Posted on 12/29/2010 11:40:27 PM PST by yort
W. Cleon Skousen's book "The Five Thousand Year Leap" has been reissued, and after an endorsement from Glenn Beck, it was even briefly the No. 1 best-seller at Amazon.com. This is bad news for religious conservatism.
Skousen's book is a slipshod mixture of tendentious history, bad theology and paranoid politics in the John Birch Society mold. It ought to be treated as a curiosity of the pre-Reagan right, a fantasy world where communist agents such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Dwight D. Eisenhower worked to undermine America....
The revival of Skousen-esque thinking via Glenn Beck's teary-eyed presentations on the dangers of creeping socialism and the tea party's darker prognostications on President Barack Obama's secret totalitarian agenda present problems for serious religious conservatives....
...Beck's neo-Skousenism is a distraction and a dead end. His ready use of religious imagery appeals to many religious conservatives, but ultimately it is political and spiritual junk food: tasty to some but without substance and poisonous in large quantities.
Forget debates over gay marriage; the traditional kind seems to be in free fall among those vulnerable citizens who could benefit the most from it. This is surely an issue where the republic would benefit from serious religious voices, as opposed to paranoid fantasy presented as saccharine political spirituality.
Over the long term, the revival of the worst strands of Cold War conservatism on the religious right is bad for America and bad for religious conservatives. If vigorously pursued, it will render conservative religious voices irrelevant to serious political discussions. Sadly, the irrelevance will be deserved.
(Excerpt) Read more at 2.timesdispatch.com ...
I like Beck.
Welcome to FreeRepublic.
You just joined FR to post this crap? Move along please
You sign up yesterday to post this?
IBTZ
Beck’s not my cup of tea. His hyper-emotionalism must be an acquired taste.
"Suppose we've chosen the wrong god. Every time we go to church we're just making him madder and madder!" --Homer Simpson's take on Pascal's Wager
::Troll Alert::
?
I think we should leave hyper-emotionalism crap to the liberals and stick to logic and reason.
Conservatives are those who advocate the preservation, conservation, or restoration of our constitutional republican form of government. Not a single candidate who leads with their personal religious preference ever, ever, ever meets that test.
Religious tyranny is not conservative.
Pro-life liberalism is not conservative.
Authoritarian statism is not conservative.
Constitutional conservatism is conservative.
From my memory of the book, it boils down to 28 solid ideals the founders had for keeping the country free and prosperous.
I find the article lacking any meat in it’s criticism. Beck’s OCD usually has him spinning around trying to find a direction for his thoughts, which irritates me. Especially when he goes dark after reading some obscure book. This is not one of those books.
I smell an elitist GOP hack in Oman. His resume sides toward that conclusion. If the author wants to make a point, he should have cited quotes from 5000 instead of glossing over what his overall thoughts were.
Apparently Beck is good for a headline though.
where is the chalkboard?
This is kind of an odd sentence. I've read it several times and I'm not sure what to make of it. I'm not sure what it has to do with Beck.
BTW, welcome to FR. Try not to get ‘zotted’ straight away. Personally I find the occasional contrarian far more interesting.
I notice the author couldn’t include any actual quote from the book where it is said Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist. Usually when people do that it is because they either haven’t read what they imply they have read, or have read it and are not being truthful about what they have read. Maybe the author should read the books he critiques before writing about them and then actually provide supporting quotes to make his point.
The usual procedure here is to join, then lurk for, oh, half a decade, before posting anything. Some here take great offence to any deviation from normal, especially if the newb posts articles contrary to certain established facts.
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