By Clarence Page The Detroit News Speak not ill of the dead. That’s easy advice to follow until you are remembering those who spoke a lot of ill while they were alive.
Yes, I am talking about the late Rev. Jerry Falwell.
The founder of the Moral Majority was found dead last Tuesday at age 73 in his Lynchburg, Va., office. Reports that his heart had failed were greeted with grim irony by those who thought it had failed years earlier.
This, after all, is the preacher who declared back in the 1980s that, “AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals.”
Of “feminists and all these radical gals,” he scoffed, “These women just need a man in the house. That’s all they need.”
After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, he said on Pat Robertson’s “The 700 Club” that, “The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this, because God will not be mocked.”
During South African Bishop Desmond Tutu’s rise as an antiapartheid leader, Falwell said, “I think he’s a phony, period, as far as representing the black people of South Africa.”
On Islam, “I think Mohammed was a terrorist.”
And the bleats go on.
Falwell was the sort of newsmaker who kept us wondering what he would say next, if only to find out whether it was nuttier than what he said in his previous eruption.
Yet although he may have said nutty things from time to time, he wasn’t nuts. He backed away from his imprudent Sept. 11 remarks, for example, when many of his fellow social conservatives thought he had gone too far.
And on those occasions when I encountered or interviewed him, Falwell seemed surprisingly friendly and gracious, compared to his bombastic TV image. After all, he did not build his Thomas Road Baptist Church into a megachurch with 24,000 members — plus Liberty University with 9,600 resident students and 17,250 distance-learning students — by acting like a grump or a goof. Even his fiercest adversaries learned better than to underestimate him.
In that sense his rise is instructive for students of politics, social movements and show business. He always had two Jerry Falwells to offer to the public. There were really two Jerry Falwells — one angelic, the other pugnacious. The face he presented to the public was whichever would do him the most good.
In that sense, I am stricken by his similarities to another conservative religious extremist I have known for more than two decades: Minister Louis Farrakhan.
At first glance, the Chicago-based Nation of Islam minister could hardly have less in common with the Lynchburg Baptist preacher. But look deeper. Farrakhan billed himself as “The Charmer” in his days as a calypso performer before he joined the Nation in the 1950s. And he can be quite charming in person or on the pulpit. Or he can sound like a hater, depending on whether he feels like making news.
Sen. John McCain touched on this ironic similarity during his 2000 presidential campaign. In a hot-blooded moment of candor that he later came to regret, he said, “Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right.”
Actually that’s not quite fair to Minister Farrakhan. He might be an agent of intolerance from time to time, but he does not belong on the left. The social, political and economic values of the 77-year-old Nation of Islam lines up remarkably close to those of Falwell’s conservatism. Both favor self-help, oppose big government and attract charges of thinly veiled bigotry toward other groups.
Yet Farrakhan has never been invited to the White House and probably never will. Falwell became a featured visitor. McCain agreed to be last year’s commencement speaker at Falwell’s Liberty University. “Intolerance?” What intolerance? All is forgiven. This year’s speaker is former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who is considering a run for the Republican presidential nomination.
Actually McCain already did Falwell a big favor back in 2000. The senator made Falwell sound like someone who mattered. Falwell’s political influence had ebbed in recent years, partly because of his penchant for shooting from the lip. He was asked to address the Republican National Convention in 2000, but not again in 2004.
Yet if it is any consolation for those of us who seek a sensible political center, Minister Farrakhan’s brand of religious extremism seems to have limited appeal these days, too. He provided security for the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s first presidential campaign in 1984. But not many major candidates clamor to be photographed with him now.
If that means the politics of addition are rising up and the politics of division moving down, that’s a blessing for us all.
MIAMI, Florida (AP) — U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris told a religious journal that separation of church and state is “a lie” and God and the nation’s founding fathers did not intend the country be “a nation of secular laws.”
The minister of a church that dismissed a female Sunday School teacher after adopting what it called a literal interpretation of the Bible says a woman can perform any job outside of the church.