Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" Event

We’re happy to offer thanks in advance to Glenn Beck for organizing the Restoring Honor rally this coming Saturday, August 28, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. It is significant for many reasons, and almost none of them will be reported on or understood by the Pravda media.

Pravda will be preoccupied with silly score-keeping. How many people were in attendance? How many people attended some counter-rally with Al Sharpton? Because it is the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream…” speech, what are racial (or racist) conclusions that should be drawn from Beck’s decision to schedule it on August 28? What does it mean for Beck’s ratings? What will Bill O’Reilly think?

All of these lines of reportage will only serve to underscore how poorly served the American people are by the present quality of thought in the industry known as ‘journalism’. They will also, ironically, underscore the importance of Beck’s message—which is that we as a people need to recognize that America as an idea, and Americans who are privileged to live with the blessings of the American idea, are engaged in something much deeper and more important to humanity than the latest list of focus group issues generated within the 2 year attention span of partisan politics.

Glenn Beck has proven that he, much more than the talk radio giants, is willing to wade deeply into the religious and moral dimensions of Judeo-Christian America, and to assert without hesitation or apology that these are the dimensions that have made America great. Limbaugh, Hannity and Levin would more or less agree with Beck, but for whatever reason, they do not stick their necks out as far or as consistently and repeatedly as Beck on the spiritual dimension of what is going on in America. This has made Beck probably the most reviled of all of them in the last several years, and he has suffered as a result, most recently noting that he may be at risk of losing his eyesight. But it is also why those who attend or support his rally are going to be a major force for good in the coming decades.

Forget what you may have heard about Beck’s event from Pravda or other ruling class outlets. Beck has requested that there be no political signs at the event. The message is not about politics but about honor and virtue. Sarah Palin will attend, but will not be making a political speech. Alveda King will attend, demonstrating by her presence that Beck’s event is not hostile to the memory of Martin Luther King but complementary to it.

The people who attend this event—and we will be surprised if it is a crowd of less than 100,000—are what we would call ‘thinkers’. That does not mean they are not passionate about what is right—they are—but they are what used to be known as serious adults.

Serious adults know that America is exceptional because of its founding ideals—and of what those founding ideals imply and affirm as to the nature and purpose and destiny of individuals and mankind. These ideals tell us that we are something more and better than animals.

This is what we first wrote about 17 months ago in “We Do Not Want This”. The context of that essay was merely the introduction of the Obama administration’s first budget; since that time, ‘events’ have proliferated which only underscore that we do not want anything that ‘this’ decades-long drift into secularism and godless intellectualism has brought us.

There’s no way in a short essay to catalog every aspect of this drift, but it is not hard to summarize some of the simplest ‘counter-drift’ feelings that serious adult Americans still share:

• We know we benefit from the institution of marriage and family. No amount of ‘research studies’, no judge’s ruling, and no movie will ever change what we know to be true about the good of marriage and family.

• We know that individual responsibility is a core truth about life and living. No form of collectivism can ever create a substitute ‘life order’ than can avoid this core truth.

• We know what honesty is and what it is not; we know what respect is, and what it is not.

• We know that virtue and wisdom exist, and do not change in any fundamental way, but the spiritual and moral condition of our society do change dramatically if we deny this truth or allow generations to grow up unaware of it.

• We know Judeo-Christian America has produced a better culture and society than anywhere else on earth because of its rightness.

We’ll look forward to seeing the ripple effect of “Restoring Honor”. We think it will be bigger, more powerful and more pivotal than any report will capture. It will be another event to mark in the Second American Revolution.

Paul Gable

August 23, 2010