Glenn Beck, Respected Lunatic and Spiritual Guide to the Thing That Used to Be Conservatism

Last updated on: December 31, 2014 at 3:45 pm by Mark Shea

Glenn Beck, Respected Lunatic and Spiritual Guide to the Thing That Used to Be Conservatism 2014-12-31T15:45:53-07:00 Mark Shea

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…urges Catholic apostasy.

Glenn Beck, a man who a disturbing number of Catholics actually take seriously, is now telling his followers that if their Church teaches about social or economic justice, it is preaching both Nazism and Communism and the members of said Church should abandon it.

No. Really:

On his daily radio and television shows last week, Fox News personality Glenn Beck set out to convince his audience that “social justice,” the term many Christian churches use to describe their efforts to address poverty and human rights, is a “code word” for communism and Nazism. Beck urged Christians to discuss the term with their priests and to leave their churches if leaders would not reconsider their emphasis on social justice.

“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!”

Later, Beck held up cards, one with a hammer and sickle and other with a swastika. “Communists are on the left, and the Nazis are on the right. That’s what people say. But they both subscribe to one philosophy, and they flew one banner. . . . But on each banner, read the words, here in America: ‘social justice.’ They talked about economic justice, rights of the workers, redistribution of wealth, and surprisingly, democracy.”

Why on earth any Catholic would take his cues from this guy is utterly beyond me. If it were a Lefty urging Catholics to apostatize in the name of abortion rights, no serious Catholic would ever bother to watch him again. But because this raving lunatic is prattling on about tropes near and dear to the heart of the Thing That Used to be Conservatism (i.e. free market economics) he is given a pass to run around making absolutely defamatory claims against Catholic teaching and even to urge Catholics to leave Holy Church. The Compendium of Catholic Social Teaching = Mein Kampf = the Communist Manifesto. Sure.

That this man has a national television program and is seriously regarded as an opinion shaper for a mass audience is one of the gravest indictments of our civilization that I can think of. That he is regarded with anything other than scorn or pity by Catholics is astonishing to me.

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