The Reverend Jerry Falwell
He has been largely absent in recent years from the political stage but his presence lingered. Here’s the best analysis I’ve seen yet on Falwell’s impact, in brief, at least in the day since he passed on.
From the beginning of his rise to national notice—with the 1973 meetings that would lead, eventually, to the founding of the Moral Majority in 1979—Falwell seemed a useful figure. An evangelical preacher who talked about politics? A backwoods hick with a national following? His caricature justified the fear of an impending theocracy at the same time that it confirmed a sense of class superiority.
True, and the media kept the caricature at the ready, one of the go-to characters to help dramatize the dangers of America becoming a theocracy, taken over by the ‘religious right.’
The left kept his memory alive as the great figure with which to frighten children, and, even on the right, too many seemed happy to use Falwell as the figure against which they could distinguish themselves: Sure, I’m a conservative, but I’m not one of those people.
So he became a ‘frame of reference’ conservative whose most notable slips were the most often referred to in recent times.
But then that’s what bogeymen are for: figures with which to instruct and discipline children, regardless of their fiction. All our present-day talk of impending theocracy couldn’t have happened without Jerry Falwell. And yet, all our present-day talk about abortion, and values, and the right of believers to participate in the public square—much of that couldn’t have happened without Jerry Falwell, either. He made an enormous difference in 1980, and those who now routinely genuflect toward the memory Ronald Reagan shouldn’t forget it.
That’s a very important point, and the significance and legacy of Rev. Falwell’s public work.
Moreover, underneath the symbol, there was a man, and those who knew him all testify to the genuineness of that man—as a preacher, a sinner, a worker, and a believer. It is enough. Jerry Falwell has gone beyond symbols and caricatures to rest in the judgment of the God of Things As They Are.
And this is important to remember, too, who he was as a man. Yesterday, just hours after his passing, I saw Rev. Franklin Graham — Billy Graham’s son and heir — interviewed on Fox News about Falwell’s political impact and the Moral Majority and all…. And Rev. Graham acknowledged all that but quickly re-directed the focus to Rev. Falwell, the preacher of the Gospel who went into the world to proclaim that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, that he died for us and rose from the dead so that all may be saved.
And I’m sitting here thinking about a homily I’d just heard the evening before, by a priest ready to retire, in which he said that the first job of any priest or bishop or pope is to tell people about Jesus.
The pope just did that in Brazil, and worldwide in his new book. The Rev. Franklin Graham did it on Fox News when given the opportunity to speak about religion and politics. And the Rev. Jerry Falwell ultimately spent his life’s work doing just that, telling people about Jesus and the Gospel.
As Fr. Richard John Neuhaus concluded his comments, carried in that article above in First Things:
May he rest in peace where the sounds of battle are no more.