Last weekend, Glenn Beck had half a million folks, many of them very well intentioned and understandably angry about the direction of our country, convene at the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s famous speech. While I expected a mix of good and bad messages – Beck still has a love of the military state, but is also the highest-profile media personality to attack Woodrow Wilson regularly, which I consider a major point in his favor – what I saw was something else entirely. It was a religious revival, with ecumenical theism as the unifying principle. So long as you believed in God (or, as one speaker seemed to repeatedly put it, "gods") you would be welcome in the Beck extended family, regardless of your denomination.
But there was more to it than that. You must, above all else, accept the core elements of America’s secular civic religion. The Pilgrims and Native Americans were God’s "chosen people," as Beck said. The U.S. government, forcibly united under Lincoln, represents the hand of God on earth. The Civil Rights movement was also a holy, blessed and distinctly American endeavor. The whole event was a pseudo-religious mass prayer to the alleged U.S. values of egalitarianism, militarism, and soft theocracy. Everything good about America – which was tied inextricably to the federal government, its military wing and unifying power over the states and people – has God’s signature right on it. Sarah Palin’s speech was particularly awful, as she spoke of the righteous destiny of women since ancient times to see their children grow up and die for the holy state.
This is frightening stuff – the stuff of a theocratic national socialism, when taken to its extreme. This is not to say most of Beck’s fans are Nazis, or anything like that. But there is something at the core of modern conservatism that still contains the seed of the most wretched political horrors you can imagine. And we could reasonably worry that we have yet to see the worst from this bunch. In fact, Bush perhaps moderated some of the right’s worst impulses, in particular the explicit Islamophobia. With Obama as president, the right is looking for a political savior even more unambiguously hateful than the Bush regime. The culture war, too, has again reared its ugly head, with conservatives predictably neglecting the obvious solution of opposing state encroachments on their own families and cultural values, and instead politicizing everything and depending on government as the final moral arbiter in society.
The religious devotion to the military and nation-state – whether wrapped up in Christianity or secularism – explains why some people can never be trusted on the question of war. When Ann Coulter expresses skepticism toward Afghanistan, it is the function of a watered-down and vulgar America First sentiment. But America First is only a bulwark for peace when it’s radical, consistent and coupled with a concern for the dignity and humanity of foreign victims of the regime. If the only reason to oppose war is it’s a waste of American blood and money, there will be no stopping the next Republican president from unleashing even more death and destruction than did Bush, so long as it can be excused in the name of "national security." For Americans to embrace peace, they must accept the notion that foreigners have all the natural rights Americans do, and dropping bombs on them while they sit peacefully in their homes and neighborhoods is every bit as barbaric, monstrous and murderous as 9/11 or any other terrorist act. Most left-liberals are too poisoned by nationalism and love of government to fully admit this. But conservatives, in particular, are generally incapable of even wrapping their heads around the notion.
