McChurch and the Falwell Legacy

The Rev. Falwell's legacy:
He strengthened democracy

Joseph R. Reisert Friday, May 18, 2007

Dr. Reisert...

For starters, we are a Republic, not a Democracy...A Republic bends to and gives voice to the rights of the minority; a Democracy is, essentially, majority rule...

You are correct, me thinks, that Falwell improved Democracy, which is not to say that he did not damage the Republic by attempting over the years to institute a theocratic regime through the "Moral Majority" redux.

Falwell, through a decided ignorance of the great American experiment in equality and justice for all, promoted apartheid not only among people of faith but among Americans of all stripes...His was the successful moblization of Spiro Agnew's "Silent Majority" with a biblical twist...

Yes, the evangelical public awakened to the process of government and the need to engage...Did they, however, distinguish themselves by seeking the strength of party politics?

Me thinks not...

Where the Christian Right made a great contribution was in raising debate over the social and moral slump into which America had drifted through the elevation of the individual over community...For the first time in our history, we now know, for example, that we cannot divorce a fetus from its mother, or vice versa...We can surgically separate them, but they are inextricably bound together if only in the context of a vague social contract...

That is, in my opinion, where Falwell made his greatest contribution...He called us to an acute awareness that our choices, if you will, are not made in a vacuum...If the Christian Right had applied that principle to such social contracts as marriage and citizenship, they might not have suffered so under the charge of hypocrisy...

Stan Moody is the author of "Crisis in Evangelical Scholarship" and "McChurched: 300 Million Served and Still Hungry

The Rev. Jerry Falwell, the founder of the Moral Majority, died this week.

Few individuals have done as much as Falwell to change the shape and direction of American politics in the 20th century. Whether you regard those changes as fundamentally positive or negative should depend not so much on whether you agree or disagree with the conservative policy positions Falwell championed, but on your understanding of democracy.

Before Falwell, fundamentalist Christians tended to stay away from politics, even to regard it as sinful. They tended not to vote, at least not in the same numbers as mainline Protestants, and they remained deliberately apart from the wider, public culture.

Falwell, however, concluded that this apolitical stance left traditional social and moral ideals vulnerable to legal and political assault. By all accounts, his decision to enter politics was precipitated by the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade. That 1973 ruling created a new, constitutional right to abortion and in one stroke invalidated the laws of 46 states which, until that time, either prohibited or restrictively regulated abortion.

Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979 to resist and, if possible, turn back the tide of activist liberalism that had so dramatically altered the social landscape of America in the 1960s and '70s.

Falwell's organization accomplished two remarkable political achievements: first, it persuaded millions of formerly apolitical fundamentalist Protestants to become active participants in the political life of the nation. Second, by embracing social conservatives from a variety of religious backgrounds, it enabled conservative Protestants, Catholics, and Jews to overcome their past suspicions and to discover their common political interests.

The overall effect was to mobilize a new, large constituency -- the "religious right" -- and to bring it over to the Republican party. As a consequence, the party enjoyed far more political success since the creation of the Moral Majority than it had at any time since the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.

An evaluation of Falwell's life work must come down, then, to the question whether the rise of the religious right, which Falwell engineered, was a good thing or a bad thing for American democracy.

One view is that what is really valuable about democracy is that it is the only form of government that treats all citizens as morally equal to one another. Every citizen has the right to vote, and so, in principle, each of us has an equal influence on public policy. If more of us want, say, stricter environmental laws than oppose them, that's what we'll get; if not, not.

But according to this view, the ideal of moral equality also imposes limits to the kinds of policies any majority should be allowed to implement. In particular, it holds that the laws must leave individuals equally free to make their own moral decisions, whatever the political majority may favor at the moment. Hence the courts must stand ready to intervene, in order to guarantee "choice" on abortion, to eliminate the old prohibitions on indecency and obscenity, to eliminate from our laws the hint of any public support for religion and, in general, to prohibit the public endorsement of any one way of life as better than any other.

Defenders of this idea of democracy regard Falwell's influence on America politics as wholly malign. When, in 1981 the president of Yale, A. Bartlett Giamatti, sent a letter to the incoming freshmen class denouncing the "self-proclaimed Moral Majority," he focused his opposition on the organization's aim of enacting its own moral views into law and denounced it for being "absolutist in morality."

According to a less sophisticated but more profound understanding, however, democracy means majority rule. The laws should reflect what a majority of the people happen to want; the courts should intervene only to protect the people's traditional liberties from being infringed by legislative innovations.

The essence of democracy, on this view, is procedural, not substantive. It doesn't demand that we all accept the same philosophy of "moral equality" -- which is, in any case, just as absolutist in morality as any traditional, religious doctrine. Instead, it demands only that we all play the political game by the same rules.

At bottom, Falwell's achievement comes to this: he brought millions of previously alienated Americans to play the game of politics by the same rules as everyone else and thus strengthened our democracy. Which is why Democrats and Republicans alike will be honoring him in the same way this week: by seeking the votes of his former followers.

Joseph R. Reisert is associate professor of American Constitutional Law and chairman of the Department of Government at Colby College in Waterville.