Glenn Beck, Mormon
Over at Alternet, Joanna Brooks is crediting the rise and persona of Fox News personality Glenn Beck to the Mormonism to which the former Catholic converted in 1999. She begins the critical piece with Beck’s own description of the experience:
"I was friendless, working in the smallest radio market I had ever worked in... a hopeless alcoholic, abusing drugs every day," Beck said in an interview taped last fall. "I was trying to find a job and nobody would hire me … couldn’t get an agent to represent me. …""I was baptized on a Sunday, and on Monday" -- Beck’s throat tightens again; he wipes tears from his eyes with his index fingers -- "an agent called me out of the blue." Three days later, Beck was offered his own political talk radio show at WFLA-AM in Tampa, Florida, the job that put him on the road from "morning zoo" radio prankster to conservative media heavyweight.
Brooks says Beck’s reverence for the founders, his devotion to the writings of Freeman Society founder Cleon Skousen, even what she calls his “oft-ridiculed penchant for punctuating his tirades with tears” all derive from his Mormonism:
As sociologist David Knowlton has written, "Mormonism praises the man who is able to shed tears as a manifestation of spirituality." Crying and choking up are understood by Mormons as manifestations of the Holy Spirit. For men at every rank of Mormon culture and visibility, appropriately-timed displays of tender emotion are displays of power.
Not typical of Mormon masculinity, Brooks writes, are “Beck’s high-decibel swings between bombast and self-deprecation.”
Such demonstrative excesses are socialized out of most Mormon men during a regimented process of masculine formation that begins with entry into the lowest ranks of Mormonism’s lay priesthood at age 12, intensifies during compulsory missionary service from age 19 through 21, and continues throughout a lifetime of service within hierarchical priesthood quorums. A textbook example of the traditional Mormon “man of steel and velvet” whose inability to connect with the Republican base may have as much to do with his lack of familiar jocularity and chest-thumping outrage as it does with the perceived weirdness of his Mormon beliefs. As a convert, Beck missed out on crucial early years of Mormon male socialization. Consequently, his renegade persona may endear him even more to his Mormon male fans who might like to comport themselves as he does, but feel they cannot.
