Falwell's America

In recent months, there has been an interesting and vigorous debate in Left Blogistan about how best to deal with issues of faith in the context of politics. The indispensible Atrios spent a week batting the issue around, and kept returning to a simple conclusion:

"We believe different stuff. Especially to the extent that people want to keep shoving personal religion out into our political sphere, it's important [to] examine those differences. And if we examine those differences, we're entitled to make decisions based on them. Otherwise, the implication is that someone's religious beliefs say something incredibly important about them, but we're not actually supposed to talk about exactly what that is."

Herein lies the fundamental error in basing political decisions on religious principles: whose religion gets to be the deciding factor in a debate? "We believe different stuff." Some of us adhere to a faith that requires a sacrament of ritual human sacrifice. Some of us adhere to a faith that requires actual sacrifice of live animals. Some of us adhere to no faith at all. When we're trying to determine what national policy on , say, torture should be, whose argument carries the most weight? The person who believes any violence against a human is an abomination? Or the person who believes that the infliction of severe physical pain is an express ticket to paradise?

These are not rhetorical questions. There is an answer, and a simple one. It's found the in First Amendment to the United States Constitution. And the answer is:

NONE OF THE ABOVE.

The Framers were quite explicit: government shall not adhere to any given religion, nor prevent the American people from freely excercising their religious beliefs. All of the people, and any beliefs. That was a shocking notion in 1787. After all, virtually every government on the planet drew its legitimacy from its claim to providential design. Kings got their crowns from the clergy, not the people they governed. The genius of the First Amendment is that is severes the umbilical between our government and any god.

The notion is still shocking to much of Planet Earth. Try telling the Emir of Kuwait and the President of Iran and the Queen of England that their stations are not endowed upon them by the Almighty -- then duck.

Which brings us, of course, to Jerry Falwell. The airwaves are bloated with eulogies for the late minister. "He had no hate in him," says Paul Weyrich, who has been the radical right wing's bagman for a generation. "He was one of the kindest people I ever met." Weyrich (who coined the term "Moral Majority") admits, "He was controversial. He sort of enjoyed tickling the opposition."

"No hate", you say? When Falwell said, “I do not believe that God answers the prayer of any unredeemed Gentile or Jew” he wasn't expressing hate? When he said, days after the September 11th attacks, "I really believe that the Pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen’", he was "tickling the opposition"? When he bankrolled a scurrilous attack video that accused the President of the United States of murder, he was being kind? (The Carpetbagger Report has a long list of Falwell's less-than-Christian moments that documents his pattern of lies, insults, bigotry and theft.)

More importantly, Falwell saw himself as a "kingmaker." Six weeks before the 2004 election, he made that painfully plain:

"The Rev. Jerry Falwell said yesterday that evangelical Christians, after nearly 25 years of increasing political activism, now control the Republican Party and the fate of President Bush in the November election."

A few weeks earlier, he went even further:

"I would gauge my support for George W. Bush right along side Ronald Reagan among one of the most endeared men among evangelical Christians in modern history."

There it is. Falwell saw Bush as the re-incarnation of Reagan, whom he described as his "hero":

"I will remember Mr. Reagan primarily for his relationship with the evangelical Christian values of our Founders."

Falwell was careful not to say Reagan was an "adherent" of those "evangelical Christian values", since the sainted Ronnie was anything but a saint. But Falwell's assertion that "our Founders" held those "evangelical Christian values" deserves some attention.

Falwell, and other conservative religionists, have consistently claimed that the United States is, and always has been, "a Christian nation". They usually base that claim on the fact that most of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were devoutly religious. That means, of course, they were evangelical Christians.

They were not.

This lie is one of the most pervasive in American politics. Among the 56 signatories to the Declaration, more than half were Anglicans -- members of the Church of England, hardly a hotbed of evangelical fervor. More than 40% of them were either Congregationalists or Presbyterians (two very closely related mainline denominations). The rest were Quakers (who do not ascribe to traditional Christian dogma), Catholics or Unitarians (who are not Christians at all, much less evangelicals).

The religious affiliations of delegates to the Constitutional Convention were roughly the same, with a smattering of Methodists, Lutherans and Dutch Reformed Church members sprinkled in. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone among those two august assemblages of Founders whose political and religious beliefs even vaguely resembled Falwell's. Or Reagan's.

Indeed, the leader who most embodies the religious and political convictions of Jerry Falwell might be Oliver Cromwell, who demonstrated his loyalty to his country by killing its king and installing himself as a dictator, imposing his own faith forcibly upon the population (torturing or killing anyone who refused to convert). That's Falwell's kind of leader.

That, in fact, is precisely the kind of leader all religious conservatives crave -- a bold and murderous moralist who will brook no dissent on issues of policy or faith. Their only quibble with Cromwell would be his refusal to wear the crown. For the one trait the unites Falwell, the religious right at large, and the current regime occupying the White House, the Supreme Court and a large minority of the members of Congress, is their undying devotion to the ideal of an American Empire. They have no use for the United States, with its quaint rule of law and enshrinement of individual liberty as sovereign over government power.

As his comments above suggest, Falwell saw George W. Bush as more than a president. He sees him as the embodiment of his vision for an Imperial America, ordained by his God to reign over this country. He didn't see the same sniveling, cowardly gunsel the rest of the world sees. No, he saw another Reagan. Or maybe he saw Bush as a latter-day Charlemagne. No doubt, he saw himself as Bush's Pope Leo, crown in his own hands, poised to grant a divine blessing on the new American Imperium.

Jerry Falwell may be gone, but his vision for America remains very much alive.