Falwell, Adieu, Auf Wiedersehn, Goodbye

Jerry Falwell dead at 73.  I’d be lying if I said that I wished he could have lived as long a Lazarus.  He wasn’t my favorite person on this planet, and I can’t help feel that he invoked God mostly to feed his own ego, and as a result has effected the world for the worse.  I’m not giddy with delight that he’s gone, but you can rest assured that I’m not going to shed any tears that he’s passed.

What was my beef with the guy?  Hard to pin that down.

Jerry Falwell dead at 73.  I’d be lying if I said that I wished he could have lived as long a Lazarus.  He wasn’t my favorite person on this planet, and I can’t help feel that he invoked God mostly to feed his own ego, and as a result has effected the world for the worse.  I’m not giddy with delight that he’s gone, but you can rest assured that I’m not going to shed any tears that he’s passed.

What was my beef with the guy?  Hard to pin that down.  In a way I sort of liken him to Saul of Tarsus…a person who manages to twist true faith in order to serve their own personal ends who, through a charismatic message style, manage to twist others to their perversion of what the faith had been.  (Can you tell I’m not a fan of Paul the "Apostle"?)  I’d paint Pat Robertson with a similar brush, but he simply isn’t slick enough not to be easily outed as a loony.

Here’s the trick: I don’t have a problem with good people who in good conscience believe many of the same things as this pile of ministers.  I don’t think they are any less intelligent, nor to I think their agenda is any less valid than mine.  Not to say that I agree with aspects of that agenda, but just because I don’t agree with you doesn’t mean that you are less than I am.  However, when you cross an ineffable line, that changes.  I’ve talked to several evangelical/fundamental ministers over the decades, and have had many scores of conservative Christian friends and family, and have seen how their actions mesh with their faith.  Most of them I respect.  Others…they seem like Falwells-in-training….devils in religious vestments.

I think increasing the influence of people of faith was a good thing to do — their voice had been too eagerly squashed by "free-think" — but not the way it was done.  It was done not by promoting the good, but of celebrating hate.  Falwell’s thrust was to promote a theocracy whose core rested on: if you aren’t just like us, then you are a minion of Satan.  Thoughts like that make it easy for people to beat to death the boy who seems a little too effeminate, or snub a woman in the workforce who isn’t home making babies and washing her husband’s feet, or invade a country just because people of their particular faith are mostly evil.  After all, that’s what God wants.

I am of course hyperbolizing things way out-of-context to illustrate why I’m not sad to know that I don’t have to hear Falwell gleefully blame gays, and feminists, and just about everyone else who doesn’t (er…didn’t) fit his own Aryan-esque view of the perfect race for all the ills of the world.  He was a dangerous man who preached not the word of God (probably…I can’t claim to direct, unambiguous communications with the Almighty), but the viral thinking of fear and hate. My only hope is that it’s not too late for people to start listening to the voices of their better angels.