Resolved: Glenn Beck thinks the United States is supposed to be a theocracy

This brief clip doesn't do full justice to Beck's lamentation that America has strayed from the theocratic origins of colonies like that of Massachusetts Bay Colony which carried over into some of the early state constitutions. Nothing, absolutely nothing, that Beck does nauseates me more than the way he tries to co-opt people or persons by bulldozing over their actual views in order to transform them into props to support his John Birch Society type extremist political views.

For example, he has depicted himself as a modern day reincarnation of Thomas Paine and has cited Thomas Paine to justify "refounding" America by dismantling the welfare state and progressive taxation. The actual, real life Thomas Paine - as opposed to the one that only exists in Beck's demented imagination - wrote in several of his major works that the French revolution could establish its legitimacy by establishing a welfare state with progressive taxation and that Britian should follow suit.

Here we have Beck citing Thomas Jefferson - of all people - to support the notion that the separation of church and state is "fictional" and "nonsense." That would be the same Thomas Jefferson who wrote this to the Danbury Baptists

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

So obviously Thomas Jefferson was in favor of theocracy and it's only those evil, Satanic, New World Order progressive liberal fascist communists who believe in the separation of church and state.

And Jefferson and Madison - the other man most associated with the First amendment - having worked tirelessly to disestablish official state religion in Virginia is evidence that they favored state theocracies. (And Madison actually proposed disestablishing religion at the state level in the Bill of Rights, but having the federal government overrule state laws was not feasible at the time, regardless of what the early founders might have thought about the merits of disestablishment.1)

And Thomas Jefferson, the bizarro Thomas Jefferson that only exists so that Beck can wrap his Mormon nationalism up in patriotic garb that is, believes that the basis of U.S. law is the Ten Commandments. That would be the same Thomas Jefferson who wrote this to Thomas Cooper

If, therefore, from the settlement of the Saxons to the introduction of Christianity among them, that system of religion could not be a part of the common law, because they were not yet Christians, and if, having their laws from that period to the close of the common law, we are all able to find among them no such act of adoption, we may safely affirm (though contradicted by all the judges and writers on earth) that Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.

1. See Head and Heart: American Christianities by Gary Wills