The distinguished columnist George Will advised me once not to write about politics all the time — even if I was inclined to be a “political columnist.”
Will argued that only mentally ill people thought about politics all the time — and that columnists must make an effort to occasionally opine about something else.
George also suggested that columnists must work very hard to be provocative or funny or unusual, because reading a column was not like the morning ritual of reading the Bible. You don’t have to read a column; it is a “discretionary” activity, Will suggested.
I was reminded of Will’s advice when the mini-storm broke over television and radio provocateur Glenn Beck’s call to escape from churches that promote “social justice” and “economic justice” — code words, according to Beck, for totalitarianism on the order of Nazis and Communists.
Beck has been smacked around by all manner of God’s children, but at the end of the day, Beck may have done his church critics a favor — and they may have given him a gift as well.
Remember the George Will advice? Don’t write about politics all the time. Beck, who writes and chatters about politics all the time, strayed just a bit with a combination of politics and religion — mixed together in a provocative way that prompted everyone to get all excited — promoting, in the process, the personality cult of Glenn Beck.
Beck did the churches a favor by being just outrageous enough to free them from a criticism that has afflicted them for years — with no help from Glenn Beck. Especially among the mainstream Protestants, denominations have been quarreling about a tendency to not only sound like left-wing Democrats — but to be so far removed from traditional devotion and faith as to risk becoming irrelevant.
The mainline Protestants in particular — the United Church of Christ, Methodists, Presbyterians and the like — have been hemorrhaging members for years, a loss attributed in large part to denominational dabbling in ”social justice” that smacked of left-wing Democratic Party talking points, at the expense of religious transcendence.
In Connecticut, for instance, the state’s largest UCC church, in Wethersfield, left the denomination to pursue more Evangelical leanings — after years of disgruntlement over the lefty political drift of the UCC staff.
For decades, religious folks have argued about exactly what Glenn Beck was alluding to, albeit, with a bit less hyperbole.
Dr. Peter Berger, formerly on the faculty of the Hartford Seminary and now at Boston University, led a major movement among mainstream Protestants to, in a sense, get back to God and move away from things that church leaders lacked competence to address.
In an interview with the Hartford Courant in 1972, Berger criticized “the spectacle of church bureaucrats going on all over the place about things they really know nothing about.”
In a Glenn Beckian moment, Berger suggested, “if you are interested in a program of racial justice, why do it through the church? There are organizations everywhere, and they probably do a better job.”
Berger, a distinguished and well-respected sociologist, is no Glenn Beck, either politically or rhetorically. Berger’s job is not to entertain — and he doesn’t fancy himself a “conservative.”
The issue is not unknown to corporate executives, who pursue their mission to maximize profits on behalf of shareholders — while dabbling as advocates for social justice. And, again, a prominent intellectual, the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, told the corporate types to stick to their knitting — that their job was profits, not social action.
Of course, as George Will noted, the need for balance is most challenging for columnists. How ‘bout them Red Sox, huh?
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
