Amid the Glenn Beck Phenomenon

It was July 5, the day after Independence Day. We pulled into the parking lot of a community hall at Dayton, Idaho (population 450), for an evening with religious-Right media phenomenon Glenn Beck. I opened the car door and we were buffeted by a pig-manure stench from working barns nearby.

We came from Logan, Utah, a larger town thirty-five miles south in the beautiful Cache Valley, bordered by purple mountains running north–south on each side, home to occasional mountain lions. My car companions were Mormons. So is Beck (and so are failed presidential aspirant Mitt Romney and 2 per cent of Americans). Two nights before we’d also been part of Beck’s audience, that time at the “Freedom Fire” pre-Independence Day entertainment at Utah State University’s football stadium.

This article is largely about Glenn Beck (below), the apotheosis of religious-Rightism, but it’s also about ways of thinking in middle America, unfiltered through the “progressive” media, where…