Notes for Right Now: A Different Kind of Terror
In the hours and days after the messianic histrionics of Glenn Becks Restoring Honor Rally, most in the media seemed to find themselves inspired to analyze the proceedings in terms of a turn toward God, on the part of this supposed newsman turned newsmaker. A rather flimsy analysis, I thought, for it only parroted Beck’s own pronouncement, during the rally—drenched in the adoration of his followers—that “today is the day America turns back to God.”
Perhaps history will show him to have been prescient. But the question, while we wait, is: to just what God might Beck, or even America, have been turning (or turning back) on the day Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was forever contaminated? As a Mormon, of course, Beck himself probably doesn’t understand what God, or gods—or, according to some accounts, aliens—he worships, or is descended from, or is in the process of becoming. As one of the unquestionable leaders of the increasingly politicized and, therefore, increasingly dangerous turn-of-the-century American evangelical movement, on the other hand, there can be little doubt that the God to which Beck referred during his Dream Day rally was the Judeo-Christian one to which that movement traces itself (in reality, of course, it is just one of what are surely an endless number of bastard children of 1980s televangelism).
Perhaps, however, things aren’t as obvious as they appear—or, in any event, as Beck and his cabal of cohorts would like them to appear. Despite a Bar Mitzvah (a year later than is typical, for reasons I won’t get into here), I am no theologian. Nonetheless, I did once read the Book of Job (in its English translation) for a seminar on tragic literature taught by a middle-aged French moral philosopher who shall here remain nameless. And as it happens, in reading the Book of Job, even and perhaps even especially as literature, one learns some surprising things about the God of the Old Testament, of the Hebrews, the singular and all-powerful God of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
For those who have not read the text themselves, this, as far as I can remember it, is what happens in the Book of Job: Job is a wealthy, influential, and by all accounts good man whose fortunes suddenly, and radically, take a turn for the worse. Loved ones die, pestilences rot his flesh, he loses his money, his land, his pride…and when he is not busy begging to just be allowed to die already, the question by which Job is, as much as by any other misfortune, plagued is: Why? Why me? Why this? Why now? For what offense, what crime, what lapse in faith, am I being punished? Indeed, it at certain moments in the text seems that even more than relief—whether or not that relief comes in the form of death—Job wants an explanation, a reason. One by one, Job’s friends and associates try to find one: to decipher just what it is that Job has done, just what law or laws of this singular, all-powerful God who, singular and all-powerful, is alone responsible for that suffering, Job has violated in order to deserve such punishment. And one by one, Job refuses their explanations.
Something very fundamental, as it turns out, is at stake in Job’s insistent search for the solution to the riddle of his suffering—something perhaps even more important than its termination. For if it turns out that, as Job seems to desperately fear, there is no reason for what he has been put through, if he is not being punished for anything, then the god who is responsible for his woes is, as it turns out, not a just one—at the very least not if our idea of justice involves, as per the icon, a kind of balancing of the scales, or settling of accounts, a giving of what is owed and receiving of what is deserved. It would seem impossible, no? But when God Himself at last shows up on the scene, rather than validating any of the explanations suggested by one of Job’s associates, or supplementing them with a definitive explanation of his own, he merely blusters about, detailing the extent of his infinite powers in the form of a series of rhetorical “Can you do…?” questions. The violence and destruction to which he has subjected Job has been for its own sake. He has punished in order to punish. He has caused suffering in order to cause suffering. He has destroyed in order to destroy. Indeed, in this way he fits rather well the description of the “terrorist” on whose phantasmagorical presence—anywhere, at any time—the war that began ten years ago, we were told, with the attacks of September 11th, is predicated.
There is, of course, a framing narrative in the Book of Job, in which the reader learns that in fact God was testing Job’s faith, as part of a kind of wager with Satan, who had presented the hypothesis that even a man as good as Job would turn his back on his Creator were he to be unjustly punished—and that because he ultimately did not turn his back on God, even when he discovered that his suffering indeed had been unjustified and unjust, Job was eventually restored to the glory from which he had fallen. But that framing narrative misleads. It was added much later, by who knows what tone deaf revisionists, perhaps in an effort to deny what the original, for better or for worse, makes irrevocably clear: that the God of the Hebrews, of the Judeo-Christian tradition from which the turn-of-the-century American evangelical movement that is currently gathered up behind Beck purports to have descended, is not a God of justice. If it is justice man wants—a world in which, as much as possible, men give what they owe and receive what they deserve—he will have no choice but to pursue it himself.
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It was Beck’s curious modification of his position regarding the United States’ current president, just after his big rally, that got me thinking again of the Book of Job. Some months ago, Beck notoriously described President Obama as a “racist.” In an interview the day of the big rally, however, he said that he regretted having leveled such an accusation—he chalked it up to his “big fat mouth”—when what he really meant was that Obama, as Beck put it, “is a guy who understands the world through liberation theology, which is oppressor and victim.” It’s difficult, based on that rather hazy explanation, to discern precisely what Beck means by “liberation theology.” But it’s much easier, I think, when one considers the “theology” to which Beck himself, not as a Mormon but rather as a figurehead and leader, subscribes: that of this strange turn-of-the-century American Evangelism. Its unmistakable ideological function one of simultaneously mystifying and justifying the radical material imbalances by which late capitalist postmodernity, even in its most affluent foci, is characterized, this theology holds, against the lessons of the Book of Job, that God is not only singular and all-powerful but in addition infallibly just. As such, a given individual’s condition in the world—even and perhaps especially his material condition—necessarily corresponds to his moral quality. If you are good, Beck and his cohorts and followers will tell you, you will be rewarded—with money! And if you are poor, if you are suffering, if you are ill and cannot pay for your care, then you must be doing something wrong, or not be doing enough, or perhaps—like the Job dreamed up by the tone-deaf revisionists who slid the Book bearing his name into a rudimentary frame—you are being tested, in which case your rewards will come eventually, as long as you don’t fail the test by losing your faith in God’s justice.
Understanding this makes it easier to understand what, exactly, Beck is referring to when he describes Obama’s “liberation theology”: he is referring to the so far disappointingly hesitant and predictably hamstrung brand of progressive politics the President has attempted to practice, one apparent objective of which is to reduce, however minimally, certain radical material discrepancies in the United States and the world. This, I suppose, is why it was so easy for Beck, with that big, fat mouth of his, to mistake it for racism: after all, the concentration of poverty, in the United States, is significantly higher in the black community (and the so-called “Hispanic” community”) than in the white community. One would imagine this is also why so many of Beck’s cohorts and followers seem to identify President Obama as closely with Satan as so many war-hating liberals did his predecessor. Any attempt at a redistribution of wealth, according to the theo-logic of these turn-of-the-century evangelists, would be an attempt to “supplant God”—an accusation Beck tossed at Obama and other “progressives” back in January—and nothing, of course, could be more Satanic than that (that the adherents of this theology seem to be under the impression the global late capitalism, with its secret societies of financiers, is a neutral system for the distribution of wealth, one that does not interfere with the work of God, is entirely unbelievable, and yet apparently true).
Anyhow, the midterm elections are approaching. Beck, and his cohorts and followers, appear to have cohered into a formidable political force. The Tea Party Express is rolling its way through primary season. We’ll know soon enough whether the collective America, and not just the tens of thousands of borderline and full-blown bizarroes who collected for Beck’s Restoring Honor rally, is turning back to God. But before history has its way, a bit of clarity is called for. The God in question, at this moment, is not the Judeo-Christian one we enjoy a direct encounter with, for one of the last times, in the Book of Job. That God knows nothing at all of what we call justice. He is sheer, senseless power. He huffs and puffs, blows houses down and tears lives to pieces, just because. Prototype of our mythical turn-of-the-century “terrorist,” that God kills for the sake of killing, destroys for the sake of destruction. What a surprise, then, that the God of Glenn Beck, and his cabal of cohorts and army of followers—a God of justice who, in this world in which (depending on who you ask) something like 30,000 children die every day of starvation, gives to each exactly what he is worth and nothing less—is endlessly, even infinitely, more frightening.
Powerful and incredibly insightful!