A crushing defeat for Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck was pretty sure that God killed Antonin Scalia so Ted Cruz would win the presidency.

Glenn Beck’s theology is very different from mine.

In 2010, I worried that Glenn Beck was doing more harm than good. For days, I’d watched Beck tell his watchers that the world was ending and they would be crushed. Here’s what I wrote:

Beck offers no solutions.  At least, he hasn’t in the past two days.  Yes, he tells us to pray. But he’s unwittingly driving people toward catatonia.  And he’s doing this to the very people we most need engaged right now.

To be honest, I was pissed at him. He was undoing our work on the ground for Ed Martin. Glenn Beck was effectively discouraging people from voting.

Jump ahead to 2016. Glenn Beck, just a few months after announcing his exit from politics and from the Republican party, Beck decided that God is a Cruz guy, and God commanded him to endorse Ted Cruz.  And God commanded YOU to vote for Ted Cruz.

Walter Hudson of PJ Media describes the problems with Beck’s weird revelation:

Glenn Beck has endorsed Ted Cruz for president, which his organization emphasized as his “first ever presidential endorsement.” That distinction proves significant in the context of Beck’s dominionism. He has said that Cruz was “raised for this hour” by the “hand of divine providence.” Most recently, Beck has offered the outlandish claim that God brought about the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to “wake up” conservative voters and summon support for Cruz.

As a Christian, I retain unshakable faith in the sovereignty of God. In a sense, you could truthfully say that He brought about Scalia’s death, but only in the same way that He has brought about anything that has ever happened. Assigning special theological significance to a particular death or a particular candidacy for president requires a certain level of presumption that I, for one, would not dare.

God isn’t doing Glenn Beck any favors tonight.

Donald Trump not only blew away expectations for Nevada, he also registered a record number of new voters in the state. And he broke through the media-imposed glass ceiling of 32 percent. With about 30 percent of the votes counted, Trump has 45 percent! Including more than 40 percent of the Hispanic vote.

In short, Trump became the nominee-apparent tonight.

Trump received 50 percent of the Evangelical vote (according to Fox News entrance polls), almost doubling Ted Cruz’s support from that group. Cruz’s theory was that Evangelicals would carry him to the White House. Trump won women, men, Hispanics, and post-grad educated voters. Trump won it all.

Glenn Beck tried to drag God into a political campaign. In the process he dragged a lot of good people into this race with lies and promises of magic. Now, Beck has been exposed as a charlatan. Let’s hope he has the decency to retire to the rock he crawled out from.