Where were you on the day Jerry Falwell Died? I seriously doubt that question will ever
emerge. It would be more like, “Who the heck was Jerry Falwell?”. Nevertheless, on the
day Jerry Falwell died, I recorded that I had been reading Jon Meacham’s incredible
treatise, American Gospel (2006)1, a must-read for every thinking Christian.
Back on message, however, what stood out to me on the day Jerry Falwell died was
Meacham’s account of Falwell’s conversion from preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ to
individuals to that of saving the soul of America. “We were mobilizing a potential army
numbering in the tens of millions. The fight was on!!” (p. 218).
For common reference, Falwell was without doubt the father of Christian Nationalism.
Through the formation of the “Moral Majority”, Falwell led a movement toward a
renewed “Manifest Destiny” of America as mankind’s beacon of hope from “sea to
shining sea.”2 Manifest Destiny was invoked in our current President’s inaugural address
as a gateway not only to expanding America’s borders but to conquering space.3
Is the Christian Nationalist God Impotent?
God may not have been sufficient for Falwell’s purposes. Jetting around the world in his
Lear donated by the State of Israel, Falwell achieved rock star status, while America
lumbered on, defending its non-sectarian roots that provided the very freedoms that gave
rise to Jerry Falwell. We find those freedoms under revisionary attack today by a radical
evangelical movement that would appear to have lost faith in God.
Meacham systematically avoids his own litmus test of faith by leaving us in the dark as to
his church affiliation, if any. That he perfectly understands the Christian message and its
distortion by the charlatans of the Gospel is clear, however. He writes with a passion that
unmasks more than a scholarly interest in the debate.
A striking message emerges from his brief thoughts on notorious atheist, Madelyn
Murray O’Hair:
O’Hair and two of her relatives disappeared in 1995; they were killed,
dismembered, and secretly buried on a Texas ranch as a result of an extortion-
kidnapping scheme. It took nearly six years for authorities to locate the family’s
remains. When O’Hair’s minister son learned that the bodies had been found, he
said, “She was an evil person who led many to hell. That is hard to say about my
own mother, but it is true” (p. 236).
Voices like Robertson’s, Falwell’s, and O’Hair’s come from the farthest fringes,
but they reach many ears (p. 237).
Is America Truly a Christian Nation?
Meacham’s theme was that America is anything but a Christian nation, and he based that
on the carefully constructed safeguards against the domination of public life by any
religious belief system. He offers hope, however, in what he refers to as the “American
Gospel”, an underlying belief in the actions in human history of a sovereign power while
protecting the right to worship that power in any and all variations…or not to worship at
all.
Thus, the founders carefully and skillfully protected the minority from the overreaching
of any majority, a concept foreign to the agenda of the Christian Right, which seeks to
impose its theocratic aims through majority rule. As a result of those founding principles,
America is the most religious nation in the industrialized world but also, perhaps, the
most pluralistically religious.
Had Falwell been seminary-educated, he might have latched onto the doctrines of the
sovereignty of God and the present, dynamic, victorious Kingdom of God inaugurated by
Jesus. Truth be known, however, tragically few pastors and theologians have held onto
the Kingdom of God as the primary citizenship of the believer in Jesus Christ as Lord. It
is in those two doctrines that Falwell might have found the source of power necessary to
deny self in favor of God’s divine rule and providence.
It may be a long time before the damage he inflicted on civility is repaired. Denying self,
a pivotal doctrine of the Confessing Church, leaves little or no room for fame and
fortune.
Yet, in a world ruled by a sovereign God, who knows but that Jerry Falwell was turned
loose to awaken the sleeping giant of faith through the promotion from the pulpit of its
anti-Christian alternative? Review of the damage on this date reminds us that the Moral
Majority was formed in opposition to the presidency of Jimmy Carter, widely applauded
at his recent memorial for his Christ-like, touch-a-life example of humility.
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1 American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation: Meacham,
Jon: 9780812976663: Amazon.com: Books
2 Christian nationalism: How evangelical Christianity became a political religion –
Baptist News Global
3 What is 'Manifest Destiny?' | National Post
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