Glenn Beck has the Lord's Prayer upside down: "On Earth as it is in Hell."
I say this because Glenn Beck compared the young victims of the Norway massacre to Hitler youth. The blogger who reported this (see below) states that Beck did not condone the killing. But Beck dips his finger in the water before he jumps in. For example, he claimed on Fox News that President Obama hates White people. He backed off when even his Fox News cohorts balked at his offensive accusation. But before he backed off, he offered this accusation to the world.
As to the Norwegian victims: before their toe tags had been taken off for burial, Beck gestured to a shadow of a justification for their assassination by a right-wing, Christian fanatic.
This sickened me.
1. Even Glenn Beck is complicated.
Yet I believe that human beings are complicated. To see someone as a cartoon villain instead of as a person with good and evil inside is wrong. My commitment to seeing complexity in humans makes me try to understand how Beck can be say something so sickening.
This goes against my instinct. My instinct is to say that when the Evil One speaks, Glenn Beck’s lips move.
But that would be wrong. So here goes my meditation on Glenn Beck.
2. Beck is disoriented by a mix of conservatism, Christianity, and evil.
Somebody deeply decent that I am related to condones torture. I was dismayed when I learned that. But I know that he strongly identifies with the Republican Party and with George W. Bush. This relative could see no evil in his president or party. So Bush’s endorsement of torture moved him to endorse it, too. I believe that the shallowness of President Bush is a falling light that caused shadows to rise among those who admired him. These shadows rose in my deeply decent relative. They took the form of considering a great evil to be a great good.
If he had been willing to see evil in the president – even if he saw good, too – my deeply decent relative’s morality would not have been darkened by Bush.
This shows how some people might idealize persons, and therefore not be able to see evil in them, to their detriment.
Now Beck. Beck does not so much idealize a single person. But he idealizes persons, like the assassin, who have qualities of Christianity and conservatism. To Glenn Beck, Christianity and conservatism, which the assassin embraces in the extreme, are good things. Perhaps to Beck, if Christianity and conservatism are good things, extreme Christianity and extreme conservatism are extremely good.
Could it be that Beck cannot recognize the evil effect of these things in the Norwegian assassin? Like my deeply decent relative, Beck might see a person as good or evil, not good and evil. Because he is a conservative Christian, this assassin, Beck might deep down want to see him as good or as mostly good.
If so, it must disorient him to see Christianity and conservatism and murder exist together in the Norwegian assassin. To restore his own mental equilibrium, Beck must find a way to reconcile this perceived goodness with murder. That involves contriving a way to make the death of the scores of victims not a bad thing, but somehow a good thing.
Naziism is a premier evil, so it becomes a handy label with which to blacken the blameless. Beck immolates the memories of the dead to preserve his ideology.
3. Beck might be acting out of anxiety for his followers.
Another explanation. Perhaps Beck considers his ideology to be an ark in dangerous seas. Himself an extremist, perhaps he worries that this proof of the evil of extremism, Christian extremism and conservative extremism, will demoralize his followers. Beck might fear that this demoralization will make some of his followers jump off his ark, to their peril. So it is out of compassion that he stains the memory of the dead – compassion for those who listen to him.
4. But that doesn’t make defaming the dead right.
This is the best that I can do to explain what Beck has said. I know that what I write is shallow and unsatisfying.
Even though I try to explain what Beck has said, I don’t justify it. Evil with a reason behind it is still evil. To say that there is some compassion or logic mixed in with what Beck says is not to say in any ultimate way that he is a good person. It only acknowledges that he is a complicated person.
5. Making peace with Glenn Beck.
But to say that Beck is complicated is to concede his humanity. To say that Beck is complicated is to say that he is like me and like every person that I know. We differ only in degree, because nobody is entirely good or entirely evil.
The Norwegian assassin had one kind of extreme Christianity. Another extreme Christianity – let me distinguish it by calling it radical Christianity – calls us to recognize our universal moral poverty before God. With the prophet Isaiah, we are called to say:
But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away. [Isaiah 64:6.]Isaiah calls us to know our universal moral poverty before God. Having in mind this universal moral poverty, a Christian does not look upon a Glenn Beck and say, "There but for the grace of God go I." A Christian says, "There I go."
And if I look at Glenn Beck in this way, then I must say, "Glenn Beck is me."
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My source for Glenn Beck’s statement:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/28/a-madman-and-his-manifesto/
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