Glenn Beck: America's Faith-Based Self-Help Expert

By Michael Orion Powell

I see a lot that is familiar in Glenn Beck, and not in the ways that one would assume I would say. It’s not racism or encroaching fascism that I see in him personally (though these elements are strongly attracted to him) but instead the despondent despair and goofiness that is part of growing up in Washington state. Beck is from Mount Vernon, Washington, a small town not far from my hometown of Seattle, Washington.

In Washington state, among both those of progressive or conservative political persuasions, is a very deep libertarian streak. Our ancestors didn’t move to Washington state in order to engage with the larger society or to hold anyone else’s burden – we moved there because we want everyone to leave us the hell alone. Our contributions to popular culture – Nirvana, Death Cab for Cutie, Soundgarden, Queens of the Stone Age, Carl Sagan or even Bill Nye the Science Guy – reflect a strong anti-social disposition and a tendency to live reclusively in one’s own fantasty world.

I have no doubt that Beck subscribes to this tendency. Mount Vernon is a dreary, depressing town, not quite poor and not quite rich and surrounded by beautiful mountains and rainy weather that reminds you on a daily basis of nature’s disregard for humans. On his radio show, Beck has often explored his fracturous family life – his mother’s suicide, his ADD, his alchoholism and pot smoking. His adulthood shows a chaotic maze of confusion that eventually led him into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. His biography even shows him at point fantasizing about killing himself to the music of fellow Washingtonian Kurt Cobain.

It’s not off the mark to say that there is a current of alienation and isolation in the movement that Beck deems himself the head of. His compatriot Sarah Palin is also from a tiny town somewhere on the periphery of the United States. Having been born in Idaho, she shares the territorial home of Beck, and having attended no less than six universities before graduating, she also shares Beck’s youthful confusion and chaos.

While some youth find a rock of solidity through philosophy, Palin and Beck have quite clearly found theirs through faith. Any window dressing of secular intentions or policies is just that, as Beck and Palin are really pushing the beautiful nothings of prostelityzing. Their popularity isn’t really founded on the fact that they are saying something of timely prescience, but that those who like them feel they are talking to them.

A friend of mine is attending the “Restoring Honor” rally and, by all accounts, he is not a dumb guy or a racist. What’s going on here comes to the fact that America is changing because of existential forces – we seem to be losing our capability as a military superpower and are facing profound economic competition from China, India, Brazil and other rising powers. Policy wonks and Political Science majors know this but the average Fox listener doesn’t.

It’s easier for them to buy what Beck is selling – blaming the problems and joblessness on the “progressive” policies of Obama, most of which are not really distinguishable from Bush by any account aside from rhetoric. By counseling the declining, majority-white American middle class that they can get through these times with the “faith, hope and charity” that rescued him from alcoholism and self-destruction, Beck is effectively acting as a psychiatrist for the confused and scared.