A Wee History Lesson
Max Blumenthal writing for The Nation has an article up about the career of Jerry Falwell that is must reading while the republican candidates for president are busy singing his praises. Most folks know the man’s recent history all too well…
In 1984, Falwell called the gay-friendly Metropolitan Community Church "a vile and Satanic system" that will "one day be utterly annihilated and there will be a celebration in heaven." Members of these churches, Falwell added, are "brute beasts." Falwell initially denied his statements, offering Jerry Sloan, an MCC minister and gay rights activist $5,000 to prove that he had made them. When Sloan produced a videotape containing footage of Falwell’s denunciations, the reverend refused to pay. Only after Sloan sued did Falwell cough up the money.
Falwell uttered countless epithets over his long life…
…but it’s his beginnings that the republicans who are calling him a saint now, would probably like us all to utterly forget. Point of fact, the religious right itself has been busy rewriting that part of their history for the past couple decades. For generations after the trouncing fundamentalism got during the Scopes trial, fundamentalists held themselves apart from the secular world. Falwell himself said that "Preachers are not called to be politicians, but soul winners", though at the time he was hurling that one at Martin Luther King Jr. But it was the sensibility of the breed for generations.
They would all have us all believe now, that it was largely Roe v. Wade that brought fundamentalists into politics. It wasn’t.
Falwell started his career like a lot of them did, preaching segregation…
Decades before the forces that now make up the Christian right declared their culture war, Falwell was a rabid segregationist who railed against the civil rights movement from the pulpit of the abandoned backwater bottling plant he converted into Thomas Road Baptist Church. This opening episode of Falwell’s life, studiously overlooked by his friends, naïvely unacknowledged by many of his chroniclers, and puzzlingly and glaringly omitted in the obituaries of the Washington Post and New York Times, is essential to understanding his historical significance in galvanizing the Christian right. Indeed, it was race–not abortion or the attendant suite of so-called "values" issues–that propelled Falwell and his evangelical allies into political activism.
As with his positions on abortion and homosexuality, the basso profondo preacher’s own words on race stand as vivid documents of his legacy. Falwell launched on the warpath against civil rights four years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools with a sermon titled "Segregation or Integration: Which?"
"If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God’s word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made," Falwell boomed from above his congregation in Lynchburg. "The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line."
Falwell’s jeremiad continued: "The true Negro does not want integration…. He realizes his potential is far better among his own race." Falwell went on to announce that integration "will destroy our race eventually. In one northern city," he warned, "a pastor friend of mine tells me that a couple of opposite race live next door to his church as man and wife."
As pressure from the civil rights movement built during the early 1960s, and President Lyndon Johnson introduced sweeping civil rights legislation, Falwell grew increasingly conspiratorial. He enlisted with J. Edgar Hoover to distribute FBI manufactured propaganda against the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and publicly denounced the 1964 Civil Rights Act as "civil wrongs."
In a 1964 sermon, "Ministers and Marchers," Falwell attacked King as a Communist subversive. After questioning "the sincerity and intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations," Falwell declared, "It is very obvious that the Communists, as they do in all parts of the world, are taking advantage of a tense situation in our land, and are exploiting every incident to bring about violence and bloodshed."
But the spark that lit the roaring fire that eventually consumed the republican party wasn’t integration specifically…
In a recent interview broadcast on CNN the day of his death, Falwell offered his version of the Christian right’s genesis: "We were simply driven into the process by Roe v. Wade and earlier than that, the expulsion of God from the public square." But his account was fuzzy revisionism at best. By 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled on Roe, the antiabortion movement was almost exclusively Catholic. While various Catholic cardinals condemned the Court’s ruling, W.A. Criswell, the fundamentalist former president of America’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, casually endorsed it. (Falwell, an independent Baptist for forty years, joined the SBC in 1996.) "I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person," Criswell exclaimed, "and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed." A year before Roe, the SBC had resolved to press for legislation allowing for abortion in limited cases.
While abortion clinics sprung up across the United States during the early 1970s, evangelicals did little. No pastors invoked the Dred Scott decision to undermine the legal justification for abortion. There were no clinic blockades, no passionate cries to liberate the "pre-born." For Falwell and his allies, the true impetus for political action came when the Supreme Court ruled in Green v. Connally to revoke the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory private schools in 1971. Their resentment was compounded in 1971 when the Internal Revenue Service attempted to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, which forbade interracial dating. (Blacks were denied entry until that year.) Falwell was furious, complaining, "In some states it’s easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school."
Seeking to capitalize on mounting evangelical discontent, a right-wing Washington operative and anti-Vatican II Catholic named Paul Weyrich took a series of trips down South to meet with Falwell and other evangelical leaders. Weyrich hoped to produce a well-funded evangelical lobbying outfit that could lend grassroots muscle to the top-heavy Republican Party and effectively mobilize the vanquished forces of massive resistance into a new political bloc. In discussions with Falwell, Weyrich cited various social ills that necessitated evangelical involvement in politics, particularly abortion, school prayer and the rise of feminism. His implorations initially fell on deaf ears.
"I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed," Weyrich recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. "What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation."
Dig it. It wasn’t abortion. It wasn’t militant homosexuality. It wasn’t rampant sexual hedonism. It wasn’t the secularization of America’s schools. It wasn’t even racism, that lit the fire the brought the fundamentalist leadership charging into our political system in a blind destructive frenzy. It was their tax exemption. It was money.
Seen in that light, a lot of things fit nearly into place. Their exaltation of the profit motive over helping the needy, their outright contempt for the poor, like spitting in the face of the man who said it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle then for a rich man to enter heaven, their private jets, their mansions, their palace like mega churches, their weighty investment portfolios. And that stunningly blind eye all these righteous men of God have been turning to the massive corruption of the Bush administration. They’re not hypocrites after all. It was about money right from the beginning. It’s still about money.
