Jerry Falwell died yesterday, so today, of course, is marked by political and religious obituaries. For those who want to valorize the entry of conservative Christians into the political mainstream, Falwell is a hero. For those who lament the degree to which his highly influential movement has polarized political discourse, Falwell is something akin to the anti-Christ.
In Salon this morning, Alan Wolfe purports "To the extent that history will remember [Falwell], it will be as a politician, not as a preacher." I'd like to argue that a purely political reading of this man's influence really misses the significance of his influence and the insidiousness of his message.
As anyone who has read more than a post or two of this blog will know, I don't underestimate the danger inherent in Falwell's ideology. There's a sense in which current US domestic and international policy is the logical extension of this extremist's positions. G.W. Bush is nothing if not an intellectual (!) heir to Falwell. Bush's belief in a fundamentalist, conservative Christian god and in an apocalyptic narrative for explaining the world, in a Manichean and naive belief in a clear-cut good and a self-evident evil, in an American exceptionalism that justifies our running roughshod over the world in a twenty-first century version of a nineteen-century trope, Manifest Destiny, is how we've arrived at such a sorry impasse as this. Falwell's responsibility in creating such a government is huge. I don't want to underestimate the degree to which he has helped wrack and wreck our political landscape.
But for me, the real harm of a Falwell (or for conservative Christianity for that matter) is that he has sent a message to those drawn to religion that they need not challenge themselves to love or accept anything that is foreign to them, that the dominant ideology, their inherited world view, is appropriate, and that spirituality is not a challenge to change. It's ironic because the New Testament spends so much time rejecting dominant ideologies (think of Jesus' numerous run ins with the Pharisees, who articulated a pure, and very traditional, reading of Hebrew law). Falwell's message of hatred toward gays, of steadfast loyalty to a surface reading of traditions and of the transparency of scripture sends a message that is fundamentally dangerous: the spiritual life is one of complacency and of finger pointing.
My fear is that there is/will be a generation of thoughtful individuals who will reject spirituality precisely because the most visible religion they see is so patently, so simple-mindedly, so blithely wrong headed that a binary opposition to it is the obvious and, apparently, logical choice.
Christianity suffers by its association with such shallowness. Authentic spirituality calls us to change, demands that we love, challenges us to question our traditions. As such, Falwell's legacy is counter-spiritual and has, I fear, shunted American spiritual discourse for a generation.
