Glen Back's oratory style is a relatively recent one developed by Christian Evangelical preachers over the past 20 years.
He appeals broadly to that base. And it's a honkin' huge base too.
Some background on the different oratory styles used by Christian preachers of ALL stripes (not just the Evangelical ones) over the past several hundred years ..........
The first really big time modern day evangelist (not the first "Evangelical," which is a flavor of Christianity, but the first big time modern day "evangelist" which is a traveling preacher who addresses a huge crowd with intent to convert) was George Whitefield. He had a very theatrical style of preaching ad preferred open air preaching to the limitations of an enclosed church setting. His forray onto theatrical rather than the quiet and staid demeanor more typical of Christian church history set him apart.
After him, another huge name was Charles Finney. Finney was also very theatrical, he preferred open air meetings and later pioneerd the "tent meeting." He developed a preaching style that emphasized the immediacy of needing to get saved and not put it off least one die that very evening and be sent to Hell forever -- later nown as the "turn or burn" style of preaching, and the "fire-n-brimstone" style. He invented the "altar call," and also invented "commitement cards." He turned up the heat on the emotional aspect of religion, downplaying the thinking and the rationality.
Both Whitefield and Finney adopted an important oratory trick that profesisonal singers get trained in. It's a trick that goes back thousands of years to the ancient Greeks and is essential when addressing a huge crowd without the aid of a microphone and sound system The trick is to over-pronounce the final-consonant sound of all your words. Thus, instead of merely saying "God," you have to say "GAWW-DUH!" Failure to over-pronounce the final consonant ending results in your words falling weakly upon the struggling ears of just the people in the front row, and then not reaching anyone beyond the third row. ALL successful tent preachers and open air preachers adopted that trick. And it has thus become a cliche associated with them.
This style carried over into the 20th century for preachers and politicians alike, and even into radio days and the days of microphones. (Not to go all Godwin on you fine folks here, but even Hitler took professional oratory lessons before his rise to power, and he was also instructed on these oratory tricks, as well as on how to strike several very deliberate body poses while up on a stage in order to have the most visual impact during his speaking.)
By the 1950's, with microphones very common, a new style of preaching began evolving, one that was much more soft-spoken. Billy Graham pretty much became the world leader of "the soft-spoken evangelist."
In the 1980's peaching began to shift toward self-improvement, adopting a feel-good message that incorpated psycho-babble, so the vocabulary of preaching began getting introspective and quasi-scientific. There was "thoughtfulness" in this new preaching style, incorporating deiberate pauses and silences, nuanced moments of intense intelectualizing. But becasue actual rock solid logic wasn't always a strong point, only neo-logic and very tennuous associations, the foundational undercurrent remained emotional rather than rational -- it merely FELT rational is all. Also, some very sophisticated usage of the physical area on the stage also began to evolve, not merely swaggering from left to right with arms waving. A measured drama where the physical space on the stage played a pre-planned role in the stories being told also began to evolve. It was interesting to watch, and a skilled preacher could keep the crowd engaged for well over an hour. And then overhead projectors with slide shows and then PowerPoint presentations eventually became common. And so walking across the stage to the projector screen in order to broadly point at specific items on it also got incorporated. I have seen terrible usage of the screens in many sermons, and every now and again I see a phenomenal usage of it.
Glen Beck uses a very keenly measured version of this post-1970's style of preaching, complete with the deliberate moments of silence and the thoughtful interaction witb the blackboard and/or the projector screen. Also he sadly pays more attention to crafting each of his presentatinos according to the intended emotional impact, with intellect and logic merely secondary tools that service the end-goal of emotionalism. And his license to incorporate the projector screens/blackboards only increased after the success of An Inconvenient Truth.
There is a HUGE base among the American public that responds very well to this neo-intellectual church-incubated style of oratory/presentation that Glen Back uses. You can make fun of him, but he has impact on them -- they relate very intensely to what he's saying, and they latch onto it and agree wholeheartedly. His downfall is that he's preaching only to the choir and thus gaining no new converts. However, via all this negative mockery of him, he's gaining a martyrdom status, which is militating his current fan base to come to his defense and cast a more faithful support of him.
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