Be Wary of The Crowd You Don't See Coming
For all others comprise nothing but useful idiots
Be Wary of The Crowd You Don't See Coming
For all others comprise nothing but useful idiots
Part I
In life, some people learn lessons through the experience of others. This is the hope of all educators, parents, and clergy. They hope that studying the results of other people's actions will be a sufficient lesson to either emulate positive actions or avoid behaviors that produce negative results. Some people, unfortunately, must learn lessons the hard way through experience itself. My personality makeup, stubbornness, and personal vision of grandeur propelled me into the latter group. For I once became a useful idiot, fodder in a large gathering that was co-opted by nefarious agitators. It is not a story I relish recalling much less admitting to in this post. However, current events of crowd manipulation compel me to do so.
I got sober in 2008. The one thing about sobriety is that you find you have a lot more time on your hands when you give up your primary job of drinking all day long. It does, after all, take a tremendous amount of time and energy to maintain that level of a dedicated schedule. One of the things I did with my new-found time was to read more news and listen to talk radio. As my sobriety dovetailed with streaming services like IHeart radio, listening to live or podcast versions of talk radio shows became extremely convenient. One such talk show host I connected with was Glenn Beck. I suppose it had something to do with the fact that he was a recovering alcoholic himself, and if God could save him from a lifetime of miserable dependence, there must be hope for me.
About the time I started listening to Beck, he had a popular afternoon television show on the Fox News Station as well as a daily broadcast three-hour radio show. He began a series of "restoring" events. In 2010, he held a rally in Washington DC titled "Restoring Honor." If you believed the media, about a few hundred people showed up for the event. But if you witnessed the photos of Beck speaking at the Lincoln Memorial, the numbers measured well into the thousands. I listened to the speeches of that rally and wondered what it would be like to attend such an event.
The following year, Glenn Beck announced "Restoring Courage" tour in Israel. That year, he took his show on the road to the very birthplace of Christianity. Again, I listened to the broadcasts and rebroadcasts of the speeches from Beck's tour to the Holy Land.
The year following, in 2012, Glenn Beck completed the trifecta of his "restoring" events with his "Restoring Love" event at Dallas Stadium in front of 65,000 people. I listened to the speeches and continued to be drawn to what I perceived to be positive energy from these events.
In 2015, the growing in popularity talk radio host Glenn Beck hosted an event in Birmingham, Alabama. It was titled, "Restoring Unity." Although Beck's other events did not inspire me to take time and resources to attend, this one was different. As part of Restoring Unity, Glenn was raising awareness of the abuse of Coptic Christians in the Middle East and had launched the Nazarene Fund
https://thenazarenefund.org/
to help rescue them from their plight. That was a cause I could stand behind. I even took the pulpit of my church to deliver a sermon on that very topic. I decided that it was time for me to see firsthand what it would be like to attend a "Restoring" event. (So that my readers may get a glimpse of my dedication to learn from this agitation of my soul, I am attaching a copy of that sermon at the end of this post.)
I have never been a "stargazer," so attending a Glenn Beck event was never about meeting (or being in the proximity of) someone famous. I have on occasion met someone well known and I never stumbled for words. Perhaps, I use the old standard of addressing an assembly and imagine that famous person in their underwear thus rendering them unintimidating to me. Although, if I ever met Glenn in person, I am not sure I could erase that mental image. Nevertheless, his 2015 event, "Restoring Unity" piqued my interest, and I could get behind and support the just launched Nazarene Fund.
I purchased tickets for "Restoring Unity" for me and my two oldest children and set up plans for our road trip from St. Paul, Minnesota to Birmingham, Alabama that August of 2015. To be honest, my two children were not excited to hang out with their father at Bishops Lowe's Southern Baptist church to hear a conservative talk show host talk about unity, so I bribed them with a three-day trip extension to New Orleans following the event. "Restoring Unity" was billed as a two-day event with a prayers service at Lowe's Guiding Light Church on the first day. Day two was held at a much larger event center in Birmingham and featured a handful of prominent speakers, including Mr. Beck. But on the morning of that second day, an outdoor rally was planned. Billed as the "Restoring Unity Rally," it followed the same route that landed Dr. Martin Luther King in jail in 1963.
Intrigued by what it would be like to participate in such a gathering, I attended that rally the morning of the second day and that is when I learned that we should all be wary of participating in crowds. For that was the day where I learned the lesson of useful idiots. Because being a part of a crowd of more than 20,000 people that marched on the streets of Birmingham that day with television cameras rolling was significant. It showed me what happens when a popular personality inspires a crowd to gather. Crowds attract characters of all stripes. As too often happens, nefarious individuals that could never assemble a large crowd themselves swoop in to usurp the gathered for another purpose.
Stay tuned for Part II of this story where I explain how I believe that rally got corrupted.
Church Sermon Addendum:
August 9, 2015
By
Bruce Nelson
Please join me in prayer:
God, may the words of my mouth reflect the beauty of the world you have provided us and the grace with which you administer it to us, your children. May you continue to guide us in words, actions and deeds so that we may fulfill your ultimate purpose for us, which is to serve all others in times of great joy as well as in periods of extreme sorrow. You have promised that when two or three have gathered together in your name you will be among us and bless us. It is in that promise and in Your Name, we pray, Amen.
I.
I am honored by your willingness to hear me speak this morning. As you will soon hear, I am not a role model to look up to...in fact, I am the example parents use to compel their children to do well in school and avoid the vices and superfluities of life. I have been twice divorced, gone through bankruptcy and had a home foreclosed on all while spiraling down the rabbit hole of alcohol addiction. I stared into the abyss of contemplating life or death and the smells and utter despairs that accompany those circles of hell. The pain of constant worry inflicted on my parents and loved ones knew no bounds during the deep throws of my addiction. Standing here before you, a father, employed and sober, at least for today, gives me a story to tell about the grace of God and the power of redemption. And because of that unbelievable gift, my life today is the embodiment of living daily amends to my children who are the most precious and innocent part of me.
In early recovery, someone said, "God does not give you more than you can handle". And they were right! Because, as I was recuperating in the hospital from my last drink of alcohol just over seven years ago, I had no idea the path God had in mind for me, for if I had known then, I never would have stayed sober, and I would not be before you today. Early on, my recovery was a pathway of asking for help, minimum wage jobs, lots of meetings and some real soul-searching, more especially to ascertain my character defects and beg God to remove them.
Because of my recovery from addiction, I may be uniquely qualified to talk about heaven and hell, at least as they may exist on earth. Although my faith tells me that there is a heaven and hell in the afterlife, for which I am indeed hopeful, because I have many unanswered questions to ask... But, for this morning, I will stick to earthly heaven and hell, or goodness and grace versus evil and despair.
II.
America, in the dawn of the 21st century, is a remarkable place. We live in a time of unbelievable advances in technology that further our understanding of the world around us and put untold volumes of information at our very fingertips; to be called upon at a moment’s notice to enlighten us, entertain us or merely to settle an argument. One can go so far to say that with the electronic age that we now live in, that the light of truth is more available to us than ever before. It is also true, that hiding in the shadows and darkness to perpetuate evil and misery upon God’s children, is much more difficult as cameras and amateur reporters armed with mobile technology, are on nearly every corner of the earth. Where just 70 years ago, the horrors of Nazi concentration camps and subsequent Holocaust were but whispers and shadows to the American people. The Third Reich propagated a campaign of ethnic cleansing not only on the Jewish people, but on devout Christians, homosexuals and anyone else who did not step in line with Der Furor’s vision of his 1000-year empire. At the conclusion of the European portion of World War II, the Allied armies liberating Germany discovered the depth and horrors of the atrocities conducted by poor souls following Hitler’s orders and the entire world gasped! We collectively condemned the genocide, and we vowed to remain ever vigilant against future despots’ intent on destroying innocent life. We vowed by saying the words “Never Again!”
Friends, even with the wonders of our first world life and the technology driven 21st century, we are again witnessing an evil genocide against Christians, Yazidi’s, homosexuals and even Muslims, who are not Muslim enough. As we turn on the news, are bombarded by extreme events, so awful it’s beyond our experience to comprehend, so awful our brain tunes it out. It is like the whispers and shadows of World War II; we collectively want to push these horrors into a distant past or ancient shadows of how humans use to act prior to our postmodern life we now live. The problem is the evildoers executing Christian, Yazidi, homosexuals and Muslims are not in the shadows. They use that same technology that you and I hold in our hands to document their hate for God’s children. We cannot, try as we might, ignore the wholesale slaughter of men who do not have “the right” extreme beliefs, the indoctrination of young boys who are desensitized to decapitation by practicing on dolls and young girls and women trafficked into submissive slavery to be awarded to faithful soldiers as a prize for their willingness to propagate evil. Evil is no longer content to hide in the shadows while using fear as its weaponry of comply or die. Evil is in the daylight right in front of us, ignoring it is the choice of conscience and not ignorance to its existence. The question is, how long do Christians stand by as innocent men are executed and their women and children are exchanged in open markets? How long do we stand by and accept human trafficking in exchange for bullets!
III.
So, what should we do? What can we do? We say, “This problem is bigger than us… That’s what governments are for, yes, that’s it, this problem is too big for us, therefore it must be left to governments to solve.” The problem with this conclusion is, at least in our modern times, governments are political machines, and as such, make political decisions; and as in all decisions rendered through the political process, there are winners and losers. Our participation in the mechanism of government has been reduced to determine what team we are on and vote for that team to win so that our political will may prevail.
Now, as a Minnesotan, I will always root for my team, the Vikings, much to dismay and ridicule of my Wisconsin friends. They are my team through thick or thin and heartbreaking season after heartbreaking season. If, however, the Vikings do actually win a super bowl, between you and I, I will keep a keen eye out for the four horsemen, because the end is most definitely near. But football is a game and to lose hurts only my pride. As we participate in our government, we are so busy making sure that our elected officials are on our team. We look for whether or not they are on the "D" team or the "R" team. What about the "C" team? Not the one you may be thinking...The Christian team. When did we drop that as important criteria for judging the hearts of our elected officials?
We cannot solve the Middle Eastern genocide ourselves. We live in a representative republic. The first amendment does not say that we have no right to impose our religion on the government. It says the government cannot impose religion on us. We have a right, and a responsibility to ask our representatives to stop this holocaust! We have a right to ask them "how is your soul?" We don't need to take politicians’ word for it, we should expect truth through action. And because we are Christians, we must demand it; and so should the cry come from the synagogues, and the mosques and the temples from all over the land. Because if we cede this basic right of our sovereignty, the right to project our faiths on our government, our chains of silence are of our own making. Winston Churchill once said, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing-after they’ve tried everything else.” But that greatest generation is all but gone and we cannot count on divine benevolence because of who we were 50 or 100 years ago, it can only come from who we are today, right now. We, as God’s children, are only as good as our next right decision.
IV.
The paradox is that with all extreme atrocities, we are taught there is ultimate good; mankind is the best of God’s miracles, and yet there is evil. A man, our Lord and Savior, had to suffer for all of our sins to fulfill this blessed miracle. Leibniz came to the same conclusion, “that by God’s divine providence through Omnipotence, this world must be good, in fact, it must be the best of all possible worlds!” By denying the extreme awfulness in our world we are setting ourselves up to deny the purest forms of goodness in our world as well. After all, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, Jesus, and many other people held by their moral valor never avoided an extreme issue simply because they had other things to think about. Jesus stood for all humanity even when he had to bear a cross and suffer under Pontius Pilate. But even as he stood for all humanity, he never passed by a stranger who needed help whom he denied no matter how "insignificant" or "lesser evil" they faced. We tend to get caught in the notion that it is necessary to change our behavior to better serve God, and maybe that is true, but it is first necessary to change our thoughts; after all, what is a prayer but a well-meant thought? I contend, that only by acknowledging and confronting evil, in its rawest, purest and most unfiltered form, can we truly come to understand God’s divine goodness, because if we close our eyes to the former, we will never glimpse the latter. Nowhere in that book we reverence on the alter, nor our collective experience in the 2000 years since, do we find that true evil doers win in the end, but the Bible is riddled with stories of how people, who out of fear of political consequences, safety concerns or loss of material possessions, experience a kind of hell on earth because they failed to live by its simple tenants of love. Because God is all loving, we can and do come back from the brink of despair, but God must weep for us for all our self-inflected pain in the process. I did not get down on my knees and beg God to help me remove my addition because I had had enough, I had already decided that the insurance policy on my head would give my family a better life then I could. I did not surrender to God's will... It was God that scooped me up from the abyss and said I am not done with you yet. When we bury, through fear, the truth of wholesale slaughter and enslavement of Christians, Jews and Yezidi peoples, just like my fear of addition, we put ourselves into one of Dante's circles of hell. And just like Dante wrote, there is a pathway out if we can overcome fear and ask for Divine guidance! I am convinced that God is far less concerned about what happens to us then how we respond to what happens to us!
My standing before you today grew out of a conversation, I had with Michael several months ago regarding the atrocities inflicted on God’s children in the Middle East. Michael asked me if I’d be willing to share my thoughts with the congregation in the form of the sermon today. I initially ignored the request because I thought at best, all I could provide words, rhetoric-perhaps some form of artistic sophistry. And although words have meanings and words can inspire action, I had no idea about what action I was going to take regarding these very words I speak to you today. I grew up following my father’s football team because it made for warm pleasant Sunday afternoons. I probably also followed my father’s politics as it made for a warm friendly dinner conversation as well. This summer has seen a great many turning points in our Country’s collective conscience with regard to recent events and Supreme Court decisions. And although these changes should be celebrated as many people fought long and hard for many years to see them through, we must remember that they are all political changes and as such with all political decisions, there are winners and losers and belong in the realm of right versus left. But the problem of genocide in the Middle East is not a right verses left problem, it is a right versus wrong problem. Governments are very poor at solving right versus wrong problems and it is only through pressure from citizens, churches, synagogues and mosques will governments cease solving this problem in the terms of right versus left (winners vs. losers) and begin to call on God’s divine guidance to pursue a path of right verses wrong. And if we Americans, if we as Christians, cannot get past right versus left and unite as one collective Christian body to say with one voice Never Again will we allow any genocide to continue our watch, what good is all our theological work? “God will not hold us guiltless”, said Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “silence in the face of evil is itself evil, not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
God endowed us, as we saw earlier with our children, with the natural gift of knowing right from wrong. It is us, Her children, that invented right and left...(REPEAT) The answer to what action I am personally going to take regarding these atrocities came when I saw that a southern black Baptist Bishop and a white conservative Mormon decided to jettison right and left to create a rally based on right verses wrong coming up in of all places, Birmingham Alabama, the place where Martin Luther King Jr was jailed on Good Friday in 1963 for violating an order not to demonstrate without a permit. I knew my family had to travel to Birmingham at the end of the month for the Never Again is Now event! You will not see this event covered in the media, it will not crowd out stories of dead lions in Zimbabwe, Christian cake bakers or brave ex-Olympians struggling to cope with identity from our newspapers’ front pages. But I Hope it will start the process of Christians, both right and left, coming together in one voice and with our checkbooks to raise awareness of the Middle Eastern genocide and raise money for their relief. For if God provided me with a pathway out of the hell of addiction by a simple formula of uniting with other alcoholics regardless of race, sexual identity, creed, economic status or political persuasion, for the sole purpose of serving others to save myself, then the message I have for our Christian churches is the same. If we continue to focus our energies on the political issues of the day that divide our churches into left versus right, we will witness our Christianity spiral downward into at best, a worthy service organization, or at worst, a Political Action Committee! God showed us the pathway out of this self-inflicted hole of modern Christianity is to unite with all of God’s children in service to others. If our American Christian churches cannot unite as one voice to condemn the current genocide in the Middle East, History will find her rocking in the corner of one of the circles of Dante’s Infernal muttering to herself, “I used to be relevant.”(REPEAT)
When I read these words in today’s epistle reading, Ephesians 4:25-5:2:
So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another. Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil…Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
I now understand the principle behind nonviolent protests. In fact, when we are in Birmingham on Saturday, August 29, we will be walking the exact route Martin Luther King Jr. marched 50 years ago. It is requested as part of our participation in this March that we impress upon our conscience, Martin Luther King’s pledge of nonviolence, which includes that we “walk and talk in the manner of love, for God is love,” and to “remember always that non-violent movements seek justice and reconciliation, not victory.”
History has proven that our political leaders, like the Pharisees of old, may be great keepers of tradition and the status quo, but they often use their reliance of right and left to blind them, with false justification, of God's simple plan of right verses wrong! Sometimes, like almost 2000 years ago, it takes a man willing to ride an ass through the East gates of the city, not armed with the sword to fight the injustices, but armed with the word of God’s love, to save humanity. And maybe, as with today’s speaker, it takes an imperfect ass willing to ride a donkey through the East gate of our 21st century city to proclaim, as we promised ourselves 70 years ago after witnessing the horrors of the Holocaust, NEVER AGAIN IS NOW!