Are Leaders Making You Afraid So They Can Make Money?

A friend recently stopped by the house for dinner and we had the most fascinating conversation.

As we talked, he told me he’d recently been attacked on the air by Glenn Beck. Fascinatingly, he was the second friend I’d had over for dinner who’d recently been attacked by Glenn Beck. But both of them had the same story.

As he pulled up the YouTube video, I couldn’t help but wonder whether Glenn Beck even knew what either of my friends were about. Beck demonized my friend without the slightest understanding of what he represented or stood for, which looked nothing like what Beck was railing against.

*Photo Credit: www.audio-luci-store.it, Creative Commons

It made me realize as media becomes more and more sensationalized we need a refresher in defining a term we should have learned our first year in college: A straw-man argument.

A straw-man argument happens when we put words in the mouth of somebody else and then refute them whether they actually said those words or not.

Every hero needs a villain, but false heroes create straw men in order to look heroic in their supposed fight against an easy enemy. I say easy enemy because, well, what could be more easy than setting up an enemy who doesn’t exist and whose points you can easily refute?

I’ve been the “victim” of this myself.

After I wrote a blog about why I don’t often attend church, countless people wrote in response only to misquote my initial argument in such a way they could refute the points. The experience was exhausting. But here’s the deal. Most of the supposed enemies we are retaliating against in our conservative and liberal movements don’t actually exist.

The truth is 99% of people are balanced in their thinking and aren’t trying to ruin the world for destruction’s sake.

Glenn Beck, James Carville and the like make millions by frightening old people into thinking somebody is out to get them. But don’t fall for it. All they’re doing is taking years off your life so they can drive a Maserati.

What if there was, somewhere in the middle, a balanced group of American thinkers who actually had the intellectual capacity to notice manipulation when it happened? What if there was a tribe that didn’t identify with either the left or right but rather pursued truth whether it benefited anybody’s agenda or not?

Isn’t this what Jesus did?

What was His agenda other than telling the truth? It seems to me Jesus was a truth teller and Satan was a liar. Interestingly, Satan was a liar who quoted scripture. So, given the scriptural precedent that liars also quote scripture, shouldn’t the polar charges of good and evil shift from conservative and liberal to the more accurate binary categories of truth tellers and manipulators?

What if we lumped liberal and conservative manipulators into the same group and liberal and conservative truth tellers into another group? What if Mark Driscoll, James Carville, Glenn Beck and the like could be labeled as what they are: Deceptive leaders with an agenda to gain personal power? And what if we finally woke up from our naivete and realized some people use Jesus, the Bible and all things religious to manipulate the masses?

I’m convinced Satan is less interested in getting you to look at porn than he is at confusing you about what Jesus is trying to do on earth. And what Jesus is trying to do on earth is spread the truth.

And the truth doesn’t have an agenda. It is the agenda. (tweet this)

So what would the world look like if the rest of us could have a civil conversation in which true and noble ideas were actually discussed in peace, civility and respect?

Some would call it a pipe dream. I’d call it progress.

Are Leaders Making You Afraid So They Can Make Money? is a post from: Storyline Blog