“We’re all bastards but God loves us anyway.” These are the eight words that Will Campbell used to sum up the Christian message. Quite profound. “We’re all bastards but God loves us anyway.”[i]
For me, these are humbling words to remember. Because, you see, when I think of Glen Beck, I think “manipulative fearmonger”—and yes, sometimes even “idolatrous bastard.” But thankfully, Campbell has made “bastard” a theological term that means “loved…forgiven…[and] reconciled.”[ii] But for me, this new definition is only partially comforting, because Beck is indeed “idolatrous”—as are most of the folks on Fox News…and on MSNBC…and in American presidential politics in general—and as such it is difficult to even begin to think about loving him while he is leading Christians into idolatry. I use the word “idolatrous” for Beck and those like him (on Fox and MSNBC) because they work based on the assumption that God’s reconciling Kingdom, inaugurated by God’s suffering on the Cross, is insufficient for bringing about peace and security.
To be fair to Beck and his ilk (whether on Fox or MSNBC), they may not necessarily be speaking as “Christians.” But to the extent that Christians hear and enact Beck & Company’s hateful rhetoric is the extent to which they are subject to theological critique (of course, those who speak on behalf of Christians—Fox and Friends hosts, I’m looking at you especially—are directly in need of critique).
My frustration is simply this: Christians give more credibility to the words of Glen Beck than they do to the words of Scripture. Glen Beck says that Barack Obama “want[s] to intentionally collapse our economic system,”[iii] and “conservative” “Christians” get out their hate speech and run to the aid of their beloved economic system (which oppresses the poor and itself becomes an idol). But why do Christians think that the United States’ economic system needs to be protected from the President of the United States—ludicrous on several levels. I would suggest that instead of trying to protect the “capitalist system,” Christians should find ways to allow the egalitarian reality of God’s Kingdom to inform their economic decisions so that the good news is proclaimed to the poor and oppressed.
However, also troubling to me are those Christians who think that through getting the right people in positions of power, they can make a difference in the world. Christians who say something along the lines of “If we can only get the right person in the White House, we can get things back to the way they used to be when America was a Christian nation.”[iv] But the Myth of Christian America has been adequately exposed as a lie. As Richard Hughes has observed:
“The myth of a Christian America is problematic on several counts. First, it flies in the face of the founders’ intentions. In spite of their Christian groundings, they never intended to create an explicitly Christian nation. Second, the notion of Christian America contradicts the plain fact of religious pluralism in the United States. And third, a Christian America often means an acculturated, Americanized Christianity [that is, a ‘domesticated…Christian faith’ which is ‘robbed…of the radical demands one encounters in the ethical teachings of Jesus’].”[v]
Christians, then, do not need to try to control the course of history by bringing about a Christian America because we believe that God is already at work reconciling his creation back to himself. We believe in the eschatological hope that the world will be renewed and that we will be resurrected. Thus, any illusion that humans are in control of history is just that—an illusion. When Beck & Co. say that we need to protect ourselves; he is advocating a false protection. For the only protection the state can offer is that based on violence. Such protection is not really protection. Bill Cavanaugh puts it bluntly: the state is not our savior.[vi] Beck & Co. seem to really think that if they try hard enough, and trust in the power of the state enough, that they can really “get out of this life alive.”[vii] But we know that no matter how many bombs are dropped on Afghani villages, we will still die some day. We are not in control. God is in control. And God has defeated Death and all its power at the Cross. Beck & Co. cannot offer or achieve an alternative to Death, but that does not stop them from preaching their own gospel.
The gospel of Glen Beck can be caricaturized in this manner: “There is real evil ‘out there’ and ‘the progressives’ are bringing it to ‘our’ shores. It has to be stopped by any means necessary.” Of course for Beck et al, “any means necessary” means through fearful manipulation and violence. Both manipulation and violence must be condemned by all Christians. The Gospel of Glen Beck cannot be allowed to usurp the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Christians, then, cannot buy into the political assumptions of Glen Beck. For Beck, the status quo must be protected and the enemies of the status quo must be stopped. Such a notion is the logic of empire. Jesus came to be and was killed as a political subversive who spoke against empire's oppression. Rome did not execute Jesus because he was teaching his disciples how to be good Roman citizens; Rome executed Jesus because he was teaching his disciples what it meant to be citizens of God’s Kingdom. Caesar could not have a man going around talking about loving enemies because there were enemies to conquer and borders to expand. Caesar, like empire, has no patience for such faithful enemy love. If Caesar is stuck with a populous that loves its enemies, then suddenly there are no people left to fight for empire. But enemy love is precisely what Jesus commanded his followers to do. The politically disruptive teaching of enemy love prompted the empire to do what empire does: kill to protect itself.
In discussion such things, Cavanaugh is right, “Politics is a practice of the imagination.”[viii] The notion that America is separated from Mexico (and therefore Americans are separated from Mexicans) by a border requires imagination. Without the ability to imagine that there is an imaginary line that separates America from Mexico, the whole notion of national sovereignty would not exist. But Christians must not only imagine a different politic; Christians must embody a different politic. A politic based on the church. The state invented the divide between sacred and secular.[ix] The state, in order for it to have power, must, as Cavanaugh points out, eliminate all other social bodies.[x] Thus, the state invented the realm of the secular in order to force religion to be privatized.[xi] Once religion was privatized, the state could take over as the main instrument of unity for individuals. But the church must not allow the state to constitute identity for Christians. The church must be its own political body that bears witness to the Kingdom of God. In order to do this, Christians are called to live the subversive truths of the Kingdom of God—that is, we Christians are called to love enemies and pray for those who persecute us—because what good is it if we only love those who love us? (Matt 5:43ff). When the church as the Body of Christ becomes the basis for unity for the Christian, the state will be threatened. For example, when the church becomes its own political body, the imagined border between us and them will disappear. If I may paraphrase Lee Camp: Christians must live in the political reality that affirms that we have more in common with a Christian undocumented immigrant from Mexico than with our non-Christian American neighbor who lives down the street. We cannot buy into the notion that imagined borders are more important than Christian communion.
Christians, then, should not buy into the idolatrous gospel of Glen Beck and those like him. However, we must (and here I am speaking directly to myself) find ways to critique Beck in love, as we have been called to love our neighbor. For me that is difficult because Beck leads Christians into idolatrous state-worship.
As Will Campbell might say, we must resist idolatries and finds ways to reconcile with one another.
[This is another hastily written blog entry. Please leave some feedback.]
[i] Will D. Campbell, “Excerpt from Brother to a Dragonfly” in Writings on Reconciliation and Resistance, edited by Richard C. Goode (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2010), 9.
[ii] Ibid., 10.
[iii] See http://www.newshounds.us/2010/01/06/glenn_beck_hate_mongering_of_the_day_obama_and_progressives_want_to_intentionally_collapse_our_economic_system.php
[iv] http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-january-5-2010/even-better-than-the-real-thing
[v] Richard T. Hughes, Myths America Lives By (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 88-89, 78.
[vi] William T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination: Discovering the Liturgy as a Political Act in an Age of Global Consumerism (New York: T & T Clark, 2002), see chapter 1, p.9ff.
[vii] For more about human attempts to get out of this life alive, see Stanley Hauerwas, “September 11, 2001: A Pacifist Response,” http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/mmedia/features/911site/hauerwas.html
[viii] Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination, 1.
[ix] William T. Cavanaugh, “God Is Not Religious,” in God is Not…: Religious, Nice, ‘One of Us,’ An American, A Captialist, edited by D. Brent Laytham (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2004), 104. Cavanaugh also discusses the invention of religion in Theopolitical Imagination and The Myth of Religious Violence (Oxford University Press, 2009).
[x] Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination, 17ff.
[xi] Cavanaugh, “God Is Not Religious,” 103-108.
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