(HOST) Commentator Olin Robison has been thinking about the recent death – and complex legacy – of Jerry Falwell.
(ROBISON) The Reverend Mr. Jerry Falwell died a few days ago. He was found unconscious in his office at Liberty University, a place of which he was both the founder and the Chancellor.
I’ve spent a great deal of time since then looking at newspaper and Internet articles to try to gauge people’s reactions to this exceptional man. Frankly, it truly depends on who is doing the writing and whether they were simpatico with Mr. Falwell’s views.
To those who admired him, he was a knight in shining armor doing battle with the forces of darkness. To others, he was a prince of that very darkness.
Admire him or detest him, there seems to be a consensus that Mr. Falwell had a dramatic impact on American political life. Whether that influence was constructive or malignant obviously depends on the perspective of the observer.
My sense is that Mr. Falwell would have enjoyed the consensus. He clearly loved the limelight; he was a skilled politician, and he loved the conflict. He knew how and when to be provocative in the advancement of his public agenda. He was very, very good at it.
As much as any person, he politicized religion in America.
He founded the now-disbanded Moral Majority in 1979, and then shortly thereafter took public credit for Ronald Reagan’s election to the Presidency. He was the consummate political organizer, and he was especially gifted in using the medium of television to his advantage.
Many of his detractors simply could not forgive his bold assertion shortly after the horrors of 9/11 that the people and organizations he didn’t like – and he had quite a list – that these people had brought the tragedies of 9/11 on the nation. He said bluntly that this list of liberals had caused God to permit what happened on 9/11 as a punishment. No kidding, he really did say those things.
I am puzzled at the frequency with which he is referred to as a Southern Baptist. He was, in fact, simply an arch-conservative Baptist who lived in the South. His rather famous mega-church, the Thomas Road Baptist Church, to this day is not a member of the Baptist General Association of Virginia, and they have only reluctantly been affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention in the last decade; and even then, according to Mr. Falwell, only when the Convention leadership had come around to his views, rather than his having gone over to them. He publicly called his Church an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist Church, and he stressed the word “Independent.”
Mainstream Baptists historically have been strict constructionists regarding the separation of church and state. Such distinctions seemed not to matter much to Mr. Falwell. He believed that if those lines were blurred it was a small price to pay to make America a more virtuous country, and that of course meant more virtuous by his definitions.
He strikes me as unlikely to have a successor of equal prominence and influence. Perhaps one or two generations from now, but not right away.
The religious right and the political right have for about twenty now made common cause to mutual advantage. In the process they have managed to scare a lot of other people both with their tactics and with their certitude.
I predict that the pendulum of public opinion will now begin to swing in the other direction, and there are those, including me, who think that it cannot happen soon enough.
It was the Reverend Mr. Falwell who once proclaimed that “God is a Republican.” Well, I doubt that seriously. That almost certainly isn’t true.
Olin Robison is past president of both the Salzburg Seminar and Middlebury College. He now lives in Shelburne.