For those of you wondering about Beck's ranting about a new "Black Robed Regiment" today, recall that our friends at the Donkey Edge attended Glenn Beck U and reported this back:
[M]y right-wing funhouse soon turned into a house of horrors, as I was treated to an approximately 30-minute lecture (presumably the outer limits of a wing-nut’s attention span) that covered our Founding Fathers and the birth of our nation. I had clearly picked the wrong day to give up drinking.
What unfolded was a “lecture” about the so-called “Black-Robed Regiment” – apparently a band of Evangelical Christian preachers that invoked from the Bible the political and moral underpinnings upon which the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were based and that single-handedly defeated the British at the battles of Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill. Ever heard of the “Black-Robed Regiment”? Me neither. It sounds like an obscure 1990s Steven Seagal film.
You can hear the clip from the lecture ">here.
A little googling shows that this is a major wingnut theocratic theme. (There are so many ...)The basic concept is that it wasn't the Enlightenment that informed the founders, it was fundamentalist preaching. Therefore, America was conceived as an "exceptional" Christian Theocracy.
Here's the Beck U "professor" giving his lecture on YouTube, which is probably where Beck found it late one night while searching for that rare live versions of "Jim Dandy To The Rescue"
Beck is obviously just peddling far right nonsense in all its forms and this happens to be one of his little hobby horses. But among many right wingers, this is apparently an article of faith (no pun intended.)