ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Thursday, September 2 2010

Tent revival, 21st-century style
By Colleen Carroll Campbell

What was the meaning of Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally last weekend? Neither liberals nor conservatives can decide, but the huge gathering on the National Mall unsettled Americans in both camps.

For secular liberals, the event sounded all the usual alarms: fears about the mingling of religion and politics, the potency of grassroots conservatives and a coming voter backlash in November. The fact that Beck avoided mention of the president and politics did little to quell liberal anger about the Fox News personality's choice to host a conservative jamboree in the same spot where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech exactly 47 years earlier.

Events that generate that much angst on the left usually garner effusive praise from the right. Not so Beck's rally. While some conservatives applauded it, others watched warily as an ex-Catholic Mormon celebrity led a largely evangelical Protestant crowd in the 21st-century equivalent of a tent revival. The message Beck preaches dances too close to syncretism for many religious conservatives, while his flippancy about the threat of gay marriage has disappointed social conservatives.

Still, somebody likes Glenn Beck. Attendance estimates varied wildly — CBS News said 80,000 showed up, NBC put the figure closer to 300,000 — but by any measure, the man knows how to draw a crowd. Attendees followed Beck's advice to bring their kids and leave their signs at home, forcing reporters to shelve their stock stories about rabid Tea Party protesters fuming with anti-Obama rage. The peaceful, patriotic audience eagerly embraced Beck's apolitical message: that America needs to "turn back to God" by replacing our fixation on partisan politics and past failings with a focus on personal spiritual renewal.

"Go to your churches, your synagogues, your mosques, anyone who is not preaching hate and division, anyone who is not teaching to kill another man," Beck told the crowd. "No matter what anyone might say or do, no matter what anyone smears or lies or throws our way ... we must look to God and look to love."

Left-wing alarmism aside, that message hardly qualifies as hate speech. Nor is Beck's blend of patriotism and religion as novel as some conservatives imagine. It's vintage civil religion, that old conflation of love of God and love of country that makes politicians popular and theologians cringe.

To the extent that such a message reminds Americans to keep our political differences in perspective and spend as much energy reforming our own hearts and families as we spend reforming our nation, it's helpful and good. Strident secularists dislike religious talk in the public square, but most Americans see nothing menacing about a public figure calling us to put our hope in God rather than the political star du jour. Still smarting from Obama's failure to live up to his own hype — the seas have not receded, the planet has not healed and his blame-it-all-on-Bush shtick has grown old — many feel fed up with both political parties and ready to seek answers elsewhere. Beck has tapped into that anti-establishment, post-partisan, spiritual hunger.

Of course, an entertainer like Beck cannot meet the need for authentic community that drove those throngs to his rally any more than Americanism as a religion can answer the transcendent longings of the human heart. Religious Americans who resonate with the admonition to early Christians in Scripture — that "we have here no lasting city, but we seek the one that is to come" — believe that no amount of hard work will transform our nation into nirvana, and answers to life's biggest questions lie beyond the bounds not only of political parties but of patriotism itself. America is our beloved home worthy of our sacrifices and loyalty, "a nation," as G.K. Chesterton said, "with the soul of a church." But America is not a church, and neither Glenn Beck nor Barack Obama can be our savior.

Beck's star, like Obama's, will fade. Eventually, he will be eclipsed by the next politico-celebrity. That's all the more reason for his spiritually hungry followers to heed the advice he doled out last weekend, and turn to their faith communities for the ultimate meaning that neither politicians nor pundits like him can provide.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is a St. Louis-based author, former presidential speechwriter and television and radio host of "Faith & Culture" on EWTN. Her website is www.colleen-campbell.com.