Read Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America for Free Online Page B

how sincerely Glenn Beck holds his views. But we do know that he came to these views recently. He has told us that he was a blank slate before his 1999 conversion to Mormonism. “I didn’t know what was really happening in the world,” he has said, and “I really didn’t care.” And, after intense study of the faith, he emerged with the writings of a deceased Mormon thinker—John Birch Society supporter Cleon Skousen—serving as the foundation of his newly acquired worldview.
    “I remember, I used to be—believe it or not—a liberal,” Beck confessed to viewers one night. “I used to be a social liberal and everything else, but I was a fiscal conservative. Then I discovered alcoholism, and discovered AA, and sobered up. The only way that I knew I could stay sober is if I figured out what I really believe … I was never consistent on anything. Unless we’re consistent, I don’t think we can solve any problem.”
    Beck found consistency in Mormon theology—which he studied so fervently that he frustrated church leaders: “At one point I had the bishop with his head in his hands, saying ‘Glenn, I don’t have the answer to that question. I don’t think the president of our church has ever been asked that question,’ ” Beck writes in his book The Real America . “I took these through the ringer. Within a month I had exhausted the resources of Mormon.org and had moved on to Mormon Doctrine , a book more akin to scholarly use than light reading … I like scientific thinking, and I wanted it all to fall into line. For me to join, it needed to logically work and bear good fruit.”
    The fruit it bore was a philosophy—broadcast on radio and television—that is strikingly similar to the White Horse Prophecy of Joseph Smith.
    Before the Mormons went west, Smith traveled to Washington seeking help for his oppressed followers and received nothing but frustration. Rather than turning on the government, however, “They considered themselves the last Real Americans, the legitimate heirs of the pilgrims and Founding Fathers,” Pat Bagley writes in the Salt Lake Tribune . “And, they believed, the very survival of the Constitution depended on the Saints. From Smith on, LDS leaders prophesied the Constitution would one day hang by a thread, only to be saved by Mormons.”
    A compilation of church leaders’ statements over the years by the journal BYU Studies shows this strain of thinking. Though there are doubts about whether Smith actually wrote the phrase “hang by a thread,” his successors left no doubt about the theology behind it. Orson Hyde, a Smith contemporary, wrote that Smith believed that “the time would come when the Constitution and the country would be in danger of an overthrow; and said [Smith]: ‘If the Constitution be saved at all, it will be by the elders of this Church.’ ” The church’s fifth leader, Charles Nibley, believed that “the day would come when there would be so much of disorder, of secret combinations taking the law into their own hands, tramping upon Constitutional rights and the liberties of the people, that the Constitution would hang as by a thread. Yes, but it will still hang, and there will be enough of good people, many who may not belong to our Church at all, people who have respect for law and for order, and for Constitutional rights, who will rally around with us and save the Constitution.”
    The prophecy was renewed with each generation of church leadership. “The prophet Joseph Smith said the time will come when, through secret organizations taking the law into their own hands … the Constitution of the United States would be so torn and rent asunder, and life and property and peace and security would be held of so little value, that the Constitution would, as it were, hang by a thread,” church apostle Melvin Ballard said in 1928. “This Constitution will be preserved, but it will be preserved very largely in consequence of what the Lord has