Beck Plays Prophet -- Guest Re-Post from Andrew Murphy

Today's guest post, or re-post rather from a piece originally appearing at Religion Dispatches, comes from Andrew Murphy, author of Prodigal Nation: Moral Decline and Divine Punishment from New England to 9/11, which we reviewed earlier here on the blog. Andrew's former guest post for us, "When is a Jeremiah not a Jeremiah," may be found here.

Andrew's post today, his take on politics, the prophetic tradition, King, and the Beck rally, comes to us today courtesy of the author. It originally appeared as "Beck Plays Prophet -- Politics Pervades," at today's Religion Dispatches.

There are any number of ways to interpret the events on the National Mall last Saturday — the dueling rallies, the competition over the legacy of Martin Luther King’s “dream,” the intertwining of piety, politics, and patriotism — and many of these have already been blogged and commented on ad infinitum.

And so first, to the obvious: Glenn Beck is no Martin Luther King. Beck’s movement is not King’s movement. This rally was not that rally. We know that. And the incongruity of it all — white middle-class Christians being comforted about their essential goodness on the very grounds where King had called a nation to account for its grievous moral failings — has been noisily pointed out by Rev. Al Sharpton’s counter-rally, by bloggers and pundits on the left, and by many surviving members of the civil rights movements.

What Beck does share with King, however, is that each sought to play prophet to a nation gone astray. That one of them became a national icon, a martyr for the cause of civil rights, and the other hosts a cable television show and has referred to himself as a “rodeo clown” — not to mention that one preached racial justice and reconciliation, while the other denounced the nation’s first African-American president as a “racist…with deep-seated hatred for whites and white culture” — shouldn’t diminish the significance of this observation. Nor should the fact that the diagnoses of the nation’s ills offered by each of these prophets, the sorts of solutions they proffered, and the vision of the future that emerged from each rally could hardly be more different. The two rallies were attempts to bring a prophetic voice to America, and each one was framed by a jeremiad — a prophetic critique of the degenerate present in light of an enduring national mission. The jeremiad as a form of political rhetoric has a long history in the American tradition, and so it is worth taking another look at these two Jeremiahs on the Mall.

Promise of liberty, legacy of injustice

King rose at the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963 to call the nation to account, to insist on the redemption of an American founding promise. The “dream” that he so eloquently voiced that day was actually built on a much more mundane image — that of a bounced check. King reported that he and his fellow marchers “have come to our nation's capital to cash a check,” written by the nation’s founders, “a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.” Unfortunately, he continued, “America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned….America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds.”

The American past and present, in King’s view, was defined largely by the unwillingness of the nation to honor the check written at the founding. And so the inheritance from the past was a dual one: a founding promise of liberty and equality in theory, and a legacy of slavery and segregation in practice. The change sought by King and the civil rights movement was motivated by a desire to overcome, or to redeem, the latter by finally realizing the potential of the former. This pointed contrast of present with past — of founding covenant with degenerate practice — is central to the power of King’s prophetic political critique.

Contrast all of this with the tenor of the contemporary conservative movement. Central to the traditionalist conservatism espoused by Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, the two featured speakers at Saturday’s “Restoring Honor” rally — is the idea that the values and practices that dominated the nation’s life during previous eras — traditional families, (Christian) religion in the public sphere, celebration of the military, the equation of white America with “real” America — must be those that lead it into the future. This is the “honor” that needs to be restored, and despite the minor brouhaha caused by Beck’s admission earlier this month that he didn’t think gay marriage was a particular threat to the nation (or Palin’s constant attempt to claim the mantle of feminism), the insistently backward-looking nature of the 2010 rally betrayed a rather different valorization of the past than King’s lament over the squandering of founding promise.

Where King’s dream called for deep and radical transformation — the dismantling of Jim Crow, the passage of meaningful civil rights and voting rights legislation, real equality of economic opportunity, such as had never before been witnessed in the nation’s history — on Saturday Sarah Palin set herself foursquare against any such questioning of the nation’s current practices:

I must assume that you too know that we must not fundamentally transform America as some would want. We must restore America and restore her honor!

So rather than transformation, we need restoration.

Apolitical? Not by a long shot

Beck said before the rally that he saw his role as “to wake America up onto the backsliding of principles and values most importantly of God.” He spoke on Saturday of a nation that has “wandered in the darkness too long,” and called on his listeners to rededicate themselves to faith and country, steering clear of commenting on specific pieces of legislation. Indeed, one of the more interesting claims made by Beck and his fellow organizers was that the rally was not “political.” Even the New York Times’s Ross Douthat claimed that “[Beck] had promised that the rally…would be an explicitly apolitical event. And so it came to pass…” But Douthat goes on to identify what was really at the heart of Saturday’s gathering: “a long festival of affirmation for middle-class, white Christians.” What he seems to mean is that the rally’s speakers did not explicitly endorse a particular legislative agenda. But anyone who thinks that such a “festival of affirmation for middle-class, white Christians,” given the nation’s current religious and political landscape, is “apolitical” needs — to say the least — a more robust and nuanced definition of politics.

Both of these would-be Jeremiahs — King and Beck — sought to call the nation to something, something deeply American as they understood that term. The different registers in which they spoke, the different approaches they took to the past, and the different issues on which they chose to focus their criticisms, though, betray fundamentally different understandings of prophecy and its relation to political critique. Beck’s critique evoked tradition, Christian faith, and the goodness of America, suggesting that his listeners “concentrate on the good things in America, the things we have accomplished and the things we can do tomorrow.” By contrast, King sought to transform the very foundations of an American society shot through with racial prejudice, to bring the past to bear on the present as a form of critique, to transcend past and present practices, to draw on the nation’s founding to envision a new future of racial harmony.

Of course one might object that unlike King, who confronted a governmentally-sanctioned system of American apartheid, we in the twenty-first century face no such organized evil and thus the nation needs no fundamental transformations in the way it clearly did in 1963. But this seems to me precisely the point in distinguishing Beck’s from King’s attempts at prophecy. The kind of celebration of tradition that lies at the heart of the Christian Right’s interpretation of American history and its interpretation of American politics rules out, almost by definition, the kind of searching national self-critique that King insisted on.

With a gaze set boldly backwards

In my most recent book I explore the history of the American jeremiad — the political preaching of such Jeremiahs — as a form of political rhetoric since the earliest days of colonial settlements. I examine the different ways in which traditionalists and progressives have sought to indict American society and mobilize political coalitions throughout American history, and the religious and political figures who have sought to play prophet to the nation since colonial times. King’s speech in 1963, not surprisingly, was one of the great moments of the progressive tradition in American political rhetoric, and it has achieved the sort of iconic status that so often blunts later generations’ appreciation of King’s edgy calls for reform, and his invocation of the “sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent.” Traditionalists, on the other hand, have long used the eclipse of institutional Christianity in the nation’s public life as a stalking horse for political movements — most recently, the Christian Right — and the Beck-Palin event fits squarely into the larger dynamic of a reaction against 1960s style progressivism.

And here, it seems, lies the fundamental difference between the two rallies: King called the nation forward into the fuller realization of its founding principles; while Beck and Palin directed the nation’s gaze backward. In Palin’s America, like Beck’s, the future would look much like the past, with an aggressive public Christianity and a federal government weakened in its ability to safeguard the rights of religious or other minorities. King, of course, talked of the past as well, but although his dream was “deeply rooted in the American dream” and (in some way, he insisted) consistent with the nation’s founding principles, realizing that dream would require deep and lasting change. The dream would not become reality until the nation paid the check that it had bounced repeatedly over the course of its history.

When it comes down to it, of course, King’s speech would have remained just words — stirring words, perhaps, but just words — without a successful political movement that braved all sorts of dangers in pursuit of their understanding of American ideals and the meaning of the nation’s founding promises. What will become of Beck, remains to be seen. But the rodeo clown who bills his program as “the fusion of entertainment and enlightenment” has certainly ensured that he will not fade from the limelight anytime soon

Gilbert's Jeremiad of LeBron the False Prophet, Part II

Todays' guest post comes from Matt Bowman, a Ph.D. candidate at Georgetown University who normally blogs at Juvenile Instructor. Matt follows up on my post from Friday focusing on the theological motifs in Dan Gilbert's open letter to Cleveland Cavaliers fans. Where I saw a theological muddle, Matt sees the tradition of the jeremiad.

LeBron James: false prophet
by Matt Bowman

Paul Harvey already has noted the muddled bricolage of religious invocation that is Cleveland Cavaliers’ owner Dan Gilbert’s screed against his now departed star, LeBron James, who left the city he was raised in and the franchise which drafted him to sign with the Miami Heat. As Paul notes, in one sense Gilbert’s frothing lapses into the sort of lumpy but fascinating theological mess that popular culture often makes of religion; this single sentence:

The self-declared former "King" will be taking the "curse" with him down south. And until he does "right" by Cleveland and Ohio, James (and the town where he plays) will unfortunately own this dreaded spell and bad karma.

manages to make hash of at least three and maybe four distinct religious traditions, invoking the karmic wheel of Indian subcontinent, the traditional vodou religions of Africa, a vague reference to the sort of curses which regularly plague folks in the Bible (and African Americans in the United States), and even, as Paul notes, a faint echo of Biblical commentary about Jesus’s rocky relationship with Nazareth.

But at the same time, people invoke these sorts of motifs for a reason, and I want to sketch out what I see as the larger religious processes (of betrayal/reconciliation, sin/redemption, affliction/purgation, and such) that are worked out on the basketball court in a number of religious ways (my earlier posts exploring the theology of basketball are here and here), and lurk here behind Gilbert’s unfortunate choice of Comic Sans. That is, as unlikely as it may seem, there’s coherence here.

What Gilbert’s really doing in this text is jeremiad, though a complicated one. He is calling Cleveland to repentance, for they have followed after a false prophet, sought after salvation which has turned to ashes and sin in their mouths. But while the jeremiad traditionally invoked the promise of former generations, Gilbert instead appeals to the promise of salvation that once hovered within grasp, and in a series of rhetorical inversions shows how it has been shorn of its finery. While James was once ritually adulated with Nike’s “We Are All Witnesses” campaign, which promulgated ads that did no less than promise LeBron as savior, Gilbert now uses the word to describe the agony of fan watching James’s betrayal. This is, as Gilbert puts it, “bitterly disappointing;” because, of course, “witnessing” is the source of salvation. The word itself invokes evangelical Protestant liturgies of conversion, as sinners are brought to their redemption through hearing the Word of God. In the religion of sports, however, the salvation of identification, of embedding one’s self in the transformative narrative of conflict and triumph, comes through the witnessing of the athletes on the court, of which we are witnesses. Quicken Area was therefore a church, and James’s betrayal of his fans on an ESPN spectacle Gilbert angrily labels “narcissistic” and “self-promotional” has transformed their rite of salvation into an infliction of agony for his own gain, rather than the means of grace which it was intended.

But Gilbert’s jeremiad does not end there; rather, following pattern, after presenting the problem it exhorts to redemption. And Gilbert promises, in best pastoral style, that the path to salvation is not lost; rather, the flock must simply find the correct path. In a rare correct use of apostrophes, Gilbert refers to James as the “chosen one;” a title once used in all seriousness, describing the power James was presumed to have to restore true salvific basketball to Cleveland. Now, however, James has been exposed as a false prophet. And this because, in what Paul rightly notes is one of the most fascinating lines in the document:

Some people think they should go to heaven but NOT have to die to get there.

James peddled cheap grace. By somewhat gleeful implication, Gilbert notes that in his seven year career with Cleveland, LeBron failed to win a championship. This, he maintains, was the inevitable result of James’s false religion, but now, liberated by the blinding and painful light of revelation, Cleveland has been rightly converted, and will set about making its own salvation. As Gilbert argues, “this shameful display of selfishness and betrayal by one of our very own has shifted our "motivation" to previously unknown and previously never experienced levels.”

Ultimately, the purpose of this reverse jeremiad is purgation of sin, an expiation that follows Rene Girard’s analysis of the scape goat of the Hebrew Bible. Gilbert declares, in a rather muddy bit of theological reasoning, that James will bear the “curse” (ie, inability to win, to provide a truly transformative narrative of victory for its fans to find salvation in) with him to Miami, in a way somehow related to his exposure as a false prophet. What this means is that James is the bearer of Cleveland’s sins; he must be ritually cast out from their midst, in order to take with him the contagion that afflicts them. And thus we can understand Gilbert’s insistence that Cleveland is now somehow better off without him. After all, as Gilbert notes, Clevelanders now know that James is the “exact opposite” of “what we would want our children to learn. And ‘who’ we would want them to become.” (sic, on the apostrophes; as I glancingly observed earlier, Gilbert often uses them in baffling fashion.)

It’s therefore perhaps appropriate that Gilbert closes his letter promising that “Tomorrow is a new and much brighter day.” The apostate is cast from the midst; the community’s sins have been eliminated. And the true and only heaven hovers in the distance.

Listen America!

Randall Stephens

When Jerry Falwell issued his call to arms Listen America! in 1980, he intended to rally the troops. Or to use another metaphor, them dry bones needed reanimatin'. Falwell's words leapt from the page like shouts from a megaphone. "Listen, America! Our nation is on a perilous path in regard to her political, economic, and military positions."

I'm not sure if Ken Ham is taking cues from Lynchburg's fallen saint. Could be. Ham--from the creationist Answers in Genesis fame and director of the sprawling, high tech Creation Museum--is not happy with how things are going in his adopted country. (He's is originally from Australia. I guess that chinstrap beards are popular down under. Though it seems like a hardcore, new metal, Amish thing up here.) As Ham watches America being reduced to moral rubble, there's much to shake a fist at.

In Ham's version of contemporary history, the nation is in need of a swift Jeremiad-kick to the hind quarters. He targets agents of atheism, milquetoast theism, and wild-eyed secularism lurking around every corner in his second State of the Nation address. (See video here. The embedded version seemed to slow things down here.) He is particularly tough on President Obama, who had the audacity to hope that America was more than just a Christian nation. When Obama proclaims: "Whatever we once were, we are no longer a Christian nation—at least not just. We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation and a Hindu nation and a nation of nonbelievers," it rings loud alarm bells for Ham and Christian-nation amateur historians like David Barton and Peter Marshall.

Ham's address is interesting on a number of levels. (He takes my colleague and coauthor Karl Giberson to task at around 36:20.) I'm struck by the way that Ham, like millions of other fundamentalists now and from ages past, does not believe in hermeneutics. The Bible is so clear and direct--a one-stop shop for all life's problems--that there is almost no need for interpretation. According to the Heritage Singers, "God said it, and I believe it." Or, as I heard a seminary professor put it some years ago, fundamentalists take their miracles and their passages of scripture straight, no chaser. From a whirlwind of scripture passages emerges a few other themes. A thread of declension runs throughout, depicted well in the helpful cartoons. One major point (surprise) has to do with the fact that evolution is not a science. Another theme: America is slipping from the grasp of true believers. Quislings, meek Christians, have sold out.

Observers can find out a lot about a movement by looking at what it vilifies, damns, or fights. Billy Sunday was no fan of higher criticism and, by extension, Germans. Another Billy, Graham, fought tooth and nail against sin and commies in the late 1940s. Bob Jones, III, battled the feds, who wanted to strip BJU of its tax exempt status. One could go on and on.

I'm still asking the "why" questions about all of this. Why have fundamentalists, and many evangelicals, arrayed themselves against a host of enemies? What's the nature of that embattled feeling? . . . Help me, Matt Sutton!

Calling This Blog Back to Its Pure and Godly Roots: A Modern-Day Jeremiad

A Jeremiad Over Religion in American History
by Ed Blum

I just finished reading Andrew Murphy’s terrific Prodigal Nation: Moral Decline and Divine Punishment from New England to 9/11 (also, see here for more and a "page 99" test). For those of us who’ve read our fair share on the Puritan Jeremiad or its use throughout American history, this is a refreshing book. Murphy focuses on three main historical moments: the seventeenth century when the American Jeremiad was created; the Civil War when the Jeremiad was tested; and modern America when the Jeremiad was “taken back” by the moral majority and their hopes to save the United States from its decline. This is an affordable, readable book that would be great for courses in American religious history that go from the Puritans to the present.

Murphy is a political scientist and what he does best is systematize and define. For the Jeremiad, he defines it with the following characteristics. First, Jeremiads identify problems that show a decline vis-à-vis the past; second, Jeremiads identify turning points (where society shifted from godly to sinful); and third, Jeremiads call for reform, repentance, and renewal (since, I’m guessing, we can only teach in groups of threes and in groups of three r’s). Most Jeremiads seem to share that structure.

So it got me thinking, what would a Jeremiad over this blog look like? How might I call this blog back to its beautiful and godly roots? Here’s what I came up with. First, I would laud the origins of the blog. It began simply with the vision of one pure man. Paul Harvey felt called in July 2007 “to foster discussion, sharing of links, and (I hope) eventually a group blog in American religious history.” The goal was for discussion and to share links. Perhaps a few others might join. Most pristine, Harvey began with a plug of my religious biography of W. E. B. Du Bois. It was a time of simplicity and harmony. And for a time, all went well. Paul and his co-editor Kelly Baker posted nice little links to various stories, to syllabi, and to new books and questions. All could read the blog in unity and be at peace with God.

But disaster struck in May 2008. It was then that a new contributing editor who seemed like an angel of light but was really a part of the antichrist’s plan to destroy the blog joined the crew. Dissension hit the blog almost instantly. When Dr. Harvey posted a picture of the new editor on the blog, he became angry. He demanded that the cover of his book be posted instead. It was the first time the genius of Harvey’s benevolent rule had been challenged. But it was only the beginning of the discord that this version of the antichrist would bring to the community. Attacking journal after journal, review after review, the enemy single-handedly transformed the blog from an arena of communal affirmation to one of strife and verbal tirades. Then he amassed a following of new editors and even connived me into his unholy attack on the community.

After May 2008, the blog went, figuratively, to hell. Stories emerged on new and bizarre topics. We could now read on the theology of George Carlin; even Paul Harvey posted about atheism in Phil Zuckerman’s book; evolution has been discussed on a blog about religion. What was happening? Liberal politicians like Barack Obama have been defended, and Phil Sinitiere and Jon Fea alerted us to too many books. All of it upsets the mind and has devastated the communal unity of our group. Peace has left us and now only discord and confusion.

What shall we do to be saved? Isn’t it clear, my fellow blog readers. We must return to the early time, the time when Paul posted short little snippets mostly about my books and material. The antichrist should be banished and hopefully slaughtered in the wilderness by Native Americans. Perhaps then and only then, we can reestablish this group as the last best blog on planet earth.

Child Poverty in Christian-Land

Paul Harvey

Colorado experienced nationally the largest growth rate in child poverty from 2000 to 2006, according to a study released yesterday: 180,000 children — 15.7 percent of the state total — were living in poverty in Colorado in 2006, a 73 percent increase since 2000.

Reading this study, I did a quick and admittedly unscientific web search to see what, if anything, religious right organizations in the Colorado Springs and Denver area (the epicenter, nationally, for these groups), from Focus on the Family to the megachurches to the dozens of other parachurch groups, had to say. The answer doubtless will shock you: nothing much, aside from generic statements about how marriage is good for kids and children in married families are less likely to be raised in poverty.

Fair enough; I would not dispute those statements, and there's a good argument that strengthening families is a good policy measure to combat poverty. Of course, in this world "strengthening families" has nothing to do with providing decent health insurance for the nearly 50 million uninsured, or providing the kind of post-natal support and parental leave common in European countries, or addressing critical state priorities in education, and on and on.

(Just to cite one random example: Higher education is one of the single greatest drivers of economic growth and lifting people's prospects, yet Colorado has ranked 49th in per capita higher education funding recently, just to cite one randomly chosen example. After a recent referendum in state tax policy allowing for the retention for a few years of "excess" tax revenue, I think we're all the way up to 44th now. Of course, the religious right locally opposed this change in tax policy).

I also know what we've gone through politically here in the last election cycles, and sure to be the case in this one as well: a frenzied focus on homosexuality, "the gay agenda," and especially gay marriage, sure to be worsened this time by the California Supreme Court decision and a statewide ballot measure banning gay marriage (similar to the one in Ohio in 2004). Again, scan the websites of these Colorado groups and you would assume that gay marriage will put the Republic in clear and present danger -- just as, in a previous generation, they portrayed miscegenation and the grave threat of interracial marriage, prior to the Loving case in 1967.

The disproportionate attention paid to these sideshow wedge issues has worked in firing up the base, but for how much longer? Even while evangelicals nationally appear to be waking up, belatedly, to a broader range of issues beyond the firebombs, Colorado's evangelicals still sound the same calls for culture wars.

Update: For evidence of my final statement above about some Colorado evangelicals, see this post from a local (Colorado Springs) pastor who sees complaints about poverty to be evidence of the "covetousness" of the impoverished. He writes: As Christians, we must look at the Bible's objective standards of poverty rather than at the federal government's poverty guidelines.

In other words, lack of access to affordable and decent food, health care, and education is perfectly biblical.

By contrast, we must "fight the good fight" on the central battleground for our times -- that being, of course, fighting the "homo-agenda." Onward, Christian soldier.