Falwell’s America

TELEVANGELIST Jerry Falwell is being remembered (depending on your worldview) as an inspiring religious leader, a shrewd political tactician or a demented demagogue who blamed 9/11 on “the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and lesbians.” But perhaps the best epitaph for Falwell is, “Only in America.”

Falwell rode to political influence on Christian resentment of secular culture. But in breaking down what he once called “the psychological barrier that religion and politics don’t mix,” Falwell was preaching to the converted. For good and sometimes for ill, the United States is and always has been a religious nation. Faith matters not just on Sunday but also on election day.

After Sen. John F. Kerry was defeated by President Bush in 2004, analysts blamed the “God gap” between the president who once named Jesus as his favorite political philosopher and the cerebral Catholic senator whose faith was perceived as lukewarm. Though the truth is more nuanced, there is no doubt that “values voters” helped elect Bush, just as Falwell’s Moral Majority helped Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in 1980.

The continuing influence of Christian conservatives on the Republican Party can be seen in Bush’s religiously tinged rhetoric and the three presidential candidates who said during the first GOP debate that they did not believe in evolution.

Some Democrats of late have striven to root their own political agenda in the Christian faith. With a nod to the religious underpinnings of the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War, an increasingly assertive “religious left” has challenged the administration on both the war in Iraq and poverty at home. When Bush spoke at graduation ceremonies at a Catholic college in Pennsylvania last week, he was greeted by protesters, one of whom displayed a banner with the biblical text, “Blessed Are the Peacemakers.”

Thomas Jefferson spoke of a “wall of separation” between church and state. But that wall was porous long before Jerry Falwell started chipping away at it.