Shades of Elmer Gantry

Listening on C-Span radio to most of Glenn Beck’s speech at the religious rally he staged at the Lincoln Memorial on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech, I couldn’t help but think of Sinclair Lewis’s “Elmer Gantry,” a satirical novel about religious hypocrisy in 1920’s America. Make no mistake; Glenn Beck is no Elmer Gantry, the overdrawn character of satire later played by Burt Lancaster in the 1960 movie based on Lewis’s novel. But, there are disturbing, if muted, similarities.

Forget about the outrageous appropriation of Martin Luther King, Jr’s civil rights legacy; that falls on its own merits. But, many of the words and themes that Beck enunciated resonate with me, and I am sure with many people. Unfortunately, they clashed with many of the positions and statements he has made, not just before but also after the rally. Just this past weekend, on Fox News, for example, Beck reportedly apologized for calling President Obama a racist. That’s admirable and right in line with the healing message he enunciated at the August 27th rally. No argument there. However, there were no apologies for comparing Obama to the Nazis or for alleging he is a Communist. It’s hard to figure how a person could be both a Nazi and Communism, two competing ideologies, but let’s not quibble. Besides, it’s probably difficult for Beck to recall all the epithets he’s hurled at the President over the last 18 months, and even before he was elected.

My guess is that Beck and his prime movers now realize that using the overt, savage attacks that Father Coughlin used against Jews and Communists (to Coughlin they were redundant) in the 1920’s and 1930’s and later by Senator Joseph McCarthy, Senator Richard Nixon, and others more recently, no longer work with Beck’s born-again role as healer. So, instead, he has softened his tone and has adopted a more subtle, nuanced approach, reminding me of what a Civil Rights worker in the 60s once told me. She said that dealing with the dogs and hoses was in many ways a lot easier than the tactics used by contemporary racists. At least you knew who your enemies were.

So, using a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer, Beck claimed in an interview over the weekend that most Christians can’t relate to Obama’s “liberation theology,” which is the core of the President’s Christian beliefs, says Beck.

Now here’s the cleverness and subtlety of that charge. It’s not a term easily found in the lexicon of American political mudslinging. “Liberation theology” is mostly associated with Catholic priests and nuns in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, who took seriously Vatican II’s “preferential option for the poor” and worked hard to improve the social and economic condition of the poor, only later to be smacked down by the Vatican for being too closely associated with Marxist philosophy. Also — and here’s the clincher — liberation theology is a core theme of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s preaching.

So, there you have it: Two birds with one stone or, to mix metaphors, to have your cake and eat it, too. You can once again link up Obama with Reverend Wright, in case people have forgotten, and there’s a better than even chance that Fox will replay the tape where Wright has God damning America, in case viewers have forgotten. It makes no difference that candidate Obama denounced Wright’s excesses and disassociated himself from him. — again, let’s not quibble. And, on top of that, you remind Catholics that Obama is not in sync, as he and some of his supporters claim, with so-called official Catholic social teaching. He’s probably a Marxist to boot, as evidenced, of course, by his big-government programs like health care reform, the stimulus package, and financial reform, among others.

Sound like a stretch? I don’t think so. When you have billionaires like Rupert Murdoch of Fox News and the Koch brothers bankrolling right-wing causes, Beck and his cohorts can afford first-class researchers and spinmeisters to dig up whatever they can, leaving no stone unturned. In the August 30th New Yorker, Jane Mayer profiles the Koch’s who, she reports, have quietly given more than one hundred million dollars to right-wing causes. “The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight for industry — mostly environmental regulation.”

No wonder that Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin consider Barack Obama’s social agenda heretical and anathema to their type of Christianity, which is all about turning to God. But, as the Scriptures — both Old Testament and New — tell us over and over again, you can’t ignore the poor and the disadvantaged in the process of turning to God. They go together. And, as President John F. Kennedy also reminded us in his 1961 inaugural address, while we turn to God and ask His blessings on our work, we must realize at the same time that here on earth God's work must truly be our own.