Glenn Beck Responds: Social Justice 'Is a Perversion of the Gospel'

BREAKING UPDATE: Our message to Glenn Beck is getting through. This morning on his radio show he responded to our challenge to his with further distortions of the Gospel as well as personal smears against Jim Wallis. Rather than respond to personal accusations, Jim would like to invite Glenn to a conversation about whether or not social justice is, as Glenn claims, "a perversion of the Gospel."

Here are some key quotes, with longer audio clips following each (courtesy of Media Matters):

Where I go to church, there are members that preach social justice as members--my faith doesn't--but the members preach social justice all the time. It is a perversion of the gospel. ... You want to help out? You help out. It changes you. That's what the gospel is all about: You.

Social justice was the rallying cry-economic justice and social justice-the rallying cry on both the communist front and the fascist front. That is not an American idea. And if we don't get off the social justice economic justice bandwagon, if you are not aware of what this is, you are in grave danger. All of our faiths--my faith your faith--whatever your church is, this is infecting all of them.

Beck also attacks Jim Wallis as, among other things, a "dedicated foe of capitalism":

To help set the record straight about what Beck did or didn't say previously, here are some quotes and audio from last week:

I beg you, look for the words 'social justice' or 'economic justice' on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes! ...

If you have a priest that is pushing social justice, go find another parish. Go alert your bishop and tell them, "Excuse me are you down with this whole social justice thing?" If it's my church, I'm alerting the church authorities: "Excuse me, what's this social justice thing?" And if they say, "yeah, we're all in that social justice thing"-I'm in the wrong place.

+ Click here to tell Glenn Beck: I'm a social justice Christian.