W. Cleon Skousen - The Man Behind Glenn Beck

by Bill McKeever

Glenn Lee Beck has become a leading voice in American media and his radio and television programs have become quite popular among those who hold conservative political views.

Born in Everett, Washington on February 10, 1964, he converted to Mormonism in 1999 shortly after marrying his current wife Tania (Beck's first marriage ended in divorce in 1994). With all the emotion of a typical LDS fast and testimony meeting, Beck passionately proclaims his love for America while decrying the efforts of liberals to abandon the ideals fashioned by America's founding fathers. He regularly displays his in-depth knowledge of American history, and while he challenges his listeners to "Question with Boldness," many, myself included, wonder if he really did that when it comes to the dubious historical past of Mormonism.

Beck doesn't hide the fact that one of the people who has made a major impact on his political worldview is W. Cleon Skousen, a Mormon political thinker and author of The 5,000 Year Leap, a book Beck says "changed his life." First published in 1981, Beck wrote the foreword to a new edition that instantly became a top seller on Amazon.com.



Who is W. Cleon Skousen? Willard Cleon Skousen, the founder of the National Center for Constitutional Studies, died at the age of 92 on January 9, 2006. Born in Raymond, Alberta Canada in 1913, Skousen came to the United States after an agricultural depression destroyed the family farm in 1921. He took a job working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and earned a law degree at George Washington University Law School.

In an article for Utah Holiday magazine (“Freemen America,” Feb. 1981), writers Linda Sillitoe and David Merrill noted that Skousen eventually became the head of the FBI’s communications section as well as J. Edgar Hoover’s administrative assistant. His job as an agent was to identify communist subversion and this “profoundly affected his political beliefs” (p.36).

At the request of his law school mentor and fellow Mormon, Ernest L. Wilkinson, Skousen left the FBI in 1951 to move to Provo, Utah to begin work at BYU. His interest in politics and the threat of communism led to writing The Naked Communist, the title of which he said was suggested by movie mogul Cecil B. DeMille.

In 1956 he began a relatively short career as police chief of Salt Lake City. When he was fired from that position, he returned to BYU in 1967 as a professor of ancient scripture. He began lecturing against communism and, in 1971, founded the Freemen Institute (later to be named the National Center for Constitutional Studies), an organization built around conservative ideology. Sillitoe and Merrill state,

“According to the Freemen workbook, the organization takes its name from the colonial use of the term. Mormon Freemen, however, remind one another of Book of Mormon scripture: ‘And those people who were desirous that Pahoran should remain chief judge over the land took upon them the name of freemen; and thus was the division among them, for the freemen had sworn or covenanted to maintain their rights and the privileges of their religion by a free government. (Alma 51:6.)'"

Though never officially endorsed by the LDS Church, Skousen was able to use his Mormon influence as a means to further his ideals. Many local LDS leaders had no problem promoting Skousen’s organizational activities from their pulpits. This led to a letter being read from then President Spencer Kimball urging local leaders to stop such announcements lest it be construed that the LDS Church was officially endorsing what was being said at the meetings. This did not mean that LDS leaders were not at least unofficially supportive. In fact, Skousen was a personal friend of Ezra Taft Benson, himself an ardent anti-communist who once served as Secretary of Agriculture under President Eisenhower. Benson later became Mormonism’s 13th president.

Skousen’s influence went far beyond his Mormon peers. Like others with conservative political views, he was close to Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church. Moon proclaims that he is the “Third Adam” and teaches that Jesus failed to complete His mission. In 1987 Skousen refused to disavow the controversial religious leader from Korea, saying that “theologies must be put aside to fight communism” (Salt Lake Tribune, “Skousen Isn’t About to Break His Ties to Rev. Moon,” April 29th, 1987, p.B1). Skousen was also very well connected to noted evangelicals who shared his conservative ideals.

Skousen’s politics aside, it was his theology that was especially troubling. His book The First 2,000 Years, published in 1953, included a section on God that can only be described as blasphemous.

Under the subtitle “The Source of God’s Power,” he wrote,

“Through modern revelation we learn that the universe is filled with vast numbers of intelligences, and we further learn that Elohim is God simply because all of these intelligences honor and sustain Him as such…His glory and power is something which He slowly acquired until today, ‘all things bow in humble reverence.’ But since God ‘acquired’ the honor and sustaining influence of ‘all things’ it follows as a corellary (sic) that if He should do anything to violate the confidence or ‘sense of justice’ of these intelligences, they would promptly withdraw their support, and the ‘power’ of God would disintegrate. This is what Mormon and Alma meant when they specifically stated that if God should change or act contrary to truth and justice ‘He would cease to be God.’ Our Heavenly Father can do only those things which the intelligences under Him are voluntarily willing to support Him in accomplishing” (pp.355-356).

The idea that God could “cease to be God” is not at all unique to Skousen. In fact, on page 354 he rightfully notes that the phrase comes directly from the Book of Mormon (Mormon 9:19; Alma 42:13, 25).

Skousen sums up these passages by saying, “In other words, if eternal principles were violated, God could cease to be God!”

On page 356 he also cites Doctrine and Covenants 93 to support his position.

“In the Doctrine and Covenants, ‘intelligence’ or that eternal, self-knowing will within each of us is called by several names. Sometimes it is called the ‘the light of truth,’ sometimes ‘the light of Christ,’ and in one place it is identified with the phenomenon of ‘life.’”

D&C 93:29 states that “Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be.”

Tenth Mormon President Joseph Fielding Smith taught,

“...there is something called intelligence which always existed. It is the real eternal part of man, which was not created nor made. This intelligence combined with the spirit constitutes a spiritual identity or individual” (Answers to Gospel Questions, 4:127).

In 1969, Hugh B. Brown, a member of the LDS First Presidency, stated,

“We believe that before the creation of the body, all men existed as intelligence, These intelligences were not created or made, neither indeed can they be; the intelligent entity in man which we call spirit or soul is a self-existing entity, uncreated and eternal. Thus man is crowned with the dignity which belongs to his divine and eternal nature” (Conference Reports, April 1969, p.51).

The idea that God “acquired” the sustaining influence of anything should be regarded as absurd by those who understand the true attributes of the biblical God. To think that God can only do what these alleged “intelligences” support Him in accomplishing strikes at the heart of His omnipotence.

Skousen’s conclusions also seem to throw an interesting twist into what is known as the LDS doctrine of eternal progression. If man has truly progressed from a mere intelligence with the power to dethrone God, where is this power now that he has moved on to mortality? If you combined all of the wills of every human on earth, you couldn’t muster up enough power to strip God of His heavenly position. If that was really something we could have done as “intelligences,” it seems obvious we cannot do it now. Could it not then be argued that rather than progressing, we are really regressing?

Glenn Beck often speaks of God and Christianity; how many of Skousen's theological views he shares, I cannot say. Beck is careful not to be too specific when he discusses his religious views publicly, but if Skousen has truly had a major impact on Beck and “changed his life,” fans should be cautious before assuming Beck is speaking of the Christianity of the New Testament.


Resource: mrm.org