Jerry Falwell is dead. At 73, he passed away, at his desk, apparently still working, even though doctors have (probably) been telling him to lay off for some time. He had heart problems.
Whatever one’s personal feelings may be, it ill-behooves us to beat up on someone so soon after they have died. Family and friends will still be mourning, those who saw benefit in his work will grieve, and while I found myself opposed to just about everything he stood for, I cannot fault the man for following his conscience and doing what he thought needed to be done.
Which was what?
The Moral Majority, for better or worse, brought religious fundamentalism into mainstream politics. In the mean, this has been an aggravating, problematic development that threw a wrench into the progressive works of decades of steady liberal progress. In the extreme, it brought millions of people into the political process, which is necessary to make a democracy work. As with anything else in this experiment we call the United States, it’s a mixed benefit.
The paradox of the christian fundamentalist movement is in it’s contemporary spin on the Augustinian stance that the World and its Concerns are irrelevent. Christians were, under this idea, told to stay out of politics, to leave the “trivial” problems of human interaction alone, because it is far more important to pay attention to god and the second coming and one shouldn’t allow oneself to be distracted by the material. It meant withdrawing. But now it has turned right around and made the temporal behavior of the human race the basis for on-going political activism that is just shy of fascistic.
Eventually, I expect it to leaven out. As more people get involved in the necessity of paying attention to Other People and learning Who They Are, the magma-hot rhetoric against sin and sinners of various stripes will cool and we will have a better cross-section of the voting demographic actually operating the controls of our democracy. You can hear some of it now if you listen closely to those who are the inheritors of Falwell’s vision, who, while still professing their fundamentalist credo, reject much of the spleen he unleashed as unsound and untenable.
For better or worse, Falwell changed the politics of the country. My major disappointment over him is not what he stood for or what he did, but that those of us who live by the counter principles did so poorly in answering the charges he levied against us. We had become complacent and sloppy and when he pointed the finger we reacted like children who had been caught doing something we weren’t supposed to do. We did not respond as we should have and only now, it seems, are we getting our collective act together and figuring out how to answer his challenge. I don’t think he saw himself as nothing more than a gadfly–and to his supporters he certainly was more–but he acted as one and if they got anything over on us, it is largely our failure.
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