COLUMNISTS : With friends like him . . .
Posted on Wednesday, May 23, 2007
It has taken me a while to dare say what I thought of Jerry Falwell’s life and his contribution to our times. Not that I didn’t know what I thought, and have thought all along. For the Reverend Falwell’s contribution to the political dialogue was more like a subtraction, consisting almost uniformly of bad taste. But how say as much even while the last rites were being performed, and still observe a decent respect for the dead ? Nil nisi bonum, the Romans advised. Speak only good of the dead. Clearly the Romans had no newspaper columns to write. It was a challenge to comment on the Reverend’s passing, but where I hesitated, others did not fear to tread. There was no shortage of commentary on the wire about the life and death of J. Falwell, televangelist, political organizer, college president, hallowed mountebanke, and entrepreneur extraordinaire. Which figures. The man was a fascinating character if you could bear to think about him for any length of time, and about what his success says about American taste.
To quote that artist of cynicism, H. L. Mencken, nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. Mencken, thou shouldst be living at this hour !
Christopher Hitchens, a Mencken reincarnated and a devout atheist at that, outdid even himself in castigation on the Reverend’s passing, earning this plaudit from Kathleen Parker, whose column occasionally adorns this page: “Hitchens, whose intellectual virtuosity is an argument for martini lunches, eulogized Falwell without Christian charity.” To me, a survivor of 2000 years of Christian charity, that phrase has always resonated differently, but I think I know what Ms. Parker meant. She herself practiced some charity in her final summing-up of the Reverend. She tried valiantly if not convincingly to find something good to say about his politics. She settled for noting that he appealed to those Americans legitimately concerned about the inroads a post-modern valuelessness was making in American society.
Or as she put it, “What Falwell said may have sounded like bigotry and hatred to some, but to evangelical Christians, his incautious words sounded like traditional values.” In trying to find a good word for the Reverend’s demagoguery, Ms. Parker wound up libeling the generality of evangelicals, who surely weren’t all taken in by Jerry Falwell’s bluster. Because if that was Christian love he was preaching, what would just plain hate be ?
The reverend doctor was the Elmer Gantry of his time—a familiar American type that surfaces whenever modernity challenges tradition, and tradition comes out fighting.
It wasn’t the positions Jerry Falwell took but how he took them that offended. The self-righteousness. The smarmy piety. The crassness in general. Manners are morals, and the good doctor lacked a basic civility in argument. When he blamed his fellow Americans for the attacks on 9 / 11, he sounded like a down-home version of the Susan Sontags and Noam Chomskys on the other side of the looking-glass. He did apologize for that comment, but only kind of. Faith, hope, charity ? Dr. Falwell offered little but certainty, doom, and condemnation.
Another columnist on this page, Leonard Pitts Jr., showed enough Christian charity to come up with maybe the only real service the Reverend ever performed in politics: He once participated in a civil dialogue with spokesmen for homosexual Americans. But I can’t recall him ever falling into decency again.
In the end, Jerry Falwell proved a great boon to critics of the Religious Right, who liked to present him as typical of the whole movement, rather than criticize more thoughtful believers like Richard John Neuhaus of First Things or Leon Kass of the President’s Council on Bioethics.
Few things so hurt the conservative cause in this country as much as Jerry Falwell’s support for it. He wound up doing about as much for the long-term prospects of American conservatism as Joe McCarthy did for the anti-Communist cause; he disgraced it. The Reverend Falwell was the Senator McCarthy of the culture wars, although Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter also vie for that that dubious honor. One might understand and even sympathize with Jerry Falwell’s discomfit over a society going morally adrift, yet recognize that his thrashing about wasn’t helping at all. And was hurting a lot. The Reverend Dr. Falwell wasn’t so much a defender of the conservative cause as a caricature of it. In the end, he was about as much use to the American right as a Michael Moore is to the American left. The object of politics should be to raise the level of public discourse, not lower it. Whatever temporary satisfaction the Jerry Falwells or their counterparts on the left may provide partisans, their essential vulgarity will soon enough poison even the best of causes. Often enough it’s not our enemies we have to fear but our friends. The moral of this story ? No matter how attached one may be to a good cause, beware those whose support of it makes you queasy.
—––––– • –––––—Paul Greenberg, editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, has won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing.
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