On August 28, American news commentator Glenn Beck held the “Restoring Honor” rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC to a crowd of several hundreds of thousands of people in attendance. The following day Beck appeared on Fox News Sunday to talk about the event.

When asked about the rally and its message, Beck insisted that it was nothing political, but instead a matter of faith. According to Beck, it’s because of a lack of faith that America is in trouble. It is up to the American people to fix it. “Every American has a role,” he said. “Whether you’re Democrat, Republican, independent, it doesn’t matter. We all know the country’s in trouble. We may disagree on how to solve it, but we all know the country’s in trouble.”

Asked about the controversy of the rally’s date, which coincided with the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I have a dream speech”, Beck claimed that it was merely a coincidence, but that he has since come to regard it as divine providence in order to reclaim the civil rights movement. Racial politics, said Beck, was — and is — one of the greatest problems with the country, but race has no place in politics.

Beck’s argument is that the civil rights movement should be remembered as a cause for justice; a justice which both Democrats and Republicans have twisted into tools to meet their own ends.

When hundreds of thousands of people appear in one place for one reason, Glenn Beck said that it was a sign of people being unhappy, largely because justice and faith are absent from national politics and indeed, American society at large.