Listen to it here:
Predictably, the mainstream media has made no, and I mean zero effort to disguise their contempt and loathing for Rush Limbaugh. The most even-handed article I could find was an NPR article that attempted to be fair for about 500 words and then the author couldn’t help herself and she went on a tirade about how Rush was an Everything-Phobe.
The fact that journalists and media types in America are hounding Rush to the grave really is the perfect ending to the comic opera that was Rush’s life. I call his life a comic opera, because in real life one can hardly imagine that someone would spend 33 years daily taking on the liberal establishment only to have them uniformly reject the existence of that establishment and then upon his death everyone in that establishment speaks as one man to voice their vehement bile and vent their vile calumnies against him. It’s almost as though they don’t realize that their very efforts to disprove him proves his point. I’m not sure whether they realize how obvious what they’re doing is to others…or maybe they don’t care. But it is clear that the liberal media establishment is doing their very best to try to ensure that Rush Limbaugh will not be remembered as a titanic pioneer who revived an entire radio band, spawned the alternative media, invigorated neo-conservatism, and gave 3 hours of fireside chats with multiplied millions of Americans for decades and so profoundly shaped this country, that it’s almost impossible to even separate out where Rush ends and the modern political world begins.
You don’t have to agree with him to see his legacy as being more than policies and behaviors you disagree with…you don’t have to. Really you don’t. There are people whose policies, and personal behaviors I despise, and yet I recognize that their lives and actions have so profoundly changed the world that one can only look at them in awe and recognize that their foibles – real or imaginary – are only the smallest part of who they were and that their legacies are defined by the more permanent stuff.
For me, and tens of millions of millennials like me, Rush was a voice that shaped our political worldview. Rush is a huge part of why I love radio. I’ve loved radio since I was little. I think it’s such a wonderful medium. I think radio is the perfect medium to communicate substantive talk, especially to people who are working. I cannot begin to count the hours I’ve spent riding in cars or trucks, building houses, putting on roofs, or siding, or pouring concrete, or cleaning, or just sitting around listening to Rush on the radio – and there are millions and millions of Rush babies like me. Rush changed America, and really the world.
And look, Rush has been an extremely public figure for 3 decades. Crowing over his demise, or trying to disentangle his “complex legacy” is really in bad taste and is the kind of cowardice one expects from people who are bitter and jealous of other people’s success.
There’s a book I’ve read several times by a Scottish White Hunter in the early 1900s and he talked about a pack of dogs he bought to hunt lions in the bush and that there was a group of yappy little curs who ran away from the lion when it was alive, but after it was dead they came up, arrogantly biting it, peeing on it, and acting superior. It was a literal playing out of the old saying that a live dog is better and a dead lion.
The people today who are taking pot shots at Rush couldn’t hold a light to him. They didn’t have a fraction of his talent, or courage. It, like so many things, says a lot more about them than him.
But, in case you misunderstand, I’m not claiming that Rush was perfect. He was not. He erred and sinned and did bad things. He was imperfect, and his message was, for all the value I’ve found in it, not primarily a Christian message, but a political message that is a derivative of a Christianized worldview. But Rush was an extremely impactful person. And what he did, whether you loved him or hated him is frankly, astonishing. He got on air for 3 hours a day, every day, for 33 years, and did a 3 hour commentary on the news.
Friends, do you know how hard it is to produce that much content and to be interesting doing it? I did some quick calculations and I figure Rush did about 19,000 hours of live radio content. 19,000 hours! That’s about 300,000,000 words of content! 300,000,000 words of content that tens of millions of people tuned in to, over and over and over. To put that into perspective, 300,000,000 words is like reading the NIV 382 times! Rush produced enough content to fill almost 400 bibles, on his radio talk show alone! That’s like writing A Tale of Two Cities 2,200 times! And he was interesting and entertaining and popular through it all! Friends, we can’t even comprehend that much content!
And not only did he directly shape the worldview of at least one hundred million people directly! And indirectly, I think it’s fair to say that without Rush there would be no Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, or Mark Levin – there would be no talk radio. Without Rush there would be no Ben Shapiro, no daily Wire, no conservative podsphere. Without Rush there might not BE an alternative media as it exists today – there might not be a Joe Rogan or a Dave Rubin or even a Jordan Peterson without Rush Limbaugh.
Nobody could say what might have been. But I think it’s foolish to think that as soon as Reagan repealed the Fairness Doctrine that it was only natural that a voice like Rush would arise and sweep in an optimistic, vibrant, peaceful, idealogically solid conservative movement. Conservative thought before Rush was either hyper-intellectual, effete, libertarianism and fit only for people at least one standard deviation above mean intelligence: people like Wm. F. Buckley Jr. or Milton Friedman. OR, the new voices in conservatism were going to be intellectual populist movements that openly embraced White Nationalism as a countermeasure to multiculturalism. Rush moved conservatism out of the Ivory Tower and put a conservative view out there so that construction workers and welders and factory workers could hear it, understand complex issues, and make informed choices on their own policy preferences. There was no guarantee that someone like Rush was bound to arise, that it was natural and organic. It wasn’t.
It’s safe to say that nobody has ever had the kind of influence, in sheer volume of listeners and content that Rush had. He shaped the world so much that we can’t even calculate it and we take it for granted.
But, like I said, Rush’s take on conservatism wasn’t really a Christian argument as much as it was an argument that was derived from a Christian worldview. Now, that’s not me weighing in on whether Rush was a real, born-again believer or not. He claimed to be a Christian, and while he certainly did things that make one wonder how sanctified he was, it seems best to take him at his word, at least for purposes of today’s message. Rush claimed to be a Christian but he spoke to a massive audience in ways that were not overtly Christian. He spoke on politics and he held to the values of Classical Liberalism. He loved America and was big on Americanism. He put a brand of Conservatism on offer for public consumption and people consumed it.
But more than anything else, Rush was a lightning rod. He was a watershed. He was a point of departure. Rush Limbaugh in his message represented a public and formal and permanent division in the American populace that he wanted to call attention to on a daily basis. Rush gave voice to people who rejected Radical Feminism, Race-Hustlers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, the Educational Elite, the Deep State, and of course Media Bias. In fact, it might be fair to say that more than anything, Rush’s 33 years of nationally syndicated broadcasting can be summed up as one long magnum opus on Liberal Media Bias.
Very little of what Rush said will be remembered – that’s the nature of daily news commentary…it doesn’t have a long shelf-life. What was transformative about him and what he did was NOT the individual things he said, but what he exposed. And what he exposed was that the mainstream media was and still is an extremely biased institution that was shaping, and had been shaping American views for decades without challenge or alternative.
What Rush pointed out was that societies have storytellers and the narratives they offer will guide the beliefs of the nation. And I’m using very specific language – I’m not talking about thinking. I’m talking about beliefs. Our beliefs are prior to our thoughts because we construct our thoughts off of our beliefs. Beliefs come first, thoughts come AFTER our beliefs are settled. And the liberals in journalism and entertainment were unchallenged in their narrative-making and their belief-building. The only challenger was the Christian Church, but the Church, since the advent of TV and radio had been on the decline of social influence and tv and radio had only been going up. Moreover, the Church was not speaking with one voice – media did.
Contrary to what many Evangelicals will tell you – the Postmodernists were right! Narrative matters more than Facts. The heart precedes the head. Beliefs, especially metaphysical beliefs – beliefs like, where the world came from, what is truth, do I exist, does anything matter, is there anything transcendent, what is God like – these beliefs are durable and they go unquestioned. That’s why people can believe in Evolution despite all the evidence to the contrary – like Evolution’s reliance on abiogenesis, which is life coming from non-life, speciation (which we’ve never seen), information being added through mutation (which we’ve never seen), and of course it relies, in Materialist Darwinism on everything coming from nothing with no one or no thing to cause it – moreover, an eternal universe runs into the logical impossibility of infinite regress.
But people believe it – because it’s a belief. It’s a narrative. And Rush pointed out many times that the Left Wing media had a narrative. That narrative was that America was bad and that to be good we needed to be more liberal. America was not an “exceptional” place, according to the Leftist. But Rush believed that America WAS exceptional, that our laws, our governmental philosophy, or culture of rights was the exception to the rule of human affairs in history and that that alone – it was our constitution and our culture – that made America great.
Rush recognized the power of narrative and he recognized, in some way, anyways, that beliefs are more powerful than thoughts. His career exposed the Liberal Media of not simply twisting facts but of creating a narrative about America and her people that was fundamentally different from what everyday Americans believed.
And, friends, this point that I’m making is a rather simple one, but it’s one that maybe you’ve never considered. Maybe you, especially if you’re over 60, probably think that everyone comes into the world as a blank slate and you construct your beliefs off of facts and ideas and evidence. That’s the Modernist approach – and it’s wrong. Because that approach smuggles in all the beliefs that you need to accept facts as true and to even believe in a world where facts can be objective and matter. Modernism is a failure and has failed not because facts don’t matter, but because Modernism took it for granted that facts and objective truth existed and mattered and were self-evident. But they aren’t.
In the real world there is no such thing as “taken for granted”. Why? Because that’s not how people exist. People build on beliefs. Not facts. And this is causing endless frustration among conservatives who are trying to talk to their woke friends and family members and are trying to point out with facts, and logic, and statistics, and reason, that Wokeism is logically incoherent and factually false and they don’t listen. Facts and logic cannot overcome belief. Faith is stronger than fact. This is a good thing and a bad thing. But whether your faith is unshakably in truth or a lie, faith is durable. And it is extremely hard to change someone’s faith.
And, frankly, I’m not too interested in changing people’s political opinions. Politics matter, don’t mistake me, but politics are a byproduct of your religion. The policies you advocate and vote for are derivative of your faith. I’m interested in changing people’s faith. A job that is not only almost impossible but it IS impossible.
I cannot change people’s faith. I can’t. It is impossible. But that doesn’t mean that God can’t. Charles Hodge, the great Princetonian once said about Paul’s method in Corinth:
[They] must not rely upon their own resources and attempt to overcome their enemies by argument. They must not become philosophers and turn the gospel into a philosophy. This would be to make it a human conflict on both sides. It would be human reason against human reason, the intellect of one man against the intellect of another man.
Paul told the Corinthians…that he did not appear among them as a philosopher, but as a witness; he came not with the words of man’s wisdom; he did not rely for success on his powers of argument or of persuasion, but on the demonstration of the Spirit. The faith, which he laboured to secure, was not to be founded on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God; not on arguments addressed to the understanding, but on the testimony of God. That testimony has the same effect which intuition has. It reveals the truth to the mind and conscience as self-evident; and therefore it cannot be resisted.
A rationalistic Christian, a philosophizing theologian, therefore, lays aside the divine for the human, the wisdom of God for the wisdom of men, the infinite and infallible for the finite and fallible. The success of the gospel depends on its being presented, not as the word of man, but as the word of God; not as something to be proved, but as something to be believed. It was on this principle Paul acted, and hence he was in no degree intimidated by the number, the authority, the ability, or the learning of his opponents. He was confident that he could cast down all their proud imaginations, because he relied not on himself but on God whose messenger he was.
Rush Limbaugh exposed the power of narrative in American Politics. He exposed the power of faith in American politics. As Christians we need to recognize that faith is shaping American Politics. As Christians we need to recognize that faith is shaping and has shaped the world we live in. Faith has shaped the world we live in more than Facts. And that Faith matters more than facts. And shaping and changing people’s faith is the entire reason we exist in this world. And shaping and changing people’s faith is an impossible task. But thanks be to God that the power of God and the Word of God can change a person’s faith. So, let’s rely on the Spirit and trust in the Word of God and pray God gives us success in changing people’s faith to the saving and sanctifying of their souls through faith in Jesus Christ.