Positive Liberty

Jerry Falwell, who spent the last four decades of his life attributing AIDS to God’s righteous wrath against gays, claiming America “deserve[d]” the September 11th attacks, and running a pseudo-university in Virginia dedicated to mis-educating thousands of students with creationism and such fooferah, has died peacefully at the age of 73, loved and eulogized by millions of Americans. The reader will pardon me if I fail to bow my head.

Falwell represented some of the worst elements of American society—bigotry, ignorance, and the enthusiasm for throwing millions of hard-earned dollars at a charlatan who paraded around in the alleged righteousness of dogma that hardly bothered to explain itself. Given the opportunity to speak directly to millions of his fellow citizens, Falwell took every opportunity to lie to them. He called himself a “Dr.” when he had no advanced degree. He told his listeners that the universe was created in a literal week, about 10,000 years ago—and that the world’s most brilliant scientists, using some of the most sophisticated techniques reason has yet devised, were lying to them. He told them that in the near future, the elected faithful will be physically raised from the Earth into Heaven, leaving unbelievers to a deserved fate of epochal violence and an eternal torment in Hell. He told them that Bill Clinton was involved in cocaine trafficking and the deaths of dozens of associates, all of which was a lie, and none of which he recanted. He told them that God had “lift[ed] the curtain and allow[ed] the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve” on September 11th—and that those “who have tried to secularize America… helped [it] happen.” He seethed in his hatred for homosexuals, but, unable to write his own memoirs, had themghostwritten by his gay friend Mel White. He took cash from Reverend Moon in exchange for a hug, and told Americans that one of the Teletubbies was gay.

When his “Moral Majority” was founded, it was easy enough to laugh at him, to dismiss him as a clown like many of his allied televangelists. Every week, it seemed, one of these idiots was dethroned for fornicating with prostitutes; anyway, they preyed only on fools who probably deserved to be stiffed. His outrageous pronouncements—as when he said that “the idea that religion and politics don’t mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country”—seemed like indicators of a small fundamentalist movement on the fringes of American society. But in the years that followed, that fundamentalism only grew. His “Liberty University,” managed to cling to its accreditation (by gritting its teeth and teaching evolution with a wink and a nudge toward young earth creationism); today it runs an accredited law school,whose dean was recently invited to observe President Bush vetoing the stem cell research funding bill. (Liberty is not to be confused, of course, with Regent University, founded by Falwell’s fellow televangelist Pat Robertson, which has placed many of its graduates in the White House, and whose faculty includes Christian fundamentalist former Attorney General John Ashcroft. This was not the only thing Falwell and Robertson had in common, of course.) When he fell into his final illness, the President of the United States—the leading defender of secular values in a war against fundamentalist Islam—called Falwell personally to wish him a speedy recovery. Falwell’s persistence had paid off. From a barely educated Baptist sure that God would punish him for dancing, Falwell became a major presence in the triumphant political party of his day. Unchecked, his foolishness has become dangerous.

Jerry Falwell was an embarrassment to a nation whose values of toleration, liberty, and reason he sought to undermine in every conceivable way. He exploited the ignorance of some of the most helpless members of our society, and sought only to train more like him to spread a ludicrous and insidious dogma into the most powerful levels of government—and, of course, to dissolve the separation of church and state that stands as the greatest defense against such ambitions. He was a liability to the cause of freedom which for too long was wrongly ascribed to the Republican Party. Born into in the freest and most technologically advanced nation in the history of mankind, a nation founded on the great legacy of Enlightenment liberalism, he chose to attack those values; to preach intolerance, dogmatism, ignorance, superstition, poppycock and balderdash. Perhaps the best way to sum up the legacy of Jerry Falwell is in the words of the great Barry Goldwater: “I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass.”

Update: Courtesy of PZ Myers, here is Hitchens on Falwell. Hitchens makes some great points about world politics at the end.

Trackback URI |