At Religion in America, we’ve been surprisingly silent on Glenn Beck, the self-styled prophet and demagogue. Since I don’t have a TV and definitely no cable television, I’ve been pretty much immunized from Beck. Someday, though, I’ll give in and write about Glenn Beck and American religion—there is much of interest, however depressing it might be. But here’s a roundup of some good articles on Beck and religion.

• Andrew Murphy, “Beck Plays Prophet—Politics Pervade,” Religion Dispatches. Murphy is the author of a fine book on the history of the jeremiad, which I reviewed on Religion in America. In this article, Murphy compares Beck’s rhetoric to the jeremiad of Martin Luther King Jr.

• Anthony Stevens-Arroyo, “Is Glenn Beck Preaching Mormon ‘Restoration’ Theology?” Washington Post’s On Faith. Stevens-Arroyo speculates on the relationship between Beck’s teaching and Mormon theology, comparing it to Catholic doctrine of revelation.
• Mark Silk, “Beck’s Old-Time Gospel Hour,” Spiritual Politics. Silk asks why Beck’s most recent rally focused “not about what’s wrong with America but with what’s right about America.”
• Russell D. Moore, “God, the Gospel, and Glenn Beck,” Moore to the Point. Moore, a dean at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, criticize’s Beck’s civil religion—an encouraging sign that not everyone in Beck’s core demographic is going along with him.
• Paul Harvey, “Me the People: A Roundup on the Rally,” Religion in American History. Harvey offers a roundup of coverage of Beck and religion.

While we’re on the topic of religion and politics, and especially on the topic of civil religion, here are two more articles worth thinking about:

• Stanley Hauerwas, “America’s God Is Dying,” Religion and Ethics. Hauerwas describes how “for Americans, faith in God is indistinguishable from loyalty to their country” through a mixture of Protestantism, republicanism, and common-sense morality, then argues that this American god is dying.
• Michael J. Altman, “Who Is America’s God?” Altman extends Hauerwas’s article with a quotation and analysis from Émile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

Last and least, The Onion reports that a “Man Already Knows Everything He Needs to Know About Muslims.”