On Saturday, Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally was held on the national mall in Washington DC.  The rally, which consisted of speeches by Beck, Sarah Palin and other conservative leaders, seemed less like a political rally than a spiritual one.  The main theme of the day was that America has lost its way and the only way to be great again is for everyone to turn back to God.  Beck in particular believes that America is broken and cannot be fixed by a political solution.  To solve our problems, he advocates putting all of our faith in God to make things right again.

At first this sounds innocuous but faith in God is not all it is cracked up to be.  If we have problems in our country it is not up to God to solve them.  The last time God supposedly intervened in nature was right after the events of the Gospel.  The idea that God will watch over humanity at this point in time is hard to swallow after the Holocaust.  If God was silent about the gas chambers, I doubt that he would care enough to help us out with our puny economic and political problems.

There is nothing intrinsically good about a ‘person of faith.’ As Beck and other conservatives constantly point out, the 9/11 attackers were people of faith.  What ‘person of faith’ in this current context is ‘a good Christian.’  Christianity has its fare share of blood on its hands.  While Christianity did play a big part in the demise of slavery and segregation, Christian theology was also used to prop up those institutions.  If Beck really wanted us to be good people, he would focus on common decency and not allegiance to a Christian God.  

A person doesn’t have to believe in a god to be a good person.  There are good people of every religion and of no religion.  Obama made this point clearly in his inauguration speech when he stressed the diversity of American’s religious beliefs.  According to a 2001 study by the City University of New York, the percentage of people who claim to be ‘non-religious’ grew from 8.2 percent of the population in 1990 to 14.1 percent in 2001.  Since that time those numbers have grown.  Instead of becoming more Christian, America is becoming more irreligious.  So Beck’s return to God is not only offensive to the irreligious and other ‘outsider’ religions, but it is also not politically wise.  One can look to the Ground Zero mosque debate to see how ‘Christ-like’ conservative Christians really are.

I am not a follower of Mr. Beck’s political theories but I do respect that he has systematic views regarding American History and the current political situation.  But for him to pretend to avoid politics and instead talk about God is itself a shrewd political move.  Beck defining his movement—no matter what it is—as the one that represents people of faith is a much more ominous move than calling the president a racist or crying on TV.