Reactions to Reactions to Falwell

Everyone, it seems, either loved him or hated him. On the fundamentalist side, there are tributes in a predictably hagiographical mode, along with complaints about the vitriol spewed by "liberal blogs". While some of the comments I've seen in such circles go beyond my personal comfort level, considering some of the things Falwell said when he was alive, I have to say: "What goes around comes around". Or, as Falwell's favorite book puts it: "....for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." For myself, due to some combination of principle and temperament, I cannot work up much of either a "dancing in the streets" attitude, nor a sense of great tragedy. We all die eventually, and if 73 is about ten years less than the lifespan we in the medically-advanced West have come to expect, it's not all that short either -- Falwell did, at least, make the Biblical threescore years and ten. But more to the point, he lived long enough to have done most of the damage he was ever likely to do, and to leave behind influence and institutions to carry on his "good work". So I don't see that his death does anyone much good (so to speak).

Meanwhile, on the "Christian Left", Jim Wallis gives an oddly ambivalent "tribute". To me, it reads like Wallis is doing his Christian duty to be charitable to Falwell, by finding something positive to say. He acknowledges what the two of them had in common: they both tried to bring evangelical faith out of the privacy of home and church; to get Christians to apply their values to the larger issues of the day. Where they differed is on exactly which issues, and on which side, they thought those values applied -- a fact that I think tells us something about the reliability of "Biblical faith" as a consistent or clear moral guide. Frankly, given the specific advocacies that Falwell took up, I'd just as soon he had remained cloistered.

Jerry Falwell (or, How I Joined the Moral Majority, But Never Did Learn to Love the Bomb)

So Jerry Falwell is dead. Some have suggested that it would have been sweet retribution for him to discover that there is no afterlife, but I don’t suppose he is discovering anything at all at this point. (Maybe that’s just as well for Jerry, since Westboro Baptist insists he is in Hell, for which they are praising their God, who seems to be even more nasty, petty and hate-filled than Falwell’s.)

30 years ago, while a Canadian teenage student at a US university, I inadvertently joined the newly minted Moral Majority. I was, in fact, a Christian at the time (a few years post-conversion). However, even though my religious inclinations at the time were evangelical, my political leanings were decidedly liberal, pacifist, and even socialist on many issues. I had a subscription to Christianity Today, and there Falwell posted a survey soliciting opinions about the sorry moral state of the US. As I recall, there were questions about prayer in schools (I was opposed), priority of arms spending (I thought there should be less), and sex education (I thought it should be retained and improved in schools, and added a written comment that it should be in churches as well). Much to my surprise, a few weeks later I received a letter thanking me for having joined the Moral Majority! Maybe they only counted envelopes received, and didn’t bother actually looking at the content of the responses.

Whatever the cause, I was now on Jerry’s mailing list. Jerry apparently had lots of money, as he got his hands on a mail generator that would automatically insert the name and location of the addressee at strategic points in the email. Of course, this sort of thing is old hat now, but was rather amusing to see in its primitive state – the letters appeared to have been pre-printed with the bulk of the text, then the personalizations were inserted, often in a slightly different font, and not quite lined up (eg: …you, Theo Bromine, at your home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02139…). Before moving to the more recent rhetoric of blaming gays and liberals for 9/11, Jerry spent his time trying to goad his “Moral Majority” into supporting the Military Industrial Complex, stating that God was showing his growing dissatisfaction with America’s lack of commitment to him as evidenced by the fact that the US was falling behind the USSR in military supremacy.

I suppose Falwell (and his preacher cronies from the 1980s) made a significant contribution to my slide from evangelical Christianity to a more liberal faith, and thence to my current position of provisional atheism. Whenever I told someone I was a Christian, I always felt obligated to add the disclaimer that I was not *that* sort of Christian, thus bringing a new meaning to the term “apologetics”. Unlike Christopher Hitchens, I don’t think that Falwell was really a cynical unbeliever just using the trappings of religion to gain personal wealth and power – I think Falwell sincerely believed in most of what he did and said. On the other hand, I think that existence and relative prosperity of people like Falwell is evidence *against* a loving personal god.

My Eulogy for Jerry Falwell

There is an informal rule in our culture that one should not speak ill of the dead, especially not right after their demise. I'm not sure how this taboo arose, and certainly I would not advocate waltzing into the funeral and trash-talking the dear departed to the grieving family. But it seems to me that public figures at least deserve no more immunity from criticism in death than they did in life, and the near post-mortem period is the proper time to begin assessing the legacy of the deceased. Memorial services traditionally include a speech called the "eulogy", a term meaning literally "good word" -- but also "true word". So here in the second sense, is my "eulogy" for Jerry Falwell.

I first heard of the man around 1977, from my then girl-friend (see her post), during the height of my fundamentalist period. In the following years, Falwell became my own poster-boy for everything that most dismayed me about the way so many of my American brethren practiced our then-mutual faith -- the jingoism that identifies the USA with the Kingdom of Heaven; the uncritical endorsement of free-market capitalism as the One True Biblical economic system; the support for militarism and the nuclear arms race; the identification of True Christianity with voting for a particular candidate (with the implicit and explicit demonisation of dissenting views). To me, this verged on idolatry -- a confusion between the Christian's duties to Caesar and to Christ; a blasphemous conflation of one's own temporal interests with God's eternal ones. These are the people who went on to elect Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

Sometime around 1990 (a period in which I was increasingly influenced by the pacifist and social-justice message of people like Sojourners) I realized that Falwell and I were no longer practicing the same religion. Oh, we read the same Book, and used the same language about God and Jesus -- but somehow, what we each meant by them, and our priorities, seemed diametrically opposed. My favorite artist of the period, Bruce Cockburn wrote his haunting song "Gospel of Bondage", in part about Jerry Falwell and his brand of Christianity.

By coincidence or not, on the same day Falwell died the BBC website ran an article about different attitudes to global warming among American Evangelicals. The article contrasts attitudes at two Christian colleges, both in Virginia. At Eastern Mennonite University, global warming is seen primarily as a scientific issue, about which action needs to be taken (perhaps not surprising in a denomination with a long tradition of social action). But at Falwell's Liberty University, it's "not proven". Says Liberty's senior theologian, Thomas Ice:

I think global warming is being used like many political issues to try to move the world from nationalism to internationalism or global governance.

How pathetic can you be? To make a determination of empirical fact, not based on the evidence of the phenomenom, but on which alternative fits your favorite conspiracy theory?

So what is Falwell's legacy? Well, when I encounter American political discourse on the 'net, I am constantly struck by the level of rancour displayed. Everyone, it seems, has declared themselves a "liberal" or "conservative", and pronounced anathema on the other side. Well, not quite -- perhaps I'm biassed, but it looks to me like most of the vitriol, the blanket spitefulness, started with and comes from the "conservative" side. Is it too much to trace this partition, this decline in the public dialog necessary to a functioning democracy, to Falwell and his Moral Majority (which, as was pointed out at the time, was in fact neither)? Even as an outsider, I don't think so. He was among the most prominent leaders of the rise of the Christian Right, and reliably sounded the familiar (and vote-getting) themes: anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-feminist, the uncritically pro-Israel stance of Christian Zionism (based not on any love for the Jews, but on the bizarre and obscene hallucination that is pre-millenial eschatology; in which Jews and Palestinians -- indeed all the peoples of the earth -- are just contestants in the ultimate reality TV show). He set the stage for the unapologetic (but oh-so-Christian) hate-mongers like Ann Coulter.

Just to be fair: I've read that he started some sort of Good Works like substance-abuse recovery houses etc, though I don't know anything about that. But I thought I'd mention it.

One last legacy of the man, that he left me personally: I credit Jerry Falwell with being one of the factors which lead to my alienation from fundamentalism. I suppose I should be grateful to him for that much.