Column: prophet of an angry God

“America, today, begins to turn back to God,” said a fiery Glenn Beck at his rally to restore honor in America.

The problem lies less in the fact that Glenn Beck was speaking with a racially charged, egotistical authority rooted in the entertainment industry and more in the knowledge that to turn backward, one must have been facing forward first.

The call to turn back to a God who has been forgotten by mainstream America is a cry that has faced progressives as they have imagined an enlightened and nuanced deity for decades.

The conservative Christians who swamped Washington D.C. this weekend have been searching for an angry and wrathful God to crush the liberals, sodomites and commies from their first days of Sunday school.

And now that an inflammatory talk-show host has blessed this quest from the sacred ground of the Lincoln Memorial, a crusade of perverted Christianity can invade the 2010 election season.

While the ultimate purpose of a gathering one-twentieth the size of our president’s inaugural address might be to show the force of the no-longer silent majority and its power as a voting block, the disheartening recognition of a community so out of flux with a modern understanding of God is a painful one for the modern left to comprehend.

This rally to restore honor in America did little more than refurbish the wrathful God of evangelical America.

This newly refurbished God is one who is not compatible with a progressive agenda, civil rights for all Americans or any threat to an unbelievably top-heavy form of capitalism. This is the God of Moses, as Beck points out, and he is the God whom conservatives imagine receiving the glory and praise of our Deist Founding Fathers.

There is also an eschatological drive to this God, which presents Americans with stark options. Beck’s simplistic realization left his crowd with little room for discussion: “We must advance, or perish.”

Advancement, of course, is closely linked with the fighting for many political issues that were carefully side-stepped in the crusade for a self-satisfying morality.

In backing away from political rants and into the realm of the divine, Beck and his supporters fundamentally attacked a mainstream that is shifting away from a blind faith in an angry God and into the realm of spiritual exploration.

The root issue lies in the quest to capture what Beck’s supporters identify as the Judeo-Christian God, which ultimately entrenches their argument in the self-identified moral high ground.

From the eyes of the informed public, this quest for the high-ground is merely an exercise in moral masturbation, but to the community of believers who is frightened by their impending condemnation, delivered every weeknight at 5 p.m. as a direct command of God, this crusade is real.

It is a call realized through aggressive indoctrination of fear and is one that is sure to deliver many into the hands of an angry God.

E-mail: schammoo@indiana.edu