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Why are Beck and Palin Popular?

September 10th, 2010 | 2 min read

By Andrew Walker

Yet those who deplore Beck and Palin fail to see that the reason for their popularity stems from their uninhibited willingness to evoke and champion precisely those values and themes that the overly fastidious and sophisticated perceive as crude and corny. It is when Beck and Palin are behaving most boorishly in the eyes of their cultured despisers that they are most apt to win the enthusiastic cheers of their devoted admirers.

Lee Harris, "Beyond the Tea Party: The Broadening of a Movement," The Weekly Standard, September 13, 2010, 11.

Lee, I believe, is spot-on correct. Liberals can and most certainly have bemoaned the "God and Country" tenor of the message. It squares with then candidate Obama who declared that small-town America, when afraid, clings to guns and religion.  And with statements like these made by elected officials  familiar with Harvard University and Chicago politics, the disconnect and knee-jerk reaction fumes ever more.

History will write of the Restoring Honor Rally with various opinions. Myself, I think the event represents a moral referendum  by those Americans who have grown tired of having their values both silenced and trampled upon by the cultural and mainstream Left. Main Street, more than Wall Street, is still the epicenter of America. Beck and Palin proved this.

In Christian lingo, it's popular to quote an old Christian saying, "What hath Jerusalem to do with Athens?" For our own time, it may be contextualized so as to say, "What hath Hollywood and the New York Times to do with the values of small town America?"

Who really speaks for America? The attendees of Beck's rally or the readership of the New York Times? What say you?

Andrew Walker

Andrew T. Walker is an Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.