The Falwell Legacy

I've been posting since yesterday on Jerry Falwell, not because I admired him or for that matter hated him. I found him too much the buffoon, and yet his is a name that colors in the minds of many what it means to be a Christian. Although he may have been a warm, engaging person, ever the prankster, his pronouncements were bombastic and mean. I found Franklin Graham's directive to gays and lesbians that Jerry didn't hate them, but in fact loved them, to simply be disingenuous.

The question is, what is his legacy? Will history look back and see him as a politician or as a churchman? And then how will they judge him. The postmortems have become and one of the most incisive is provided by Alan Wolfe in Salon.

Wolfe suggests that Falwell's religious legacy is minimal -- he made little contribution to America's religious life. Instead, it is to politics that Falwell's contribution has been most pronounced, and even here his success has been mixed. The Moral Majority was his creation and it did draw conservative Christians out of the shadows of separatism to engaging the political world. Indeed, he broke barriers by drawing in conservative Catholics, Mormons, and Jews into his web of opposition to all things "immoral." But the Moral Majority would collapse, and it would be the Ralph Reeds and the Karl Roves who would most effectively brought conservative religion and conservative politics into the same orbit.

As for his religious contributions, Wolfe writes:

Conservative Christianity has been trying to recover from Falwell for the past two decades. Just as his political views were too buffoonish to make the Moral Majority a reality, his religious sensibilities were too shallow to spread evangelical Protestantism. Evangelicalism grew in the exurban megachurches, and the megachurches, implicitly and occasionally explicitly, rejected Falwell's approach to the faith. Rick Warren, Joel Osteen, Bill Hybels -- these inclusive preachers inherited the mantle of Billy Graham, not Falwell and his great rival Pat Robertson. With the maturation of American evangelicalism has come an interest in social justice, environmentalism and peace. The people who represent evangelical Protestantism's future want little or nothing to do with injustice, pollution and war.

That debate is still ongoing, but it's Warren and his friends who have set the tone of the current discussions. Warren isn't the best theologian, but his tone is much more effective.

As for why Falwell gained such fame, Wolfe suggests that it was cable TV -- where Falwell's bombastic style fit well the Fox News need for the off the wall statement. In a previous generation he would have been easily ignored and forgotten and yet here we are discussing his legacy. Wolfe suggests, however, that there really is no legacy.

Instead of pondering Jerry Falwell's legacy, we would be better off asking how this man ever became a public figure in the first place. America has had more than its share of religiously inspired demagogues -- Dr. Fred Swartz, Billy James Hargis, Carl McIntyre come to mind -- but they are forgotten figures, marginal even to the times in which lived. One would like to believe that the United States has become a bigger and better country since the days when men
like them preached about captive nations and denounced the pernicious influence of rock 'n' roll. But then there is Jerry Falwell. In death, as he did in life, he reminds us that demagoguery never dies; it just changes its form. Jerry Falwell expressed great hate for a lot of his fellow Americans. It is no wonder that so many of them will greet his death with something less than love.

And so what to do we do? We choose to live differently.