His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire.

—Revelation 1:14

At twilight on a late-summer day at the southern foundation of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount—the cradle of three religions and a place of pilgrimage for centuries—a most unlikely collection of worshippers has gathered. They include Herman Cain, the oddball Republican presidential candidate whose campaign would later implode amid allegations of infidelity; Jon Voight, the Oscar-winning actor and father of Angelina Jolie, who has evolved from an anti-Vietnam War activist into a virulent critic of Barack Obama’s; Randall Terry, the veteran anti-abortion crusader, armed with a video camera, shooting footage for his syndicated television show back home; and hundreds of American tourists, many of them evangelical Christians, who have paid up to $5,000 for package tours to witness the proceedings.

Danny Danon, a hard-right Likudnik member of the Israeli Knesset well known for his alliance with evangelical-Christian supporters of Israel, is explaining to Terry and a group of journalists why he is so willing to work with Evangelicals, whose view of theology is, to put it mildly, radically different from his own. “One day, if the Messiah comes, we can ask him if it’s the first or second time in Jerusalem,” Danon explains. “But, for now, we have to work together.”

As waning sunlight warms the ancient walls, solemn music and the sound of a shofar fill the open-air pavilion. The familiar, sonorous voice of an unseen presence emerges from a concert-quality sound system: “We always come back to God, and we always come back to Jerusalem.” Then the owner of the voice, a tall, stocky man with a white brush cut, takes the stage of the makeshift amphitheater. He wears a dark suit and purple tie. A stage performer’s mini-headset microphone curves around his cheek. The man is Glenn Beck, and he is the reason everyone is here.

In his 48 years on planet Earth, Beck has been a teenage misfit; an amateur magician; an alcoholic and a pothead; a Catholic turned nonbeliever turned Mormon; a twice-married father of four; a top-rated radio talk-show host; a New York Times best-selling author in four genres; a polarizing, tearful television talking head; and a multi-media, multi-millionaire entrepreneur, now with his own online magazine and Web TV show. Just because he may have fallen off your radar since he left Fox News, last summer, doesn’t mean that millions of faithful listeners don’t still harken to his every dog-whistle warning. They do, and their views—and their votes—carry weight. For public consumption Beck styles himself as a performer, but this is pretense. He aspires to something greater. Beck is like Andy Griffith’s Lonesome Rhodes, the faux-bumpkin demagogue in A Face in the Crowd, who shouts, “I’m not just an entertainer. I’m an influence, a wielder of opinion, a force … a force!”

And he is—a force and, as he sometimes suggests, a seer. Trying to parse his every utterance leads to madness. He’s more readily comprehensible as a vortex. Glenn Beck is a full-time pre-millennial prophet predicting, if not the end of days, at least something like a new Dark Age, with a collapsing global financial and political system and an onslaught of Evil Forces that will require an every-man-for-himself mind-set to survive. If he had lived in the first century A.D., Beck could well have displaced John of Patmos as the author of the biblical book of Revelation, that bizarre, brooding, apocalyptic amalgam of seven seals, seven stars, and a lamb with seven horns. Like other prophets who have appeared over the centuries to answer disordered times with disordered visions, Beck promotes a patchwork of internally inconsistent beliefs that defy definition. He blows hot. He blows cold. He espouses love. He arouses anger. He scorns. He cries. He presents facts—and falsehoods dressed as facts. He peers down into the bottomless pit of satanic Babylon—where we are today!—then up at the bright promise of a new Jerusalem, to which he can lead us. He is not like Rush Limbaugh (at heart, a showman, whose recent sliming of a law-school student as a “slut” demonstrated just how quickly such big talkers can cause themselves bad trouble). He is not quite Sarah Palin (at root, an opportunist) or Ron Paul (a quirky ideologue) or Rick Santorum (a severely doctrinaire Catholic), though he shares supporters with all of them. He is not even, as he sometimes takes pains to say, a clear-cut Republican. But he is, nevertheless, the emotional embodiment of the grievances and paranoia that define the domineering wing of the Republican Party in this political year. And to understand them, you have to understand him.