Catholic and Enjoying It!
People will put up with a lot, but when you diss their favorite TV hero, the gloves come off! Make fun of Glenn Bek and all of a sudden you get told
Sorry, but the comparison to anti-semitism is cheap and won’t fly. Catholic moral and ethical teaching comes out of Old Testament teaching and is a refinement of it. We draw from the olive tree. The Mormon vision of the human person is a quack perversion of a number of Catholic ideas, all jumbled together with the Protestant creation myth of a refounded Church that will get it right this time, plus the lies of Joseph Smith and his confederates. For Catholics to baste themselves in the teaching of somebody who has rejected the Catholic faith for Mormonism is foolish. For Catholics to suggest that criticism of social teaching rooted in Mormonism is the equivalent anti-semitism is, well, a despicable lie intended to shut down the conversation by means of raw bullying. As to the rest of the comparison, one’s religion has nothing to do with the content of physics, music or plumbing. But one’s view of the human person and a rightly ordered society has *everything* to do with one’s religion.
That’s *why* the simple fact is that no Catholic in their five wits would suggest we entrust catechesis on social teaching to an ex-Catholic Mormon. But millions of Catholics receive virtually *all* their catechesis on social teaching from Glenn Beck while their catechisms and the Compendium gather dust on their shelves.
Millions of others, by the way, get it from “The View”, Keith Olbermann, or Oprah while engaging in the same resolute neglect of (and even contempt for) the Catechism (as we just saw in the Grand Media Canonization of St. Edward Kennedy). However, those people don’t read my blog. People who really and truly take Glenn Beck as an Important Thinker for Our Times do. My point is: if you think it’s dumb to apply to Whoopi Goldberg for instruction on social teaching, perhaps you should consider the possibility that it’s equally foolish to apply to Glenn Beck.
But have I really pored over his broadcasts to sort out the diamonds in the dung?
Well, no. I figure once a guy has devoted his show to tracing the roots of fascism to the backs of dimes, I’m afraid I feel no strong impetus to take him seriously as a Leading Thinker. On the unfortunate occasions when he does happen to cross my path in a ridiculous Youtube clip somebody posts and I see him, yet again, panicking about something, bursting into tears, or whipping his audience into a frenzy or delivering marching orders, he comes across the same every time: a populist demagogue.
Seriously: after his equally impassioned and completely contradictory performances about health care (“The system wants to kill us all!!!!” followed by “It’s the best health care system in the world!!!!” once he was hired to sell beer and shampoo for FOX) why should I take him seriously as anything but a Showman for Corporate America? Life’s too short for me to pore over Youtube to “engage” his deep thoughts. I’d rather read Chesterton and try to learn Catholic social teaching than be instructed by yet another talking head on a corporate payroll–especially one who seems to me to be emotionally unstable and rooted in a quack theological vision of the human person.
Let me hasten to add. This does not mean I’m part of some “boycott” (except in the sense that I don’t watch any TV at all that’s not on DVD). Nor do I like or support sundry calls to try to muzzle Beck’s or anyone else’s right to free speech. I merely exercise my own right to free speech by saying that I think it silly for Catholics to look to Beck as one of their principal sources of insight on social teaching, as I think it silly for them to look to Oprah.
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