Glenn Beck: Be Very Afraid!

Glenn Beck: run as fast you can away from me. I’m your worst nightmare. I am a Christian specifically because I believe in the message of social and economic justice that Jesus taught. I take the message of Jesus very seriously. When Jesus sat with followers on a hillside and said to them, “Blessed are you who are marginalized, for the realm of heaven is yours,” he offered a new vision of what life can be.

We often translate Jesus word Jesus used in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s gospel, anawim, as “poor in spirit.” Anawim is a word referring to the marginalized poor, the poor cut off from society, the oppressed people of the world. They are the first ones that Jesus said are blest. Of course, in the parallel sermon by Jesus in Luke’s gospel, Jesus also said: Woe to you who are rich because you have your blessing now. How much clearer can it be than that!

Glenn Beck doesn’t get it. While he’s Mormon, he seems to think like most Evangelical Christians. Beck espouses a kind of prosperity theology which contends that if you live the right way, then you’ll be blessed by God and get rich. There’s some truth in that belief: if you live the right way, you will get rich. But it has nothing to do with God’s blessing. A capitalist economic system places profit before people, self before others, and monopolizes the majority of the world’s goods while others are hungry, homeless, and struggle without medical care or education. While I believe that Glenn Beck and many other “conservative Christians” believe in a god who blesses rich people, that’s not the God whom Jesus described. Actually, the teachings of Jesus are much more socialist than capitalist. Jesus taught his followers to care for the poor, to share what they had with others, to view others as more important than self. The early followers of Jesus sold all their possessions and divided the money based on each person’s need. (Didn’t Karl Marx say something about each person receiving based on the person’s need?) And what was it that Jesus said about the rich? Oh, yes: it’s easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to make it to heaven.

The truth is that Christianity as it is commonly practiced in the United States is very far from the actual teachings of Jesus. At the same time, there are a lot of Christians who take the teachings of Jesus very seriously. Jesus taught a radical love for others which translates into living in a way which ensures that each person is respected and has the necessities of life provided for them. That’s precisely what social justice is all about. Christian social justice is the work of assuring that each person is treated with respect, dignity, and compassion. This is a fundamental part of Christian life and spirituality. It is because of this that churches offer tangible assistance to marginalized people in society. Economic justice takes the teachings of Jesus to their next logical step. Economic justice recognizes that the reason marginalization continues in society is because economic systems are established which prevent people from having the basic needs in life, like food, clothing, and shelter.

Many Christians in the United States are just as afraid of economic justice as in Glenn Beck. They have come believe that capitalism is an economic system created by God and handed down on stone tablets. It’s not. Capitalism is a system which enables the few control the majority of the world’s resources which the majority of people live in poverty. It is an economic system which is contrary to Christianity. (Americans should also recognize that it’s an economic system that’s contrary to democracy because in capitalism requires that a small group of people hold the real power in a society.)
In the end, I have many problems with the way in which Christianity has been co-opted by politics throughout Western history. Why I remain a Christian is specifically because the message of Jesus was one of social and economic justice. Based on the social and economic implications of the teachings of Jesus, authentic Christian spirituality can never be an escape from the world and people in it but must always be engagement with the world for the dignity of all people.