TodayFalwell left mark on American life
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Article RatingWhether you agreed with or deplored him, there is no denying that the late Rev. Jerry Falwell had an impact on American life most politicians only dream about. And he did it without ever holding elected office, getting his name on a ballot or yielding on his principles, however offensive his expression of them could sometimes be to some people.
Falwell had a troubled start in life. As a teenager, he missed out on delivering the valedictorian speech at his high school graduation because he was caught counterfeiting lunch tickets. He wrote in his autobiography that he was running with a gang of juvenile delinquents before he got turned around, but when he became a born-again Christian at 19, he gave up a chance to play professional baseball and transferred to a Baptist Bible college.
When he died suddenly at the age of 73 on Tuesday, he left behind a 24,000-member church he founded in 1956 and built from nothing, an accredited university with an associated law school and seminary and a transformed relationship between politics and faith that continues to be debated.
He also left us with a political catch phrase still in force — the Moral Majority.
Jerry Falwell had largely stepped out of the political spotlight in recent years, and neither of his two sons — who will take over the leadership of the Thomas Road Baptist Church and Liberty University respectively — has shown an interest in the political side of their father’s legacy.
Yet through those institutions and the millions of lives he touched personally through his political activities, preaching and often provocative remarks, Falwell’s influence will live on for good or ill, depending on how people perceive it.
The question for political and social historians will be this: How much credit does Falwell deserve for creating the political force that became known as the Christian right? Was he just in the right place at the right time to ride the crest of a force already in motion?
The year he formed the Moral Majority, in 1979, it was four years after Roe vs. Wade legalized abortion and four years after the fall of Saigon. The nation was grappling with an energy crisis, our president (Jimmy Carter) worried aloud in his now-famous “malaise” speech about the nation’s moral decline and Iranian revolutionaries took 53 Americans hostage in our own embassy.
Moreover, the counterculture Summer of Love was 12 years behind us and a backlash to the permissiveness it represented was building.
Undoubtedly, Falwell brought to this climate the twin gifts of knowing how to organize and how to use the media to mobilize that “moral” base to fundraise, agitate and vote.
He did it so well that regardless of whether he created, shaped or merely used this tool for change, its presence will continue to be felt in American politics long after his passing.
