Glenn Beck, Simplified

This time he’s really done it. After his recent (probably tearful) plea to his listeners:

“I’m begging you, your right to religion and freedom to exercise religion and read all of the passages of the Bible as you want to read them and as your church wants to preach them are going to come under the ropes in the next year. If it lasts that long it will be the next year. I beg you, look for the words ‘social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words.

Now, am I advising people to leave their church? ….. YES!”

Respectable church leaders are on his case. Other fringe media on the right (I’m looking at you, WorldNet Daily) have tried to get you to believe that unfettered capitalism is right there in the Bible, but none have quite the reach of Mr. Beck.

Earlier, Beck had asserted that the code word “social justice” translates into Nazism and Communism. There’s that weird conflation again: two polar opposites that under one banner or another spent most of the twentieth century at each others’ throats — at the cost of tens of millions of lives — turn out to be exactly the same thing. If only Hitler and Stalin had known, such an unpleasant misunderstanding could have been avoided altogether.

But again, I digress. Even leading figures in his own chosen church, the Latter Day Saints, are critical of him. Jim Wallis suggests that churchgoers leave him, which would be a start.

Over at NewsCorpse they theorize that what Beck is really after is to be the leader of his own cult religion. I think it’s simpler than that.

When social justice prevails, those previously without power gain some; those who previously held all the power, lose some.

When economic justice prevails, (in the short run) those without means gain some; but (again in the short run) those with means lose some. I say in the short run because a higher standard of living across the board raises the quality of life for everyone, including those who were already wealthy. But since conservatives like Beck believe they’re living in a zero-sum world I’m going to give them that for the sake of argument.

So the (at the risk of being repetitive, short-term) losers are those with power and money already. Such a group would necessarily include Mr. Beck, who has his own much-watched daily television show and a salary upwards of $500,000 a week (yes, a week).

So the simplified Mr. Beck is, “if your church is suggesting that I, Glenn Beck, give up a dime of that money, run.”