And, so, what are we to say about Pastor Jerry Falwell, who passed away yesterday of apparent heart failure? We are, I presume, to celebrate the enormous good he did for the Kingdom of God, while not over-looking or white-washing the enormous damage he did to the cause of Christ. A model of Christian conservatism, Falwell’s laudable activism energized a diminishing American moral conscience, harkening this country back to God’s values and Biblical principles. The unfortunate side effect of his Moral Majority movement, however, was to marry a conservative culture to conservative values, and a equating of morality and spirituality, blending these qualities into a kindly Ronald Reagan-Ozzie and Harriet vision of moral purity that insidiously placed white, middle-class Americans at the top of the food chain while omitting blacks and other minorities. Falwell’s palette for Christian purity kept us waiting tables, voiceless and faceless, our cultural accents eliminated as most Falwell-approved blacks looked and sounded a lot more like Wintly Phipps than Cornell West or Jesse Jackson. The easy-going, soft spoken, rounded-edge blacks of Falwell’s world were the only ones seen within his many years of faithful service to the religious right.
Falwell’s movement was an unabashedly white movement, a white moral rights movement which eclipsed the black civil rights movement as our great civil rights leaders moved off the stage, replaced by minstrels like Jackson and Sharpton. Left virtually unopposed by the fractious political doddering of the Democratic party, Falwell rode the political corpses of scandal-plagued televangelists Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart to national attention and power. In so doing, he so polarized his conservative message that many people, to this day, cannot separate Falwellian philosophy from the simple message of truth in the Bible. Christianity, most especially fundamentalist Christianity, has become socialized into a vision of the double-chinned conservative wack job, a stigma I and many pastors have to constantly combat when we seek to engage people with the message of Jesus Christ, a message Falwell distorted and a work he and like-minded conservative clones like him has made all the more difficult. The “moral” Christian right has made it exponentially more difficult to share the message of Jesus Christ.
The most significant flaw to the Christian “moral” right is their equating of morality with spirituality, when these are two very separate qualities. Their message seems to suggest that merely being moral will somehow please God and win you a place in heaven. It also suggests that, by being spiritual, you are, by default, a moral person. Neither statement is true.
Morality (the quality of being in accord with standards of right or good conduct) has no external or infallible truth to it. Theology (rational inquiry into religious questions), ideally, should be based on eternal truths, which have nothing to do with morality per se, other than that our adherence to these eternal truths forms opinions we express as guidelines governing our moral conduct. Theology and morality are hardly one and the same. A decent and moral idea, rule, or concept can still, in all its purity, transgress the holiness of a divine God. As such, our sense of morality is of not much use to God (Isaiah 64:6). Churches relying on their sensibilities of what is good, right, and moral (i.e. music styles, dancing, etc.) to dictate their interpretation of scripture is, in and of itself, faulty exegesis. The Church should not be in the business of dictating morality, but should be proclaiming truths both eternal and infallible. We, as individuals, having been presented with these truths, are a people at liberty to embrace or reject those truths, and our sense of morality is the expression of that decision.
Falwell’s philosophy was a philosophy of ignorance and a culture of coercion, bringing politics into the church and trying to force a pax-Christiana mindset on society. Jesus Himself was hardly political, and Jesus never forced Himself or His values on anybody. Falwell’s methods and goals were largely out of step with the personal example of Jesus Christ. Sadly, the overwhelming majority of fundamentalist Christians in this country likely do not realize that and likely do not have an accurate view of Christ’s ministry on earth, one done without fanfare, without media attention, and without discrimination. Jesus never made Peter get a haircut. Jesus never registered a single voter or demanded that Herod change the laws. Jesus, look it up, never claimed to be moral or talked much about morality. He talked only about the kingdom of heaven, about why it has worth, about why we should follow Him.
Jerry Falwell had it wrong. Way wrong. He, and many men like him, have so distorted the purpose and truth of the Gospel that it is quite possible they have turned off at least as many people as they have energized. They have complicated a simple and beautiful message by layering it with cultural and political components, compelling the believer to accept the Stepford Wives brainwashing in order to find acceptance by God. And this is his legacy: leaving us to fight on, trying to slay the “moral” right Christian dragon and overcome people’s erroneous perceptions about what a spiritual life in Christ could or should be, because their base reference is this chubby guy whose agenda was more about making everybody Republican and turning the clock back to 1952.
None of which should suggest the pastor did not serve his God or his country well. I’m sure he did. I just wish he’d tidied up on his way out.
