Catholic and Enjoying It!
So Glenn Beck has announced the creation of “Beck University” where enthusiasts for his unique blend of half-baked historical analysis, paranoia, and Mormon “America the Light and the Glory” secular messianism can go to get “a unique academic experience bringing together experts in the fields of religion, American history and economics.”
He describes it as an “academic program”, but as is typically the case with him, it’s hard to tell if he is speaking tongue-in-cheek (as in “The Rush Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies”) or whether his somewhat unhinged persona really does imagine that he is the Teacher of the Nations. At any rate, it is quite certain that I am constantly hearing from people who say things like “Even though he reveals himself to be a man of stupendous ignorance when he holds forth with absolute assurance on Church history, you can take it to the bank that he is a reliable guide to American history and, most especially, to the Hidden History of our Time. Why, didn’t he expose the fact that Obama is a communist atheist *and* a Muslim?” Or, as a reader wrote: “How about this quote from his book Audacity of Hope…“I will stand with the Muslims if the political winds shift in an ugly direction”. There is more, much more, but you just keep focusing on Glen Beck’s misguided take on the Dead Sea Scrolls. The train wreck will come but it won’t be the one you expect. “Contra factum non argumentum est” …Thomas Aquinas. Against the truth there is no argument.”
Yeah. See, that’s the thing. When people cite Beck to prove that Obama is simultaneously a Nazi and a Communist atheist *and* a Muslim, I don’t come away reassured that, while he may be a bit shaky on Church history, he’s rock solid on the Hidden History of our Time. You can’t be an atheist and a Muslim at the same time. More than that, when you look up the alleged quote from Audacity of Hope, what you find is something far more innocuous than evidence that Obama intends to hand the keys to Air Force One to Osama bin Laden and invite him to fly it into the Capitol. Here’s the actual passage from “The Audacity of Hope” [pg. 261]:
Of course, not all my conversations in immigrant communities follow this easy pattern. In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans, for example, have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging. They have been reminded that the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly; they need specific assurances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during World War II, and that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.
As I asked the reader who breathlessly passed this along: This is a problem why? Do you think the Executive should not resist a mob call to intern an entire population of people based on their ethnicity or religion?
My reader, nothing daunted by facts, just went on insisting that Beck had exposed the fact that Obama will “stand with the Muslims”. He was impervious to the fact that Obama was in fact talking about Arabs and Pakistanis, not Muslims, and that not all Arabs are Muslim (lots of them are Catholic).
Indeed, the extreme irony of his position is that when you Google the misquote that he provided it refers you, not to the book at all, but to a bunch of right wing sites that are repeating the same pseudoknowledge without fact-checking it. And number two on the list is… Glenn Beck.
This is why I’m urging people who are serious about exercising their faith in the public square to get their information from reliable sources and not from quacks who pretend to be experts in history and then reveal themselves to be spectacularly ignorant. There are plenty of sound reasons to oppose many of Obama’s policies. But you can’t do that if you go around regurgitating fraudulent quotes that you believed because somebody with a well modulated voice told you so and you read it on a website somewhere. All somebody has to do is produce an actual copy of the book you haven’t bothered to read and you either wind up feeling silly or, worse, persist in circulating the quote because you think that it’s okay to bear false witness against your neighbor in a good cause.
“Oh, but I know that Beck is just an entertainer! And besides, I learn so much from him!” Again I say, that’s the problem: you are learning from him. Only his audience doesn’t tend to learn simply isolated factoids which may or may not be true. They are learning a paranoid worldview that is rubbing off on them.
Case in point: the cyber trial and execution of Fr. Benedict Groeschel on charges of consorting with devils in human form.
Some background: Jacques Maritain was one of the great lay theologians of the 20th century. Maritain had a wide circle of friends and (his wife being a convert to the faith from Judaism) a warm appreciation of Jewish culture in all its diversity. (Maritain was one of the European defenders of the Jews in the years leading up to WWII). One of the people Maritain made an acquaintance of and corresponded with was an American rabble rouser named (cue ominous music) Saul Alinsky. Alinsky was a guy weaned on the Lefty Jewish atheist worldview that was vintage Depression era stuff: Stand up for the little guy. The Boss was a capitalist exploiter. Agitate, agitate, agitate. Religion is just there to keep the masses quiet, etc. He wasn’t an evangelical atheist especially. He just didn’t have time for religion. But he was quite capable of friendships with believers–including Maritain.
About fifteen years ago, there was a book that came out (reviewed here by New Oxford Review) which did a nice job of describing the friendship between these two very different men (hey! It happens!). You can see how different they are and you can see why they liked each other.
Well, all that was mere historical curiosity until the candidacy of one Barack Hussein Obama and Glenn Beck’s patented method of “connect the dots” historiography. Obama was tied to Alinsky, and Alinsky was suddenly exalted to the status of “devil in human form” for paranoid Christian conspiracy theorists. He was denounced as a “satanist” Why? Because as a garden variety Depression era lefty he had made tongue in cheek reference to Lucifer as the first “radical” and had made remarks like “Hell would be heaven for me. All my life I’ve been with the have-nots. Over here, if you’re a have-not, you’re short of dough. If you’re a have-not in hell, you’re short of virtue. Once I get into hell, I’ll start organizing the have-nots over there.”
Now let’s be clear. He was no believer. But neither was he a “satanist”. He was in the classic mold of an old school lefty who thought religion the opiate of the masses and who was more impressed by somebody who achieved concrete results through political action than who (in his view) prayed and did nothing. But he was not a doctrinaire enemy of Christians, as his friendship with Maritain attests.
Back in the day, before the Politicization of Everything, these things could be seen in a human light, like the friendship between the priest and the Communist in Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote. But with the advent of the Obama presidency and the paranoid edutainment of Glenn Beck, we begin to lose the ability to think in those terms. Once Alinsky is discovered as a weapon to use against Obama, he gets exalted as a sort of Grand Master of Satanic Evil: one of the dead Illuminati who continues to pull the strings of History from beyond the grave. And anybody who is associated with him therefore falls under vehement suspicion of being either a fellow conspirator or a dupe.
Enter Fr. Benedict Groeschel. Fr. Groeschel, one of the holiest priests it has ever been my privilege to meet, had some Paulist on his show back in January. A caller complained that the Paulist had praised Saul Alinsky. Fr. Groeschel said he didn’t know who Saul Alinsky was and deferred to the guest. The priest made a couple of remarks about Alinsky’s friendship with Maritain. That is enough to hang the priest as an apologist for Satan, of course.
But then, the reliably bitter snd vindictive Steve Kellmeyer takes it further. Fr. Benedict’s deferral to the priest means, in the nasty mind of Kellmeyer: “Hey, Jacques Maritain was good friends with the satanic atheist Saul Alinsky. And Fr. Benedict Groeschel thinks Alinsky is great because Maritain liked him.” It’s the triumph and apotheosis of the Beckian “connect the dots” method. A holy old priest who never heard of Alinsky defers to a priest who has. Voila! Alinsky is a “satanic atheist” and Fr. Groeschel “thinks Alinsky is great”. Joe McCarthy would be proud.
Beck, because he tells some people what their itching ears want to hear, is offering an “academic program” that is not an academic program. It has as much validity as an academic program as the Wilbur Weed Boxtop Diploma Mill that gave James White his “doctorate”. Beck, as is his custom, is ambiguous about the claim. If pressed, I expect his will pull his “I’m just a rodeo clown” schtick. But if you are a sucker who thinks that his connect the dots method of history (Fasces are symbols of fascism. Fasces are on Mercury dimes! Wilson minted Mercury dimes!! Wilson was a FASCIST!!!) is sound historical analysis you will very easily fall for the sort of tribalist conspiracy theorizing and heretic hunting that his method engenders. Result: you can wind up doing a Joe McCarthy on Fr. Benedict Groeschel. Guys like Beck wind up getting anointed as yet another alternative Magisterium if you take them seriously as Educators of the Masses.
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