Last Saturday Glenn Beck had a three hour meeting with Billy Graham, presumably at Graham’s home in North Carolina. David Gibson reports on the meeting at Politics Daily.
While I have no doubt that Beck respects Graham and sincerely wanted the privilege of meeting him, I can’t help but also think, along with Gibson, that this meeting was an attempt to save his poor ratings and declining popularity.
When you think about it, I wonder just how much Beck and Graham have in common.
Following the meeting, Beck said on his radio show that “the average Democrat” is “standing now with profound and clear evil.” The last time I checked Graham was still a registered Democratic, although to be fair he is probably not an “average Democratic.”
Graham has spent his entire life trying to convert people to evangelical Christianity. Beck is a Mormon. I wonder if Graham tried to preach the gospel to Beck during their visit.
As Gibson points out, Graham refused to become part of the Moral Majority in the 1970s and has always had an uneasy relationship with the Christian Right. Gibson notes that in refusing to join the Moral Majority Graham said “I’m for morality, but morality goes beyond sex to human freedom and social justice.”
And speaking of “social justice,” I wonder if Beck told Graham that the latter’s commitment to social justice was an evil progressive scheme to bring Marxism and socialism to America.
To paraphrase Gibson, Beck’s 15 minutes of fame may be up.
Why would Billy Graham waste three hours of his fleeting life to meet with Glenn Beck? Surely not to “evangelize” Beck — Franklin Graham could have done that just as well. For some reason, the people who handle Graham's schedule decided that this would be worth his time. In what moral universe is this a good idea?