Beck, Palin and 300,000 to 500,000 at the "Woodstock of this generation"

So if this is Woodstock for our generation as Beck says, you should know what to expect.

Incidentally, the woman who states that Jesus Christ would not have supported welfare or the bank bailouts … well Jesus Christ also would not have supported attending dominionist religious/political rallies led by a Mormon. So, that would qualify as someone needing to take the beam out of her own eye before she worries about the mote in someone else’s …

I’m betting that the point of the analogy was to say “the pivotal, watershed event” of this generation. Hyperbole to be sure, but not a bad analogy in that sense.
About Beck, you know it’s possible to be a Bible-believing Christian (officially) and embrace a completely unbiblical political philosophy (unbiblical because it depends on a view of human nature and human society that Scripture rejects). And, oddly (but fortunately for us all!) , it’s also possible to be a non-Christian and embrace a highly Bible-compatible political philosophy. Thinking straight about politics just doesn’t correlate with regeneration. I think that’s common grace at work, myself, since most people are unregnerate!
All that to say that Beck can be really mixed up about the nature of God, what sin is, what penalty sin requires, and how redemption is secured and still have a really good political philosophy. (As it is, I think I’d rather say his is “pretty good” not “really good” because he is way too populist).
It’s hard to really be sure what Jesus would do in His spare time when it comes to political efforts. He didn’t have any spare time!

Certainly there are elements of Beck’s conservatism which resonate with conservative Christians. This makes for good drama. However, Beck grossly exaggerates in claiming that “America today begins to turn back to God” since 1) Beck’s God is not the God of the Bible, 2) America can’t turn back to some mythical past, and 3) God’s political agenda is the kingdom of Christ, presently inaugurated awaiting eschatological consummation.

[Jim Peet] About the rally …. really pretty interesting. The show of strength for change of another sort.

More here http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/28/AR20100…

Also of interest to me ….

King’s niece Alveda King, an anti-abortion activist, addressed Beck’s rally with a plea for prayer “in the public squares of America and in our schools.” Referencing her “Uncle Martin,” King called for national unity by repeatedly declaring “I have a dream.”

Personal view: I’m no Beck fan

Also, the fact that the religious right has joined the religious left in being an ecumenical, pluralistic movement is a bad thing, not a good one, because it shows that both the religious right and the religious left are willing to sacrifice Biblical eternal truths in order for temporary worldly political objectives. So, I see a Pentecostal Christian like Alveda King joining up with a Mormon like Beck (who claimed that the date of his rally was chosen by God’s providence) in some spiritual rally as the former’s endorsing the idea that the Christian God and the Mormon god are one and the same, and that the Mormon jesus is the same as the Jesus Christ of the Bible.

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/08/27/some-evangelicals-on-defensive…
http://www.christianpost.com/article/20100827/evangelical-megachurch-pa…

And by the way … Martin Luther King, Jr. was no Christian. He denied the divinity, virgin birth and resurrection of Jesus Christ and took the position that Jesus Christ was a philosopher, ethical teacher and failed revolutionary … a sort of liberation theology type. King, Jr. (not to be confused with his evangelical father) used the centuries-old theological liberal trick of employing the language and tactics of orthodoxy to deceive people into following a completely different ideology. A lot of good, honest, sincere Bible-believing Christians were deceived by King and his fellow travelers. They were duped into believing that King believed the same thing that they did, that when he would pray or quote scripture that those prayers and texts meant the same to them that it did to King, and that therefore their movement was a legitimately Christian one based on sound doctrine and practice.

King and his cohorts used those people. They were the ones who took all the real risks. They were the ones who were attacked by police dogs, were pummeled by fire hydrants, and viciously beaten and shot by police officers, and were injured or killed by the riots that these folks purposefully incited with their tactics. Granted, King was arrested from time to time, but it was basically a show. The federal government made it clear that if King or any of his top lieutenants were injured while in custody, that there would be severe consequences. However, the Bible-believing Christian foot soldiers that King tricked didn’t have those protections, so the folks angry at not being allowed to touch King and the other SCLC leaders took out their violent hate filled frustrations on the rank and file instead.

Had these people knew that they were following a man who rejected the deity of Jesus Christ, they would have never exposed themselves to such risk. There were alternative civil rights movements and strategies that didn’t involve a complete and total rejection of Romans 13, and King’s followers would have joined those instead. Had it not been for King’s deception, the key civil rights laws might have taken a decade or two longer to pass, but the black community would have a different leadership, one that is not totally sold out to Marxism. And incidentally, even many black liberals disagreed with MLK. Thurgood Marshall loathed King’s tactics of putting people in danger, and correctly predicted that the disrespect for institutions and law and order that King, Jr. was fomenting would do severe harm to the black community in the long run. Where during King’s day black leaders usually built and ran schools, hospitals, businesses and communities, now the black community has a bunch of “leaders” more interested (and qualified for) marching and yelling demands than in building institutions.

I say that Beck is deceiving politically conservative Christians now the same way that King, Jr. deceived black Christians 50 years ago. More Christians should have challenged King, Jr. from a theological perspective back then, and more Christians should do the same regarding Glenn Beck now.

Where during King’s day black leaders usually built and ran schools, hospitals, businesses and communities, now the black community has a bunch of “leaders” more interested (and qualified for) marching and yelling demands than in building institutions.

That is quite a stereotype. I’ve been involved with doing urban ministry for 20 years and have traveled all throughout the country connecting with non-profits and ministries. There are thousands and thousands of black-run institutions (and they are usually faith-based) such as schools, hospitals/health clinics, businesses, economic corporations, homeless shelters, youth centers, homeownership programs, and etc…… The problem is the media gives a platform to the media/camera chasers such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, rather than those who are on the grass-roots level doing actual community development.

You are right about Dr. King’s theology. He flatly denied the fundamentals of the faith. Yet among some evangelical circles, apparently that doesn’t matter. There is even a popular book about racism in the evangelical church written by Dr. Soong-Chan Rah that chides evangelical Christians for even suspecting that Dr. King really wasn’t a Christian. Nevertheless, some Christian African-American foot soldiers for the civil rights movement probably knew of his theology, but joined with him anyway because of the overwhelming injustice towards blacks especially in the south such as denying them of the right to vote, having to endure a separate and severely unequal culture, and the list goes on and on. If the boycotts against the injustice that these Jim Crow laws produced hadn’t happened, I think it would have been several decades later until we would have the more equal society that we enjoy today. The visual pictures of Bull Conner hosing down the protesters and using his dogs to attack defenseless people literally turned the tide throughout the nation against those who were oppressing African-Americans. I know it affected my parents and the families they came from. They became more sympathetic to the plight of black people in the south in the 50’s and 60’s, whereas if things would have gone as they had been going, they wouldn’t have even realized that there was a severe injustice taking place in America.

I realize that your reason for bringing up Dr. King’s methods is to show how wrong Glenn Beck is, especially him being a Mormon and how he employs religious language to further his agenda.

By the way, there were evangelical civil rights activists that were not only building institutions/doing community development, but they also used boycotts and marches because when blacks came together and showed their economic buying power through boycotts, white-owned businesses were severely affected. It got their attention. One evangelical civil rights activist named John Perkins (he was discipled by a minister that was part of Child Evangelism Fellowship) in Mississippi started : churches, Bible clubs, health clinics, homeownership programs, businesses, youth centers, and the list goes on and on. However, there were sinful structures within the little city of Mendenhall that were affecting its people. He led a successful boycott and consequently was jailed and almost beaten to death. Yet God showed him through this experience that these white people needed Christ…..that they were so twisted with prejudice and hate. He was the first to articulate the concept of racial reconciliation that some Christians talk about today, based on the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Anyway, your post was good because it gave everyone such as myself some food for thought, even if I disagreed with parts of it :bigsmile:

Well said Joel.

Yes, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., denied the deity of Christ. But so did Thomas Jefferson.

I do wish Beck would leave religion alone.
There is simply no need for any more of it in politics than what informed our founders when the nation’s principles and structures were formulated. So I’m with those who say that we should not exclude God and Christian principles from “politics,” but there is only a very basic idea of God and a handful of “Christian principles” that were involved in the founding of the nation and those are the only ones we really need to keep for the country to prosper as designed.
There are anti-Christian ideas that need to be rejected because they are truly not compatible with what America was all about. But rejecting anti-Christian views of human nature and society and law is not the same thing at all as “America turning back to God.”
There is a nexus between Christianity and authentically American political philosophy, but that nexus doesn’t require people to be born again or have fervent religious faith.
So Beck would serve his country better as a political figure if he focused on the historic religious common denominators. And these don’t require revival meetings.

Beck is making a pile of money.

He is an excellent American capitalist in the midst of economic struggles.

A very intelligent American businessman seizing the moment.

Many LDS are.

LDS people are not dummies. Far, far from it. And they are very connected and unified.