McChurch - The Post-Falwell Era

Framing the Abortion Debate for the Post-Falwell Era

By:

Stan Moody

Stan Moody, an evangelical Baptist minister and founder of the Christian Policy Institute, has served in the Maine House of Representatives as both a Republican and a Democrat. Dr. Moody is the author of several provocative books, including, "Crisis in Evangelical Scholarship" and "McChurched: 300 Million Served and Still Hungry." Pastor of a rural country church in Central Maine, Moody has enjoyed a long and productive career in small business development and management.

May 19, 2007

Upon his anti-climatic death (alone in his office after breakfast), the nation has been riveted on the impact of the life and ministry of Rev. Jerry Falwell. Strangely devoid of mourning, this national musing has taken on the nature of a balanced debate over “…the good, the bad and the ugly.”

I am reminded of the words of the Apostle Paul, “Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die” (Rom 5:7 NIV). No one, however, seems willing to fall on his sword in declaring Falwell either righteous or good.

By consensus, it is clear that Falwell’s death marks the passing of an era, but which era and toward what end occupies the minds of many pundits. Of all his crusades, and there were many, the one that stands above the rest is the abortion debate – the agenda that moved him from the church to political activism within the church. Roe v. Wade gave rise to Jerry Falwell and The Moral Majority morphed into the Christian Right.

Some have accused Rev. Falwell of abandoning the Gospel for the Republican Party. That is a sore temptation, indeed, but merely begs the question, “What was his contribution?”

Of all the tributes and detractions I have read over the past few days, the one that stands out is that of a professor of government at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. The thrust of his argument was that Dr. Falwell enhanced the cause of Democracy by getting Evangelicals out of their secure spiritual ghettos and into the public arena.

I chided this distinguished professor by reminding him that America is not a Democracy but a Constitutional Republic and that he had missed altogether the contribution that Dr. Falwell has made to the social activism debate. While both are representative forms of government (“of the people, by the people and for the people”), a Constitutional Republic is distinguished from a Democracy in its protection of minority groups from the tyranny of the majority.

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 mobilization of Spiro Agnew's "Silent Majority" with a biblical twist.

Clearly, the author was correct. Rev. Falwell did indeed enhance the cause of Democracy. In so doing, however, he injured the cause of our Constitutional Republic by advocating a theocratic government through Christian nationalism. The mobilization of Evangelicals to the Republican Party was a populist movement intended to elevate certain moral and ethical beliefs over the individual rights of those practicing alternative, albeit controversial, lifestyles.

If his downside was to capitalize on our American moment of ethical confusion, what, then, was his contribution?

I believe his contribution was in an area that even he may not have understood. It takes its focus from the abortion debate, symptomatic of the social and moral slump into which America had drifted through the elevation of the individual over community. He forced us to face the strength of our national heritage that no choice is made in a vacuum.

In that sense, he unwittingly promoted the wisdom of the Founding Fathers – “out of many, one.”

The truth with which he left us was that we cannot divorce our choices from our standing within our spheres of influence and even our nation. By raising the abortion issue, he educated the nation that we cannot divorce a fetus from its mother (pro-life), nor can we divorce a mother from her fetus (pro-choice). We can surgically separate them, but they are inextricably bound together in the context of a social contract at the root of the great American experiment.

As our political leaders continue to wrestle with the dichotomy within the abortion debate between personal conviction and public law, they might be better served to extend beyond the rhetoric of Rev. Jerry Falwell and Betty Freidan to advocating for “A Mother’s Right to Choose.”

Therein lies the resolution to the balance between individual rights and national ethics – that no matter what our choices, they are not made alone.

The heritage with which he left us, therefore, is not one of ethical and moral righteousness. Of that each of us is clearly incapable, and, by caveat, so also is our nation. It is, instead, the heritage of a nation bound together as an undeveloped fetus with its mother – dependent and expectant.

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