By: Trevor Loudon
New Zeal
The graphic in this post and the text below comes from an allegedly Christian Blog, The New Methodists:
A blog about being United Methodist, missional, emergent, and midwestern. Plus other stuff too!
The author Mike Oles does not like Glenn Beck one iota, but does seem to respect him as the worthy adversary he is.
He also can’t spell Beck’s name consistently.
From the New Methodist March 12, 2010:
Glenn Beck caused a bit of a
shit stormcontroversy when he said recently that one should leave their church if the church mentions “social justice” on their web site.Glenn Beck lives in Bizzaro World.
About anything he says is the exact opposite of what is reality. Equating progressives with Nazis, etc. I know this is Fox News 101 but he nor the network is not about honest scholarship or fair play.
At another level, Glen Beck is a genius and the perfect mouth piece for America’s flailing right-wing movement. He is completely wrong but that’s not the point. He (and Fox News), understands the power of authentic and costly community organizing. They fear it and they want to dismantle it. They want to snuff it out before it even becomes an issue.
They know that they have the power to confuse and disorient with all their well communicated bullshit. Their messaging can hold up any legislation that benefits workers, minorities, low-income people, seniors, etc. But when it comes to a street fight, the people who support Fox News have no chance if everyday people are educated, organized and ready to fight.
That’s why Glen Beck went after the churches.
He knows that churches are a powerful voice when they organize together around neighborhood and working class issues. They are at the heart of resisting the right-wing agenda if they organize. It doesn’t happen often enough and most churches are stuck defending the status quo. But, look at what groups like the Industrial Area Foundation and Gamaliel Foundation. They show what can happen when people the poor, the working class, and progressives unite.
But before Beck went after the churches, he went after SEIU and the progressive labor movement. Before that he went after ACORN. I turned on Glen Beck a few weeks ago and he was going after the ghost of Saul Alinsky and the community organizing efforts in Back of The Yards neighborhood in 1960s Chicago!
Glenn Beck is crazy but he has done his homework. He understands community organizing better than your blue dog Democrat or mainline liberal. He wants to wrestle it to the ground and strangle it.
Are we ready to fight back?
Who is this self-proclaimed Christian who wants to get down and dirty with Glenn Beck?
According to his own website Mike Oles:
Spent three years as an organizer for SEIU. I mostly helped low income workers form unions.
I have been arrested twice. Fortunately both times were for civil disobedience. I was arrested in 1997 at the School of America’s protest and in 2006 at a Justice for Janitor’s rally in Indianapolis.
Now get what Mike Oles has to say about Barack Obama and the radical New Party – which, despite documentary evidence to the contrary, the Obama campaign claimed he never joined.
In college I worked as an intern organizer for the New Party on the southside of Chicago, which a young up and coming politician was a member. His name? Barack Obama.
Even Obama’s Marxist “spiritual adviser” Jim Wallis gets a mention:
I have personally met Barack Obama twice. When I was working for the Hospital Accountability Project, I was part of a press conference on a piece of legislation that he had co-sponsored. The second time was when my father-in-law (an economist) spoke at a Chicago gathering for the “Hope Fund.” In the room that day was Al Franken and Jim Wallis.
Mike Oles goes on to tell how his church turned him from a conservative to a “progressive.”
I have gone from being very conservative politically to being very progressive. For some reason I started really paying attention to politics in 1994 and was wowed over by the Gingrich revolution. I read and loved his book “To Renew America” and also read Richard Nixon’s last book. Though I can’t stand neither now, I do wish we progressives adapted some of their hardball tactics and organizing skill. (I think Obama did this quite nicely).
I started to really change politically because of my friends and church. Our church did a lot of mission work and it soon became apparent that there was so much poverty not largely because people were stupid and lazy but that the system was broken and stacked against them.
That’s how it works readers. A nice conservative mid-western boy gets into a radical church and before you know it he’s working for SEIU, mixing with Jim Wallis and Barack Obama and wants to get it on with Glenn Beck.
A good metaphor for a divided America?
