This past Saturday, some twenty thousand people marched through the streets of Birmingham, Alabama. They were there at the invitation of the conservative radio and television host Glenn Beck, as part of a movement known variously as Restoring Unity, Never Again Is Now, and All Lives Matter. (A blimp adorned with the third motto floated overhead.) Beck himself had been invited, too, by Bishop Jim Lowe, the pastor of Birmingham’s Guiding Light Church, a predominantly black, non-denominational congregation whose members number in the thousands. More specifically, the way that Beck tells it, the two came together in a sort of divine meet-cute, at an event last year. “This preacher is sitting there,” Beck explained to a studio audience on TheBlaze, his television network, in June. “I keep looking at him. And God is like, ‘You’ve got to talk to him.’ ”

Last weekend bore the fruit of that introduction. The jumble of event names did not seem to deter the crowd, who reported hours earlier than the advertised 9 A.M. start time to the designated corralling area, on Sixteenth Street and Seventh Avenue North. That placed the start of the event in the heart of Birmingham’s civil-rights district, just a block north of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where, in the fall of 1963, a Ku Klux Klan bombing killed four girls and wounded nearly two dozen other parishioners.

The location was deliberate, and, according to several rally attendees, entirely appropriate. “Personally, I believe that a lot of the fights that were necessary in those days happened here. There’s a lot of similar battles to be won,” Kyle Wipf, a thirty-seven-year-old painter for John Deere, told me. He had driven the fourteen hours from Des Moines, Iowa, with his wife, Rachel. “The same Biblical principles apply in both situations.” Joe Preston, a financial adviser from Smithfield, North Carolina, agreed. “What people did back then, just letting it happen here—I’m talking about white people—to me is akin to just sitting here and letting ISIS do things to Christians. Planned Parenthood, people just letting that happen. It’s the same thing.” Preston had travelled to Birmingham with his friend Ryan Harris, who cited the “racial divide” as his motivation for attending the march. “People who are supposed to be the non-racist people, if you pay attention, they’re the ones promoting all this stuff,” Harris said, citing “black leadership” generally, and Al Sharpton in particular, as examples. Debbie Bennett, a retired hospice worker from Kansas City, Missouri, walked the route with a cane in one hand and a poster of Frederick Douglass in the other.

PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE SONGER/AL.COM VIA LANDOV

If these concerns sound scattered, it is because Beck’s followers feel beset from many sides—political, racial, religious. They’ve got a lot of ground to cover. Despite the talk of unity, though, the crowd’s diversity was largely limited to age and geographic origin. One of the few African-American couples whom I saw told me that they were there as members of Lowe’s church; they didn’t have much to say about Beck. “I wish there were more black people here,” Mark Seymour, a fifty-seven-year-old children’s performer who lives near Birmingham, said. Why, I asked, did he think that the city’s African-Americans had absented themselves? “It’s kind of like the plantation thing,” Seymour suggested. “Why do they continue to vote for policies that hurt them? That’s just the way it is.” What did he hope the march would accomplish? “I want to say that we turned on people’s hearts,” he said.

The rally started a few minutes late. It was led by Beck, Lowe, the nineteen-eighties action star Chuck Norris, and those marchers who had sprung for a deluxe ticket (twelve hundred and fifty dollars, plus forty-four dollars and seventy-five cents in Ticketmaster fees), which earned them, among other things, a “priority spot” in the crowd, a meet-and-greet with Beck, and an unspecified book authored by the same. The assorted “All Lives Matter” posters bobbed up one block, to the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, then turned left, past Kelly Ingram Park, where, in May of 1963, police let loose fire hoses and attack dogs on a packed crowd of protesters. Since Birmingham’s civil-rights district sits adjacent to its financial district, it wasn’t long before the Unity marchers entered the valley of the city’s few skyscrapers. Another left turn, a few short blocks, and the Glenn Beck faithful arrived at the convention center, where, two hours later, they would hear directly from their leader.

When the Restoring Unity Speaker Series finally started, a little after noon, it drew about half as many people as the march and lasted well over four times as long. The Guiding Light Church choir provided a gospel background. Norris had been scheduled to lead the crowd in the Pledge of Allegiance, but he bowed out to look after his wife, who had fallen ill during the morning’s procession. The actor Jon Voight filled in for him. Pastor Rafael Cruz, the father of the Republican Presidential candidate and Texas senator Ted Cruz, delivered the invocation prayer. Alveda King, a niece of Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke for several minutes, as did Lowe. David Barton, the founder of WallBuilders, a group dedicated to infusing the United States government with Christian values, gave a crisp tour through God’s decisive influence over historic military victories, such as the Revolutionary War and the Battle of the Bulge. Audrea Taylor, a youthful employee of Beck’s Mercury Radio Arts, debriefed the audience on millennials.

Beck took the stage after a short intermission, delivering an emotionally charged, nearly ninety-minute oration. It can be difficult, at times, to follow the threads of Beck’s apocalyptic rhetoric, but certainly the sense of fear came through. “I have never felt evil this close,” he said. And, later, “We’re being tested, and evil is watching us.” Throughout the event, “evil” operated as shorthand for ISIS and Planned Parenthood, although Beck also took care to draw parallels with Nazi Germany, and to squeeze in the refrain “All lives matter” where he could. He delivered his remarks in front of a large screen that cycled through an ominous slide show—concentration-camp prisoners, an aborted fetus, ISIS militants, all engulfed in flames. And, this being Birmingham, of course, he invoked King’s legacy. “The movement to end discrimination in America was led by a man who was willing to stand alone,” he said. “He was a flawed guy, a really flawed guy.... How could he have been selected by the Lord to do something great? ... My theory is because God ran out of righteous people. ... He got down to the list and was like, ‘I’m down to Martin Luther King.’ Just like he says, about us, ‘Crap, I’m down to Glenn Beck and his listeners.’ ”

The fund-raising pitch came just after the four-hour mark. If Beck raises ten million dollars by Christmas, he says, he will rescue four hundred families—a number pulled from the “four hundred years of silence” that separate the Old Testament and the New—from ISIS, by bringing them to the United States, or, failing State Department approval, to Mexico, in which case he will personally march them across the border into the United States (“a new Selma”). This, finally, seemed to explain what the morning’s rally was really all about: practice for the next one.

As the convention center emptied, the clouds hung low and dark in the sky. Hurrying to his car to beat the rain, Joe Preston could describe the day’s events only as “awesome.” His friend Ryan Harris echoed him. “Awesome,” he said. “Even better than I expected.”