Love him or hate him, Glenn Beck is a force to be reckoned with, and a major game changer in American Politics. Not since Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Harvard Commencement Speech), has any significant secular person had the guts to stand in front of America and preach what Beck preached: “American must return to God.”
Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.“
Edward E. Ericson, Jr., “Solzhenitsyn – Voice from the Gulag,” Eternity, October 1985, pp. 23, 24.
Heck, even radio talk show host and constitutional scholar Mark Levin, who by any stretch isn’t a Beck fan, admitted to a caller that “It was a good rally.” I was both shocked and appreciative to hear the acknowledgment by Levin, as it gives a needed reassurance that despite the personality differences between conservative opinion leaders, all who “fight the good fight” must and need to be united in this turning point of American History.
I don’t agree with everything Beck does and teaches, but I’m convinced he’s got the “God and Country” right. I also happen to think he is an extraordinary human being, and sometimes wonder if he isn’t the “one sent to humble the fools.” After all, it was only a few years ago that Beck was a dirt poor dead beat drunk unable to make rent; an uncanny metaphor to the current state of our union. It’s hard to deny that Beck grabbed many Americans at their “grass roots”, reaching demographic groups that until now were simply unreachable.
While Beck is no Solzhenitsyn, they have at their core two very fundamental things in common; immense suffering and humility. Nothing gives clarity better than seeing life from the bottom up. In their own different ways, both men have experienced their own living hell. As all “bottom dwellers” know, “the ground floor” inevitably comes with the forked road; the one to bitterness, and the one to greatness, humbled and empowered by the experience.
Only in humility can a Nobel Prize Winner like Solzhenitsyn preach to the sages of Harvard, and only in humility can someone like Beck garner a crowd of a half million US Citizens from their homes in sweltering heat, jammed packed subways (there were two hour waits just to buy tickets), and dead locked traffic.
We all know what happened to Solzhenitsyn at Harvard, booed and labeled a “hectoring Jeremiad” by the New York Times, his message for the most part, fell on deaf ears. For Beck, not so much, witnessed by a crowd who made a choice to come and hear what he had to say, unlike Nobel Laureate Solzhenitsyn, an invited “academic.”
Be it the self described rodeo clown or the most prolific Russian writer Solzhenitsyn, the core of both messages of these men is God and country, only to be ignored at our own peril.
Say what you will about Glenn Beck, but the reality is, he may well be our modern day Jeremiah!
I put together a short photo video (I was there); trying to capture what I believe was the essence of those in attendance: peaceful, God-fearing, country-loving Americans.