 20th century, Christian writers often compared it to Islam. After all, it was polygamous and militant, born from the vision of a prophet claiming to be the latest in the Judeo-Christian lineage. As the Baptist author of the 1911 book Mormonism: The Islam of America put it, “[T]here is no other body of people from whom we have so much to fear in proportion to their numbers.”
According to Jan Shipps, one of the country’s foremost historians of Mormonism, when Jerry Falwell was organizing the Moral Majority, he initially made a place for Mormons, but other members were so upset that he basically rescinded his welcome.
12 August 31, 2010 | 11:31pm Twitter Emails
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Do only Mormons believe that Christ visited the Americans? Check out the iPhone app "Christ in America." Many Native American cultures share this narrative, albeit with different names for Christ, from Quetzalcoatl, Votan, and Wixepechocha in Mexico to Kukulcan (Mayans), Gucumatz (Guatemala), Sume (Brazil), Bochica (Columbia), Viracocha, Hyustus and Con-tici (Peru).Spanish Conquistadores, from James Cook to Pizzaro to Cortez were regularly greeted as if they were the promised return of the great white God, who ascended into Heaven, as Jesus does in Third Nephi in The Book of Mormon. The story is so pervasive that it is almost as common as the story of the great flood, albeit in just this hemisphere. (North and South America and some of the Polynesian islands.)
Becks show is often hysterical.He is not as misguided as most people think.
"I say on the air all time, 'if you take what I say as gospel, you're an idiot.'" ~ Glenn Beck
'Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God' ....Lenny Bruce
That's a fact, a happy fact.
More modesty from Beck:"This is the third Great American Awakening. There have been two. One started by George Whitfield, and it led to the American Revolution. The second one happened in the 1840s and '50s, and it started with people of faith, of all faiths, and it led to the freeing of the slaves. This one is going to restore our Constitution. It's going to restore individual responsibility. It's going to restore faith, hope, and charity."
Beck has invented - either accidentally or by design -Â a new and fruitful business model. He's become a "televangelist" that sells advertising rather than soliciting donations and passing the plate. Stoking fear and offering salvation to countless well-intentioned "marks." Part P.T. Barnem part Jim Bakker. It's brilliant if not diabolical.
On July 16, 2007 Ms Goldberg was recorded saying, "politics is people getting together and creating a plan to mobilize different constituencies .... and that's exactly what they do"........ She also said at the time, " Christian nationalism more than espouses different ideas or conservative ideas..... I really see it as creating an entire alternative reality ...an entirely parallel culture.... Christians believe things that were impossible are now possible".She has called Rob Parsley a Christian crusader and a political leader... she is quoted saying of him, " He is the reason George W Bush won in Ohio back in 2004"..... further alleging this is why Bush doubled the amount of the black vote he garnered in Ohio. It couldn't be that Kerry just didn't appeal to everyone....Right?She's further expressed in the past how appalled she is over that, because according to her, she doesn't believe liberals would want to go to a church and take orders from the democrats...or anyone promoting a liberal ideology........ I wonder, if she remembered to send that memo to Mr Obama at some point during the 20 years he sat in the pews of Reverend Wright's church in Chicago.It gets to the point of being a hunt for idolaters and blasphemers, when Ms Goldberg in talking about Christianity, loves to visually segregate them.... isolate them entirely from our mind's eye if she could..... That's why she went on to say in the same 2007 speech, " What we have is a political movement in the guise of a religious revival..... although clearly it's being spurred by all these deep religious longings that great numbers of Americans have and that somehow they're finding satisfaction for in a movement an imaginary world and promises a kind of glorious national restoration." As if nary a liberal has dreamed the dream.....Right?What Ms Goldberg conveniently forgets, is how from it's very beginning, liberal/progressivism has been what can be interpreted as a secular utopian religion...... Ohhhhh I'm sure all of you old enough to remember, will recall how back in the day the left sounded the trumpet when Ted Kennedy, while paraphrasing is brother RFK, said, "Some men see things as they are and say, Why? I dream things that never were and say,Why not? How perfect an example is that of the far left-wing's ideals.... imagining a utopian future????? In "their future" there will be no poor, no war, no conflict, no inequality...... That the future they dream of is only a few more "government programs" away from reality. And who is it that stands in the way of their reality????? How could a "utopian" not hate a Christian?Hatred of the Christian Right is so much a part of the Left, that the day the Left stops their hatred of them, will mark the beginning of the end of the Left as we know it........ and the beginning of real salvation in America.
Gee, what a wonderful and meandering rant "rev". Grandma and grandpa worm-food would be proud. Now, let's start working on that occupational mendacity of yours.
Rev. Call it hatred if that comforts you. Dismiss the Christian attempt to make this a theoracy if you want.The facts are that libs like me hate selectively. I hated Rev Falwell and I hate that Focus on the Family bunch. But I like ordinary Christians.The Left (thanks for the caps on that) will never end as long a people care for their fellows. The Constitution is a Leftist document and there is nothing you can do about it.
Romney is a sheep !http://www.americanromney.org/http://www.romneysheepuk.com/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ko6hAMEhXw
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