Flashback: “Humility” one of Beck's 12 values
Written by Kate Conway
Published
In February of 2009, Glenn Beck introduced “Nine Principles” and "Twelve Values" he promised could “solve any problem.” Number five on that list of capital-V Values was “Humility.”
And how has Beck embraced this value?
With a self-promotional rally on the National Mall loosely disguised as a revival-style gathering on the topic of faith.
Beck spent months building up the event, encouraging his followers to join him by posting an outrageous promotional video that compared 8-28 to the moon landing, Iwo Jima, the Montgomery bus boycott and the signing of the Declaration of Independence and likened Beck to Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, the Founding Fathers, and the Wright Brothers. Beck asserted that he was going to “reclaim the civil rights movement” and predicted that the rally would be “an American miracle” or a “defibrillator to the heart of America.”
At the rally itself, Beck compared himself to the man who saw the iceberg on the Titanic, claimed that “God's just like given me like hints on stuff,” and again placed himself in the context of Martin Luther King, Jr. with statements like “out of all these giants [Moses, Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington], I can relate to Martin Luther King probably the most because we haven't carved him in marble yet.”
Post-rally, Beck didn't resist the urge towards self-inflation, saying that he had “been told” that “no single individual has ever called 500,000 people to the mall and they arrived.”
Back on his March 9, 2009, Fox News show -- shortly after he originally introduced his Twelve Values -- Beck told his guest Jeff Foxworthy that humility is “the only prayer God ever answers.” Beck went on to claim that he prays “every night” that God “let[s] us find our way to our own humility.”
Perhaps Beck ought to pray a little harder.