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Tuesday 31 August 2010
Glenn Beck’s History Lesson: Amnesia and Conformity

Beck’s history lesson is a rather confusing one.  He states that he wants to restore America and return the nation to God.  But when exactly did the United States abandon God?  Was the abandonment present at the creation when the Bill of Rights provided for freedom of religion and a separation of church and state based upon colonial opposition to the established Church of England?  Beck, of course, ignores the Founders’ attraction to Deism and the Enlightenment, including Benjamin Franklin’s questioning of Jesus’s divine origins.  Instead, Beck proposes that America was founded as a Christian nation, and, indeed, some colonies proposed freedom of religion for all Christians in order to prevent the immigration of Jews.  While Beck does appear willing to expand his religious boundaries to include a Judeo-Christian tradition, there is certainly no room in Beck’s America for non-Christians or those who might profess no belief in a supreme being.  Thus, Muslims are left out of Beck’s national classroom, and he and his followers are able to embrace a clash of civilizations historical narrative which opposes the creation of an Islamic Center within blocks of Ground Zero, even though a gentleman’s club and lap dancing are tolerated.  In addition, Beck’s religious history lesson omits the tradition of Christian socialism in the United States which helped foster the social gospel movement and combined fundamentalist tent revivals with socialist political meetings on the Oklahoma frontier in the period before World War I.

Beck’s notion of America as a capitalist, Christian nation allows him to endorse American exceptionalism and the concept of manifest destiny.  In Beck’s world view, Americans are God’s chosen people, ant it is incumbent upon Americans to share the blessings of their civilization with the less fortunate peoples of the earth.  Thus, the continental expansionism of the United States and formation of a global empire, in which American military personnel are stationed around the world, are the unfolding of God’s plan for the planet.  Beck’s history does not allow for introspection or reflection.  Instead, a blind patriotism is celebrated in which subjugation of the environment and Native Americans, racial slavery, intolerance, exploitation of labor, and global imperialism are glossed over in a story of triumphant expansionism.  American soldiers and settlers brought the gifts of democracy to the Natives and Mexican peoples of the West and Southwest, while in World Wars I and II, the Cold War, and the War on Terror, America is exporting freedom to the world. 

It is a type of unthinking patriotism which renders Americans incapable of comprehending why some in the world might question the commitment of the United States to democratic principles.  Thus, professor Beck refuses to consider how the Cold War implementation of the Truman Doctrine led to the support of dictatorships and authoritarian regimes in the Philippines, Indonesia, Nicaragua, South Vietnam, South Africa, and Iraq.  Beck’s myopic view of history makes it difficult for his students/ followers to understand that Iranian resentment toward the United States is fueled by a CIA coup in 1953 which removed a democratically-elected government and installed the despised Shah who was overthrown in the Iranian Islamic Revolution.  To raise such issues is unpatriotic and not allowed in Beck’s “democratic” classroom.

Despite this historical celebration of America’s civilizing and democratic mission, accompanied by a failure to acknowledge that there might be any historical failings in American foreign policy—even in the jungles of Southeast Asia—Beck and his prize pupil, Sarah Palin assume that the United States somehow got off course and that God and honor, along with traditional values, must be restored.  Accordingly, we must return to the 1960s and redeem the Civil Rights Movement, for that seems to be where the nation got off course in attempting to bring the promise of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence to all Americans regardless of race, gender, class, or sexual orientation.  Rather than a period in which America got off track, the 1960s commitment to a more egalitarian society may be perceived as the moment when the nation returned to its founding principles. 

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