Death of a culture warrior
One of the most influential figures in American political and religious life, He was 73.
Falwell was a natural leader, and had an astonishing ability to mobilise supporters around a clearly articulated vision. In 1979 he founded , which helped transform America's religious right into a powerful political force (and arguably got Ronald Reagan elected in 1980). He also founded his own and .
One of America's most strident culture warriors, his views were often regarded as outrageous by even those who shared his basic religious commitments. After the 9/11 attacks, Falwell was a guest of Pat Robertson's 700 Club TV programme and declared that the terror attacks were the on America:
The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad . . . [T]he pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularize America . . . I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen.
Those comments offended more people than Falwell intended. He later apologised. But Falwell's complusive homophobia was merely one aspect of a deep-seated cultural paranoia. In February 1999, he argued that the Teletubbies character Tinky Winky could be a covert gay role model, because the character was purple, had an inverted triangle on his head and carried a handbag. This comment was at least less offensive than his unrenounced claim that Aids was the wrath of God against gay people.
A supporter of segregation in the 1960s and a defender of apartheid into the 1980s, Falwell claimed that Archbishop Desmond Tutu was "a phony" and for decades offered theological justification for those racist social and political systems. He eventually came to see the error of his way on segregation and apartheid -- and his earlier anticatholicism was similarly moderated in the context of the Moral Majority movement.
One of Falwell's most recent forays into American politics was his claim the selection of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008 would "motivate conservative evangelical Christians to oppose her more were running".
You can read a Fox News obituary of Jerry Falwell .
You also read an extraordinary list of Jerry Falwell quotations . These include this:
I had a student ask me, "Could the savior you believe in save Osama bin Laden?" Of course, we know the blood of Jesus Christ can save him, and then he must be executed.
And this:
Grown men should not be having sex with prostitutes unless they are married to them.
Your assessment of the religious and political legacy of Jerry Falwell?
Comments
I take no pleasure in any man's death, but the world is a better place today - Falwell was a sectarian vocie of hatred. He gave the war in Iraq a religious defence. He hated gays. He loathed women who would not live under the rule of the christian taliban. He hated women who wished to exercised their reproductive rights. He hated ... that was his philosophy. Goodbye Jerry.
Sound like anyone you know in Northern Ireland? Build your own church. Start your own college. Get into politics. Dominate the terrain. Anticatholic. Homophobic. Supports Israel.
Who could it be?
Falwell is a comc creation in so many respects. The truly astonishing thing is that so many Americans were prepared to take this man seriously for so long. But that's america for you. Falwell was a walking, shouting, ranting argument for the separation of church and state. Now that role is taken by Pat Robertson.
Haha #2.
Look, Falwell was a lunatic. I mean, anyone who believes that gays are responsible for 9/11 easily falls into that category. One point of correction William: the guy who wrote the Teletubbies piece worked for Falwell, and Falwell claimed he didn't know about the article before it went out. Later Falwell got sent a bunch of Tinky-Winky dolls and accepted them graciously, giving them to his grandkids.
I didn't dislike old Jerry, but his view of the role of religion in society was the opposite of mine; I'm a Christian who believes in an absolutely, wholly 'secular' society. Falwell would have hated that. Interesting man.
This is the closest I have come to taking pleasure from a persons death. I honestly cannot find any positive factors that Falwell has contributed to the world. I agree with Neworlder, the world is a better place without him, and hopefully Pat Robertson will be joining him soon. If the God of Jerry Falwell exists then I do not want anything to do with him. Even though I am a non believer, part of me wishes heaven and hell did exist so people like Falwell would rot in eternal hell! Adios!
Don't you believe it John. Falwell knew exactly what was going on with the teletubby article. He just had great political antennae and when he sensed that the staffer's article crossed the line and was making him look absurd he THEN distanced himself from it. Just as he apologised after the 9/11 comment and segregation and apartheid. He never had to apologise for homophobia because so many americans agree with him.
His legacy: George Bush. Both a disgrace.
The self appointed guardian of America's morality, he was a detestable human being if ever there was one, a very easy man to hate. He exuded his venom on American TV periodically especially on Jeraldo Rivera's TV talk/panel show on Fox where he was a regular guest for many years. All I can say is good riddance.
Well, if there is an afterlife, he now knows presumably if he belongs in heaven or hell...and if there isn't, he doesn't know anything anymore including how wrong he was all his life. Now in a way, that would be a shame.
Looks like we are all in agreement on this one! The death of Jerry Falwell is no loss. All the obituary he deserves is "Good Riddance"!
It is unsettling to think that so many Americans supported him. What is wrong with American culture that it creates a following for hate-mongers like Falwell? Is there a kind of Nazi streak in American culture which these right-wing zealots draw upon? And why is it so much stronger in America than in Europe?
The Reverend Dr Jerry Falwell
Must have known, so very well
Only by departing his mortal shell
Could he spare the world his toxic
spell
And help decent people again feel
well
May 15th, such relief to tell
Unctuous Jerry didn't fare so well
And the sound you hear is the door
to hell
Closing....behind him
It is awful when someone dies who was in the public eye like "Dr" Falwell and I cannot think of a single good word to say about him.
Maybe the degree mill that he founded-Liberty (cough) "university" will go the same way as him.
Ps. if Mr. Falwell is the standard of the type of person that enters heaven, then give me hell any day.
There's a lot of negativity about Mr Falwell floating about, as though his life is somehow itself an evil that we have been freed from. While I understand that he said a lot of things to upset a lot of people, and he made a number of claims that were either totally unverifiable or patently false, Falwell's words would have been powerless had he not the conviction to make them or the audience to accept them. The resurgence of authoritarian Christendom in the west is not the work of individual fanatics alone, nor are those individuals responsible for their own misunderstandings and abhorrent views, but rather both are symptomatic of a people in great distress and in desperate need of rescue (to the extent that any kind of hope will become greatly revered, however dangerous that hope might prove).
I think what this news has reminded me is that even those who have succumbed to the distortion of Christ's message are as human as you or I. Falwell, as bigoted, angry and vocal as he was, could have been any of us had we seen the world through his eyes, and that to me seems something we must preserve and reflect upon. Demonising Jerry Falwell for leading the life he did will not undo the damage that he wrought, nor will it prevent its reoccurrance. It is, instead, only going to hide the fact that we ourselves are very much at threat from following the path he walked. Because of this, I choose to hold his death with a degree of respectful pity.
So I raise my glass to Jerry Falwell, our brother in humanity, who was driven to a life of Bigotry and Supremecism by the injust world we live to change. May his memory live on in recognition of the battle we fight against the evils by which he was taken.
Dylan Dog says: "It is awful when someone dies who was in the public eye like "Dr" Falwell and I cannot think of a single good word to say about him."
Don't feel bad. We've got to abandon this awful habit of talking about people who've died in more glowing terms than we would have when they were alive. In fact I've rarely seen someone inspire so little of the "glowing" obituaries we're used to hearing after the death of a public figure; perhaps that should be a wake-up call to Pat Robertson?
Whilst I would disagree with his intolerant attitude towards homosexuality and his tendency to make some rather absurd remarks, I think Jerry Falwell was an important figure in combating the excesses of the 1960s - abortion on demand, the so-called 'free love' generation, drugs and general moral laxity. To that extent, he deservies credit for his life's work.
Sam Swann, I'm glad you brought up the issue of abortion, it is one of the most politically contentious issues in the United States. This is where so called "neocons" like Jerry Falwell prove they are anything but conservative. Real conservatives want the government to stay out of peoples' lives as much as possible. Oh they're for having it stay out of large corporations poluting the air and water all right but when it comes to personal matters between two people, even husband and wife or doctor and patient they would put the government right inside their bedroom and their doctor's office. The recent Supreme Court decision on late term abortions, the so called partial birth abortion is just one step in their program to make all abortions illegal in the US, just the way it was before Rowe v Wade. Not only was this unfair, it lead to countless women dead and mutlillated by attempts at self abortion and so called back alley abortions while rich women or those with well to do husbands or lovers used to send them to Switzerland for what was termed a "theraputic abortion." I was astonished that neither Gore nor Kerry made the Republican program to ultimately overturn Rowe v Wade by appointing Supreme Court judges opposed to it a campaign issue. Either of them would have won if they had. Meanwhile women in the US take the right of a legal abortion for granted and don't know how easily they could lose it.
But just as strange and irrational as the personal tragedy loss of the right to an abortion would be in the US for the lives of millions of women is the ultimate economic consequences of making abortions illegal again. You'd think real conservatives would see this clearly. There are an estimated half a million abortions performed in the US every year. Most of them are not for healthy white adoptable babies of couples who just find them inconvenient, they are black, hispanic, to teenage girls (who would want to keep them), would be born drug addicted or have some other medical ailment which will make them lifelong dependents, in other words, they are not good candidates for adoption. Most will require government assistance most of their lives and will grow up as part of a growing vast underclass which will feel cheated out of the material rewards of life children growing up in the middle class will enjoy. They will be aware of the difference and will be enraged by it. They will become a criminal menace and an economic burden the entire society will have to bear. This from many of the same people who rightly point out how much of a drain the support of illegal aliens is in the US (medical costs to society alone are generally higher than the wealth an illegal alien produces and when you add in the cost of educating their children and providing other government services, the cost is an enormous drain.) They are also the same people who advocate the death penalty for some criminals, and some who become murderers would be among the very people they insist bringing into the world. Their children and grandchildren would have to deal with the legacy of that mistake.
In the United States, a foetus is not legally a human being. How do I know for sure? Because the United States government says so. If a woman gives birth to a child at 11:59 PM on December 31, that is a child who is a dependent and they get a deduction for it on their federal income tax as though the child had been alive the entire year. If it is born one minute later at 12:00 on January 1, then for the previous year it was a foetus, not a child and they get no deduction for it at all.
The world is just a tiny bit better off now that Jerry Falwell is no longer in it. Hopefully the rest of his kind like Pat Robertson will follow soon.
I can't help feeling that if Jerry Falwell had gassed Kurds while presiding over a brutal dictatorship and then been done to death by an imperialist world power, his passing would have been met with less personal bile than has been the case so far.
Sure, he said a lot of things that we disagreed with and that were downright dangerous and potentially harmful to others. Speak about that, but don't spit on the guy's grave. While you don't have to eulogise him, ask yourself if you would still say some of this stuff that has been posted if you were face to face with his surviving family?
ChrisM- Of course people will be more sensitive when speaking face to face with a family member of someone recently deceased. That doesn't make the many varied criticisms of Falwell any less valid or the people making them wrong for doing so.
John - fair point. I've conducted enough funeral services to have been able to work that out all by myself.
Upon reading your previous postings I agree people should be allowed to voice their opinions and in the strongest terms they wish (especially if a blog is to be worth reading). What I suppose I find objectionable is the (near) pleasure that some appear to take in the death of Jerry Falwell.
(Does this opinion that the world is a better place without him mean they are in favour of the death penalty?)
You people have made comments without an element of eternal truth. Jerry's life, in spite of what is said here, was devoted to this: According to the Holy Scripture Almighty God sent himself in the person of Jesus Christ; He lived a perfect life, and He was crucified upon the cross taking upon him all sins, past and present; and, then, on the third day He raised himself from the dead. All that we must do is accept that sacrifice, and, then, we will inherit eternal life with Almighty God. That is where Jerry is at this moment, and you, too, may have that assurance with your acceptance of Christ our Saviour. Without Christ we have no hope.
If This "heaven" place is where a useless fraudster like Falwell is then give me hell any day.