Baltimore Sun ex AP, May 15, 2007:
The Rev. Jerry Falwell, the folksy, small-town preacher who used the power of television to found the Moral Majority and turn the Christian right into a mighty force in American politics during the Reagan years, died today at 73.
Falwell was found without a pulse in his office at Liberty University and pronounced dead at a hospital an hour later. Dr. Carl Moore, Falwell's physician, said he had a heart condition and presumably died of a heart rhythm abnormality.
...
Matt Foreman, executive director of National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, extended condolences to those close to Falwell, but added: "Unfortunately, we will always remember him as a founder and leader of America's anti-gay industry, someone who exacerbated the nation's appalling response to the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic, someone who demonized and vilified us for political gain and someone who used religion to divide rather than unite our nation."
I am torn between the customary courtesy upon the death of a controversial figure of
de mortuis nil nisi bonum, and the magnitude of the insult that the decedent inflicted again and again against the dignity of his fellow countrymen. The lazy thing, the undisciplined thing, would be to bang out a mere "rest in peace" and go to sleep.
But that would reflect a lack of the
firmitas and
industria which a moral person should exert in fulfilling a moral duty.
Not only did Falwell blame
inter alia feminists, pagans, gay and lesbian Americans for the September 11, 2001
mass murders committed by 19 decidedly non-feminist, decidedly non-pagan and probably mostly non-gay non-American Muslim men and indirectly by thousands of their non-Iraqi supporters and operatives in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Germany, but Falwell called those mass murder of office workers, janitors and U.S. service personnel the righteous judgment of a "God [who] will not be mocked," damning his countrymen with the words,"You helped this happen." The words of this American radical cleric represent the logical link between the
anti-American protests of the funerals of U.S. service personnel by the radical clerics of the Westboro Baptist Church on one hand, and on the other hand the anti-American violence of Iraqi radical cleric
Muqtada al-Sadr.
Yet Falwell remained not only a central figure of Christian religious identity and leadership for many Southern Baptists and others, but a core political power player until his last breath in the Republican Party's largest constituency. "Folksy" and "small-town" do not fully reflect the power that Falwell wielded on the day of his death and especially in some previous decades. Before
Willie Horton was a gleam in Lee Atwater's eye, or Ronald Reagan decried the evils of federal power with his foot metaphorically on the graves of civil rights workers Schwerner, Cheney and Goodman in
Philadelphia, Mississippi, or even Bill Clinton grabbing for his apropos-of-nothing
"Sista Souljah" moment to show that he could put black people in their place, it was Falwell who brought leading segregationists in the 1960s onto his "Old Time Gospel Hour" broadcasts to give Jim Crow a badly needed shot in the arm. Regarding God's will as applied to segregation, Falwell blamed the alleged poor religious values and commitment of the Warren Supreme Court for its failure to obey
God's direct and distinct commandment to segregate schools by race:"
If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God's word and had desired to do the Lord's will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made…. The facilities should be separate," said Falwell. "When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line."
Alas for Falwell, it would remain the task of the Republican Party into following generations to try to shut black political power in this country down hard; the struggle to
disenfranchise as many black voters as possible in bad faith continues, though
Fox News is doing its part to help. Falwell's crowning achievement in politics was certainly the formation of the Moral Majority, Inc., without which we would have had little or none of the current evangelical/Republican political and support institutions which survived or post-dated the Moral Majority.
I will say two things in favor of Jerry Falwell. He managed to be cordial, after a time, with pornographer Larry Flynt, though only after the latter published a cartoon poking cruel humor both sexual and scatological involving Falwell and his mother. It was Falwell's reputation for moral propriety on sexual matters - such that no one would ever believe such a filthy joke had any truth to it - that lost Falwell his claim for defamation trial against Hustler, though other claims lived to face a later loss. The other is that while Falwell was to some extent about money and power, he was probably less outrageously venal than many of his contemporaries, probably less venal than he could have chosen to become, and appeared generally to run his personal life Monday through Saturday in accord with the values he taught on Sunday, i.e. he maintained a unity, a wholeness,
integritas, in his values. Whether he was teaching the proper values on Sunday is a matter of philosophical debate, not of integrity.
In my view, most of us stand, on net, between the 45 yard lines in terms of personal ethics. Most of will avoid stealing from the job; most of us won't report the winnings at a neighborhood poker game on our taxes, even though that is legally required. We advance a yard, we fall back a yard. Few are Martin Luther King, Viktor Frankl, Vaclav Havel, Desmond Tutu. Few, mercifully, are Pol Pot, Jeffrey Dahmer, Adolf Eichmann, Josef Stalin. While I don't see Falwell as being noticeably better as a human being than the pile of us, maybe he was in reality no worse than at the American 50 yard line. He died suddenly; not everyone has the mixed fortune of illness and extended anticipation of death to motivate a full accounting
in apologia pro sua vita, nor the focus that comes with that dread anticipation.
Perhaps, hearing the 2:00 warning, he would have advanced the ball further; he would hardly have been the first or the last to do so. Not a deathbed conversion to Christianity - that egg was fried early in his life - but a deathbed conversion to full accountability to the people he harmed. All of us have made mistakes and been denied by caprice or arbitrary events the opportunity to make them better - the desk we left a shambles to our boss' anger when our spouse calls from the emergency room, or the like. We don't know that his last words or thoughts weren't, "How I regret hurting those people...." And if his character led us to believe that he might, just might, have the capacity for such self-reflection, however feeble or flawed, then perhaps we should give him the benefit of the doubt. And if his sudden death, albeit not at a young age, should give us all motivation to make right now to those whom we have harmed, to do justice now, to get off our rear ends now and address our ethical liabilities, then we may say that Falwell's life and death taught us something useful.
De hoc mortuo, unum bonum parvum.Labels: Christianity, theocrat
