Reflecting on the
life and work of the Rev. Jerry Falwell
[5-17-07]The Rev. Jerry
Falwell, who died on May 15, was a significant and polarizing figure
in American politics and religion during the last 30 years.
For many of us, his death is an
occasion for reflecting on the rise of the Religious Right in the
United States, and its current role in our society and our political
life.
So here’s a survey of some of the
commentaries on Jerry Falwell and his significance for us today.
We welcome your comments, or suggestions of
others that we might include.
Just send
a note!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jonathan Alter of Newsweek offers a careful and critical
analysis
He sees Falwell’s main success as
an institution-builder – founding Thomas Road
Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, and then Liberty University –
both large and prosperous institutions today. But, he says, “The
truth about the Rev. Jerry Falwell is that he was a character
assassin and hype artist who left little positive impact on the
United States – and little negative impact either, for that matter.”
Read the full article on
Huffington Post, or on
MSNBC/Newsweek.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Americans United issued this
statement:
Moral Majority Founder Was ‘Face And Voice Of The Religious
Right,’ Says AU’s Lynn
Dr. Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority and one of the key
architects of the rise of the Religious Right, died today at age 73.
The Rev. Barry W.
Lynn, executive director of Americans United, released the following
statement:
“Jerry Falwell
politicized religion and failed to understand the genius of our
Constitution, but there is no denying his impact on American
political life. He will long be remembered as the face and voice of
the Religious Right.
“Falwell
manipulated a powerful pulpit in exchange for access to political
power and promotion of a narrow range of moral concerns. I appeared
with him on news programs dozens of times over the years and, while
I disagreed with just about everything Falwell stood for, he was a
determined advocate for what he believed.
“Falwell reached
his apex of power in the 1980s. Since then, leadership of the
Religious Right has passed to James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Tony
Perkins, Donald Wildmon and others. However, Falwell remained
influential in politics, with Republican presidential candidates
seeking his support this year.
“Americans United
extends its condolences to members of Dr. Falwell’s family, the
congregants of Thomas Road Baptist Church and the students and staff
of Liberty University.”
Americans United is a religious liberty watchdog
group based in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1947, the organization
educates Americans about the importance of church-state separation
in safeguarding religious freedom.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
SoulForce, which was led for many years by Mel White,
and former ghost-writer for Dr. Falwell, issued this statement:
Soulforce
Observes the Passing of Rev. Jerry Falwell
Today, the staff
and board of directors of Soulforce observe the passing of Rev.
Jerry Falwell and offer our sincere condolences to his family, the
members of Thomas Road Baptist Church, and the students at Liberty
University.
"While Soulforce
has a long history of nonviolent direct action at Jerry Falwell
Ministries, our adversary was never Jerry Falwell, but rather the
misinformation about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people
espoused by Falwell and so many others," said Soulforce Executive
Director Jeff Lutes.
Soulforce was
founded in October, 1999, when Rev. Dr. Mel White and his partner,
Gary Nixon, took 200 delegates to meet with Rev. Falwell and his
representatives. The purpose of the meeting was to help end hate
speech and violence against sexual minorities. Prior to coming out
as a gay man, White ghost wrote two books for Falwell (If I
Should Die Before I Wake and Strength for the Journey).
Upon hearing the
news of Rev. Falwell's death, White said "It breaks my heart to
think that Jerry died without ever discovering the truth about God's
lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender children. I sincerely hope
that one day his school and his church will have a change of heart."
Soulforce remains
committed to changing hearts and minds and ending the political and
religious oppression of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender
people.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Falwell Launched the Modern Christian Right
US News and World Report
carried a brief comment on Falwell’s role, beginning:
“Jerry Falwell, who died Tuesday at age 73, did more
to launch the Christian Right as a major political force than any
other figure in the past 50 years, but his career also illustrated
the limits the movement ran into as it tried to enact its political
and public policy agenda.”
The rest of the story >>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Next Jerry Falwell
Brian Kaylor, communications specialist with the
Baptist General Convention of Missouri, says on
EthicsDaily (a very good
website representing moderate Southern Baptist thought) that the
important question is “who will take his place ... as a public face
and voice of American evangelicals.” He hopes it will be someone who
can listen to others and engage in respectful dialogue, who will not
tie the Christian faith to a particular political party, and who
will not limit Christian concern to one or two narrow issues.
He concludes: “My hope
and prayer now is that the next generation that arises to take his
place will be more careful and less polarizing with their words. In
short, I hope the next Jerry Falwell sounds a lot less like Jerry
Falwell.”
The
full article >>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
What he really said
Many people have commented on Jerry Falwell’s harsh
rhetoric. Timothy
Noah, a senior writer at Slate, has gathered some of
Falwell’s statements. Noah uses some harsh rhetoric of his own, too
(unless you consider “Rest in peace, you blowhard” as kindly
benediction), and we do not condone that in any way. But a look at
some of Falwell’s statements might be helpful.
The full
article >>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The voice of "Southernist
resentment"
Jonathan Justice, a member of Calvary Presbyterian
Church in Logansport, IN, sends this comment, seeing Falwell and
others as exploiting “Southernist resentment” but failing to stop
the cultural trend toward more liberal values:
While
I can only put up with a little of it, the coverage I have seen
of Jerry Falwell's death strikes me as peculiarly deficient
because it poses the context more or less the way he and his
handlers want it posed. I would suggest that it is more accurate
to go with Julia Ward Howe's remarks about, "trampling out the
vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored," even if she did
write them down about 70 years before he was born.
Whatever lies he
may have told about Christian doctrine, himself, or other
people, his distinctive achievement was to exploit the sour and
debilitating stream of Southernist resentment that led to the
Civil War. Long before he was 'forced into public life by the
Supreme Court decision on abortion,' he was telling anyone who
would listen that racial segregation was a good thing, and that
Martin Luther King was not.
Frankly it would appear to me that his conversion by listening
to an evangelist on the radio had a very large component of
finding a way to make a living that was all too similar to his
father's bootlegging. He was forced into public life the same
way Wal-Mart was 'forced' to open all those stores. Mr. Falwell
made a living marketing something that people wanted so much
that they happily subverted the relevant federal laws, ethical
standards, and Christian doctrines, and put money in his pocket
in the process. It was hardly new to pretend that the
resentments that come with the social transformations that each
of the depressions that the American economy suffers tends to
highlight were somehow connected to failures of personal
morality on the part of those whose success was resented, but it
did work as a way to a national standing.
Fortunately, there
is a splendid unintended consequence in the form of the
exhaustion of the unnatural resources he joined a lot of other
people in exploiting. While I would not be at all surprised to
learn that young Miss Ward was aware of Hegel's discussion of
thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, I would suspect that she was
more comfortable with the discussion of working out one's own
salvation, and that of the communities with which one
affiliated. She understood the struggle which President Lincoln
would articulate at Gettysburg.
As the economic
might and political will of the old North blossomed after WW II,
Jerry F. picked the losing side of the continuing struggle, and
played it for all it was worth. I am sure he found Strom
Thurmond an instructive model. For all the damage his favored
candidates did to our country, Jerry Falwell lost on the issues.
(I doubt that he actually cared, but that is another matter that
goes to how badly he needed to be the center of our attentions.)
Whether Falwell et
al slowed it down or not, the cultural drift is still to the
left. Segregation is now legally held to be an evil, Virginia
has had a black Governor, and the federal government has
declared Martin Luther King a great patriot. Liberty University
is so integrated that a Black person who appears to be a student
turns up on its website home page. Homosexual acts are no longer
automatically illegal. Lesbians and gay men now marry legally in
Massachusetts, Canada, and even Spain. Many of the other civil
rights of homosexual persons are specifically protected by local
and state laws. Abortion remains legal. Abstinence programs are
understood to be a fraud. College educated women are better at
both making a living and staying married. Bill Clinton is the
most popular living US President, even if Jimmy Carter beats him
and the others for moral authority.
The anointed Bush
has become a huge embarrassment, and global warming is
understood to be all too real. Meanwhile, lots of credulous
folks, and their children and grandchildren, have been forced to
see how little their gifts to Jerry, Hal, Pat, Marylyn, Oral,
Jim, James, Chuck and even Billy, have accomplished in terms of
holding back cultural or political transformation. The Cause was
already lost when Confederate batteries fired upon Fort Sumter,
but there is still a long way to go, cleaning up the evil that
lurks in the hearts of men (and other people).
Jesus and the
pietistic strain of American Evangelicalism rather get the last
laugh: The locally scaled good works that were so much window
dressing on the fundraising and the politics will turn out to be
the stuff that lasts.
