Jerry Falwell: The Old Bull's Gone (Revised, Updated)

THE ERA HAD ALREADY ENDED. After Jerry Falwell died today in Lynchburg, Howard Fineman wrote that his death was "The End of an Era." But Falwell's era had been over for years. After Falwell broke up the Moral Majority in 1989, the initiative, money, and day to day influence on the right shifted toward figures like James Dobson. Falwell became an old-bull senior statesman without a lot of real clout--sort of like the Teddy Kennedy of the right.

MORE FUNDAMENTALLY, Jerry Falwell's goal of creating a majority political coalition around "the defense of traditional values" was not realized. Christian conservativism grew dramatically, but maxed out at 20% of the population and has peaked as a political force. Seeking to seal their political control without majority support, conservative Christians ranging from Karl Rove to Tom DeLay and Monica Goodling have engaged in a wide range of unethical and criminal manuevers. As a result, Christian conservatism has become a watchword for preening arrogance, systematic deceit, and monumental incompetence more than anything else. If Falwell and Pat Robertson opened up a new era of Christian involvement in politics, the younger men and women of the Bush administration and Republican have ensured that the Christian right would be ensnared in their own failures. If Jerry Falwell ushered Christian conservativism into the political arena, he lived to see both the ascendancy of Christian conservatives in the Bush administration and their downfall before he finally died.

Once again, the era of Jerry Falwell ended well before he died.

Yet, I've always viewed Jerry Falwell as also being a progressive force in American society in some ways. Having lived in Chapel Hill, NC during the height of Falwell's Moral Majority, Jim Bakker's PTL, and Jimmy Swaggert's ministry, and watched them regularly on television, I don't have the personal animus against the Christian right that characterizes many people on the left. That was especially the case after I visited my first wife's grandmother in Hamlet, NC in 1982 and found that she was making monthly donations out of her social security to Jimmy Swaggert. Of course, I didn't like the fact that Swaggert was hoodwinking an 83 year-old widow out of her retirement but I was also impressed by the vitality of the conservatism that led her to donate. Falwell and the other personalities of the right may have been repulsive but they were also interesting.

SO THEN, what gave Falwell a progressive dimension? Having gotten his start in the politics of white racism, Falwell began to articulate a post-segregation language of conservative politics in the South and thus helped the white South make the transition out of the era of lynching, Bull Connor, George Wallace, and mass resistance to desegregation. Falwell had been part of the Southern resistance to desegregation at least through the mid-sixties when he was criticizing Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement. However, the defense of segregation was no longer part of Jerry Falwell's agenda in 1979 when he started the Moral Majority and some years later he was renouncing his past racism. Falwell was still a bigot launching vicious attacks on gays and defending apartheid, but the Moral Majority and other organizations in the new right were no longer defending lynching, denying blacks the right to vote, or excluding blacks from educational institutions and basic services. Falwell's transition out of segregation may have been reluctant, halting, incomplete, and dishonest, and it may have involved an enormous amount of nostalgia for the segregationist past. However, if American progress toward integration was going to be sustained, American conservatism had to move away from the defense of segregation and the advocacy of white supremacy. For better or worse, Jerry Falwell was one of the main figures in conservatism who made this happen.

Jerry Falwell and the early religious right also brought millions of people into politics who had not previously been connected to public life. This is what I've seen living in North Carolina and Kentucky over most of my adult life. I've seen the Moral Majority bumper stickers, the big-time televangelism, the burgeoning of the right to life movement, and the mass mobilization of the religious right around various political campaigns culminating in the Bush re-election campaign of 2004. Of course, the people Falwell brought into politics were highly conservative and bigoted toward African-Americans, feminists, gay people, the North, the West coast, and cities everywhere. However, the effect of bringing so many people into politics has been profoundly democratizing and profoundly liberalizing to the extent that rural areas in places like Kentucky are now exposed to the whole range of social and political debate. That's a progressive thing even if there is a constant risk of right-wing authoritarianism becoming dominant.