Thanks to a post by Mike Peterson, I came across this cool conversion story from CNN host, Glenn Beck.
Glenn Beck’s Conversion Story
67 thoughts on “Glenn Beck’s Conversion Story”
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Thought-provoking commentary on life, politics, religion and social issues.
So did I.
kim and jeff,
thank you all for your timeand help I know you booth and others have workered your will let me say this worked your bottoms off to locate beck well I we have him think. to all my Americans and Canadians forgive any type o”s for I has worked 16 hour day for the past 3 days.
jeff I love your coment and you make wo”t to stand up and yell at the top of my lungs
I LOVE AMERICA BECAUSE WE ARE FREE,well I canT do that because the kids are asleep. So I’ ll say God bless you booth and all others, also sorry that I have not talked to you all,you all are friends well no AMERICANS,to me.
Hey you allI got one wild Idea the kids asleep,Canada is only about 400 miles away and beck should pass over my area about 9:00 pm. So iam going to take my big mouth and attidude outside and yell I LOVE AMERICA WE ARE FREE. I hope you all hear me and I hope beck dose as he flys over, Idea to beat thois game as president HELP SPEAD THE WORD WRITE THE NAME CLYDE.
BECK,
why don’t your Email let me in I spent ovrer one hour typing you and stew a letter COME ON IS THIS TRUE I THOUGHT THIS WAS ONLY THE DEMOCRATES SO IF I cannot contact you BECK you contact me come on Ithought you were fighting for AMERICA.
HEY STEW give me email to beck.COME ON BECK.I send you mail I know who 08. BECK Emial the Clyde , I put carbon foot print on aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll. Gores ??????????????????
Ive burnt wood coal and cut wood for USA people who needed heat and they loved the warmth
THE CLYDE
clyde, you need to spend ‘ovrer one hour’ learning to use a spell checker, bro.
I really hoping that you are being intentionally out there…
Rick,
have you ever set infront of a compumter screen and typed while a two yearold baby lies asleep plus your wife , after working from 3:00am to 5:00pm after working 3 days of 16hours plus.
HEY RICK,
look at message# 53 CLYDE they have the canadian flag beside my name. well Iam knot mad but Iam concerened IAM AMERICA FROM OHIO.
HEY BECKS BLOG’s were to be AMERICAN will why does the canadian flag by every name? is tier an american web page ?
THANK YOU for checking my spelling. just tierd and tying to answer all EMAIL AND GET TO GLENN BECK, JUST WORKING HARD
VERY GOOD JOB RICK THANK YOU
I’ll try to slow down onthis type_O baord .
clyde, if you have a job that is actually impairing your ability to spell or to actually construct a sentence, I’d be amazed.
Do you work with chemicals all day? Are you somehow involved with some sort of drug testing program?
Short of those two options, I fail to see how working any length of time would allow someone to be so completely incapable of using English syntax correctly.
Unless you are actually the orangutan ‘Clyde’ from the Clint Eastwood movie ‘Every Which Way But Loose’.
If you are this orangutan, I instead, commend you on the ability to communicate on a blog at all.
Latter-day Saints believe in Christ as the Savior, the Redeemer, the Son of God, the Creator of the earth, and the only source of salvation. It is His love and grace that give meaning to life and hope to humanity. We believe in the Bible, which plainly teaches that Christ is our Savior and that all men must repent and come unto Christ to be saved. Some critics proclaim that Mormons are not Christians and don’t believe in Christ. I really don’t like other people telling me what I believe! As a Latter-day Saint, I have been taught, and have personally chosen, to accept Christ as my Savior. I am taught to follow Him, to rely on His love, and to feast on His word. I know that real Mormons are Christians. We worship Christ and covenant to follow Him. We are baptized in His name to follow Him, we partake of the sacrament (the holy communion) weekly to remember the sacrifice of His blood and to remember His victory over death, we pray to the Father in His name, and we strive to obey Him, knowing that it is only through His merits and grace that we are saved. He is constantly held up in our meetings as our Savior, our Redeemer, our Lord, and the author of our faith and our salvation. We believe that He stands at the head of His living Church, leading it as in days of old through revelation to His prophets and apostles. The Christ we worship is the living Christ, the Son of God, foretold in the Old Testament, revealed in the New Testament, and affirmed in The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ.
Paul
very thaughtful but most of all beautiful in todays world.
This is a lightly edited note I sent to a friend who in a fit of insanity included me on a group email to which Beck’s sincere, pathetic Mormon conversion story was attached. This is my gentle way of discouraging receipt of information of this kind.
best,
bob
Dear XXXXX,
Re. Glenn Beck’s Mormon Conversion Story
Unless you want an analytical response, don’t send me things like this. If you don’t want to read an analytical response to Beck’s sincere, uninformed, deceptive pap, stop reading here.
Every religious organization is populated by sincere people who have important social needs met by the organization, and who confuse the strong feelings that come from that experience with a divine encounter that justifies belief that their organization has “the truth”. So, you find one of those people who perceives the institution to be particularly important for him (“Without Mormonism, I would be a drunk with no family and no job”, says Beck), get him to tell his story using the usual, formulaic salvation narrative – “Things were going really bad in my life; then I fell into a crisis of some kind; then I found [insert name of religion]; then I had a powerful emotion experience [insert tears]; then some really great things started to happen in my life that are a sign from God; and now things are wonderful for me and my family”, and you have poster boy that is highly useful for marketing purposes. The more high profile the individual, the better this works.
A large part of LDS inspiration these days comes from a marketing firm named Edelman on Madison Avenue in NYC. Seriously. The Mormons are trying to catch up with the Evangelicals who for years have been using relatively sophisticated marketing tools, and largely as a result far outperform the Mormons in terms of conversions. Richard Bushman explained, in part, how this works to a crowd of well heeled Mormons at a dinner in Calgary recently. He did not name Edelman, but laid out the LDS marketing strategy in some detail. I know from other sources that this information is provided to LDS leaders, at high cost using tithing money of course, by Edelman. A Mormon who was at the Busman meeting summarized it for me. With typically naïve Mormon hubris, he was thrilled that his church was getting more sophisticated in terms of marketing and communications. That is prophetic inspiration for you. Call the gurus on Madison Avenue when you need to find out what to do. God must be leading each and every major business in North America, because they all use this strategy too. My acquaintance somehow missed this irony.
With a few minutes of goggling I could find you this kind of written or video presentation on behalf of many different religious groups. These are made with greater or lesser degrees of consciousness re. their manipulative, perspective distorting nature.
No religious (or other) group has a corner on this experience. It is a human universal.
While wishing Glenn Beck and his family well, I found his video repugnant. It presents a false picture of Mormonism, and will be used to dupe innocent people. The “true love” Beck talks about is at the root of countless religious and secular movements. That fact that this is a revelation to him says something about him, but not about how Mormonism is special or different from other religious groups. Members of Jim Jones’ and other cults say the same kind of thing about their groups as Beck does about Mormonism.
Beck’s favorites day of week is Sunday because that is a family day. That is the case at my house too, and only since leaving Mormonism. While Mormon, I was seldom at home with my kids on Sunday, and when I was I tended to be exhausted and hence far less of a father than I could have been. You, I know, were in the same position. You and I gave our energy to the Mormon institution instead of our families. Glenn Beck has not yet experienced that side of his new faith.
Beck’s fear based claim that he would be on the human trash heap without Mormonism is a pathetic, but unfortunately well-used religious claim. It is designed to scare people into the fold, and into staying in the fold. I reject life lived on the basis of fear, and want nothing to do with organizations that promote that point of view. This is a virus that weakens human beings, and makes them dependant on manmade authority.
I could break Beck’s presentation down and tear it apart sentence by sentence. It is nonsense. I have better things to do with my time today.
But in any event, Beck does not address the most important question about religious groups. That is, “How reliable is the authority of the institution that asks for our allegiance, and how much do they ask of us?” The more the institution asks, the more reliable its authority should be proven to be before we go along for the ride.
We know how much Mormonism asks. Ultimately, it wants full commitment. It is designed to push us as far in that direction as we will go. But perhaps Glenn Beck does not know that yet. This is because Mormonism uses sales pitches like his to get people in the door and on the train on the basis of attractive “milk”. Then the train starts to move, social commitments are, the forces of cognitive dissonance kick in, and the faster the train is going the harder it is to get off. The Moonies, Hare Krishna and many other cults explicitly recruit on this basis. So do the Mormons. The “hard doctrines”, the “meat”, the commitments required of those who attend the temple and become Mormon leaders, and a host of other aspects of Mormonism, are kept purposefully hidden until the convert gradually becomes “ready”, because by that time the train will be moving so fast that it will be very hard for him to get off.
There is no need to review the reliability of Mormon authority with you. You should be as familiar as I am with that. “Lying for the Lord”, “Faithful History” and other well established Mormon leadership traditions clearly indicate that the Mormon brand of authority should not be trusted as an accurate guide to reality. It is designed to further the interest of the Mormon institution at the expense of its members, or whomever else must be sacrificed in this regard. John D. Lee is a good example. Once Brigham Young needed a scapegoat to re. the Mountain Meadows Massacre, his faithful foot soldier and adopted son John was sold down the river in a heart beat. But the plight of gays, intellectuals and anyone else who stands in the Mormon way and is against its interest is the best example.
This is a bad video. If you are going to share garbage like this, keep it within your tribe. You embarrass yourself when you show things like this to well informed people who do not already share your beliefs, and you potentially abuse the less well informed. This is therefore both unwise and immoral.
My response to this video explains why you and other fine Mormons I know have had virtually no missionary success after a lifetime of trying. You have been dealing with well informed people who had enough perspective that it was easily predictable that they would not find naive tripe of this kind attractive.
You were trying to do Mormon missionary work in Canada in a mostly university community. The charts at http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org (a U. of Michigan project) as well as other sources, predict that Mormon missionary work will only be successful where magic thinking is at or above the average US level. Your community is far better than the Mormon in terms of magical thinking.
Ironically, the same youtube page I brought up to see Beck features Oprah as well. While I am not one of her fans, I agree with her on this one.
I hope you enjoy your Sabbath. I am about to start enjoying mine.
best,
bob
Dear Mr. Beck,
Let’s say that Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Washington, and Adams watched the Obama/McCain get together this evening; what might be their impression?
They might well have stared at each other upon realizing that after almost 250 years, the best this Nation could produce was McCain selected by almost one half of the citizenry as their choice for President. Seeing McCain stumble, mustering only a malevalant sneer, jutting chin, steely eyes and a blink rate that hit warp speed when Obama brought upFirst Amendment rights would rightly cause bewilderment at what Man, the USA Man, could achieve..
How pathetic a showing this might have seemed to the visionaries and founders of the Nation to see that the Common Man does live… he is very Common and it is very, very pathetic.
Paul, et al, no words can change you once you have heaped an unholy book atop the Holy Bible, for you have condemned your ownselves.
There are no tablets to confirm young Joseph Smith, unfortunately for your cult.
We should be talking about conversion from mormonism to Christianity, and by the way … the “angel” moroni if broken down appropriately, indicates “moron i”.
Does that help?
ah….glen beck. funny guy, sensationalist and occasionally he really hits the nail on the head. In my opinion, he had some of the most detailed and informative info available on cnn regarding radical islam.
unfortunately his other cook conspiracy theories and obvious bias got him booted. I do know that his ratings were much better than most other cnn programming.
hello everyone im putting this on here just becouse i sent it to glenn and i would like to know what you all think of this: you no what oboma is up to and who he is . now kissengure said [oboma is primed for the new world oder] so just tell everyone just say it : you no whats comming you no: why why dosent anyone just say whats going on WHY !! you see i have heard you allmost say it NOW i no that i sound like im out of my mind RIGHT but you no im NOT and money dont got anything to do with what im talking about its got to do with POWER the dem,s are fooling us what thar really doing is trying to make a line of power of ther party for the new world oder and you no that and its comming very soon now i no that i sound crazy BUT IM NOT AT ALL and you no it so just say it paul
Mr Beck is bright, articulate, and entertaining. But his “conversion” is a tragedy. LDS is pantheism at best and a poor imitation of anything mainstream Christian. I would respectfully encourage prayer for Mr Beck, that he may find his way out of the LDS cult.
Ah, Mr. ‘prophet,’ you aren’t much of a prophet, bible scholar, or Christian, if all you can do is come up with unsubstantiated, uncorroborated, ‘hateful’ anti-LDS-isms, when you’ve clearly, obviously, and undeniably NEVER studied the religion, its roots, or Joseph Smith. Had you applied even a smidgeon of the effort you put into putting down the LDS faith, into a sincere, from-the-heart, humble-yet-diligent and prayerful study of the religion, as well as the Book of Mormon, you’d come to know it is true too. Alas, That’s what you’re afraid of, isn’t it? You’d rather play the ‘ignorance is bliss’ card, and ‘pretend’ you’re an intellectual, a scholar, and a Christian, when you’re truly simply afraid of finding out the truth.
Hey phylo … thanx for the reply. Interestingly presumptuous, and far more hateful than anything in the comments you enjoyed from me. I actually read and studied the Books of Mormon, “Pearls, doctrines, et all”. Only problem with them is they do not play well, or at all, with the Holy Bible (pick your translation).
No, thanks just the same. I wull add you to our prayer list. Take care of yourself, and hang in there my friend.
Paul, once you get the title right we will believe you have read it haha. Ever heard we walk by faith and not sight? You don’t see God but do you believe he is there? But you don’t believe the book of Mormon is true because you have not seen the gold plates? And we are a cult because we believe there is a prophet on earth today? And look up the word cult in the dictionary.