Jerry Falwell: A right-real
influence By Bill Berkowitz
OAKLAND, California - The right-wing US
Christian evangelist Jerry Falwell, who died on
Tuesday at the age of 73, is perhaps best known
for his fundamentalist social positions and
tirades against lesbians, gays and feminists, not
to mention "pagans", "abortionists" and assorted
other miscreants.
But Falwell also had a
significant impact on US foreign policy over the
past 30 years, and was one of the founding fathers
here of so-called Christian Zionism - the belief
that the modern state of Israel is the fulfillment
of biblical "End Times" prophecy and thus
deserving of political,
financial and religious support.
From his
pre-Moral Majority days when he preached against
religious folk involved in the civil rights
movement, to his support for president Ronald
Reagan-backed contra movements in Central America
and Africa that were responsible for the deaths of
tens of thousands of people, to his invective
against Nelson Mandela and South Africa's African
National Congress and his support for the
apartheid regime, Falwell was a Republican Party
stalwart and a dependable voice of reaction.
Today, conservative evangelicals are a
formidable lobby group in the United States and a
key component of the Republican voting base.
However, they had largely stayed out of politics
until the mid-1970s, when Jimmy Carter's
declaration during the 1976 presidential campaign
that he had been "born again" rejuvenated the
political activism of the evangelical community.
But Carter's more liberal positions on
some social issues, and his support for a
Palestinian homeland shortly after his election in
1977, alienated right-wing Christian Zionist
leaders in the movement, like Falwell and New
Right figures Paul Weyrich and Richard Viguerie,
who steered evangelicals toward the Republican
Party - where they remain today.
In the
1980s, Israel's Likud Party drew closer to the
right wing in the US, and Falwell was a key figure
in mobilizing conservative Christian voters. In
her book Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the
Christian Right, Sara Diamond notes that
Falwell, "often through his television broadcasts
and his frequent trips to Israel, played a key
role in drawing evangelicals to pay closer
attention to Middle East politics".
In
1979, Israel rewarded Falwell with a private jet.
Two years later, he received Israel's Jabotinsky
Award for his support.
According to one
press account, "Jewish-evangelical relations had
become so close by the early '80s that,
immediately after Israel bombed Iraq's nuclear
reactor in 1981, Israeli prime minister Menachem
Begin telephoned Moral Majority leader Reverend
Jerry Falwell before calling president Ronald
Reagan to ask Falwell to 'explain to the Christian
public the reasons for the bombing'."
Falwell also served on the board of
advisors of the American Alliance of Jews and
Christians, an organization founded by Rabbi
Daniel Lapin, the president of the conservative
Jewish organization Toward Tradition, and
Christian conservative evangelical Gary Bauer,
founder of American Values.
This past
September, Falwell's church hosted Christians
United for Israel's (CUFI) pastor John Hagee, who
accused Iran of being behind the summer war
between Hezbollah and Israel. "They gave Syria
14,000 missiles and 100 million dollars," he
claimed. "Those missiles were given to Hezbollah."
Falwell served on the board of CUFI.
In
the hours since his death, a number of Falwell's
supporters have unstintingly praised him as a
seminal and courageous figure of the New Religious
Right.
Senator John McCain, who during the
2000 Republican presidential primary called
Falwell and the Reverend Pat Robertson "agents of
intolerance" but had recently sought his support,
issued a statement praising Falwell for his
contributions.
While Falwell helped place
conservative evangelicals at the forefront of the
political landscape, he was also in part
responsible for coarsening the political dialogue
in this country. In a career that was marked by a
continuous stream of controversial - and sometimes
wacky - statements, perhaps none was as
mean-spirited as his reaction to the September 11,
2001, attacks. Falwell appeared on Pat Robertson's
Christian Broadcasting Network's 700 Club
and told Robertson's viewers:
The abortionists have got to bear
some burden for this because God will not be
mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little
innocent babies, we make God mad. I really
believe that the pagans and the abortionists and
the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who
are actively trying to make that an alternative
lifestyle ... all of them who have tried to
secularize America. I point the finger in their
face and say, "You helped this happen."
He later apologized for those
remarks.
Falwell dated his political
activism to the Supreme Court's Roe vs Wade ruling
in 1973 that established a woman's right to an
abortion. "Believing life begins at conception, I
became very exercised over this," he said.
In the late 1970s, Paul Weyrich, widely
considered as the guru of the modern conservative
movement, Terry Dolan, Richard Viguerie, the
godfather of conservative direct mail, and Howard
Phillips tapped televangelist Falwell to head up
the Moral Majority. Over the years, as Falwell
became more controversial and influential
politically, he became a favored guest on cable
television's news programs.
With Falwell
at the helm, the Moral Majority, founded in 1979,
prospered. And, unlike some of his televangelist
brethren who were severely wounded by sexual and
financial scandals, Falwell's enterprises
prospered throughout the 1980s.
After the
Moral Majority officially shut down in 1989, Pat
Robertson's Christian Coalition, Dr James Dobson's
Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council
and a host of other conservative Christian groups
stepped into the breech. In 2004, Falwell, seeing
a political opening and hoping to reconnect with
his funding base, announced the formation of an
organization called the Moral Majority Coalition,
which he characterized as a "21st century
resurrection of the Moral Majority".
In
his early seventies, after recovering from a
serious illness, Falwell focused on making the
Christian liberal arts college, Liberty
University, which he founded in 1971, his
everlasting legacy. The 4,400-acre campus is home
to 9,600 students, and another 15,000 are enrolled
in its distance learning program.
The
mending-fences visit of McCain to the Liberty
University campus last year was an example of
Falwell's continued involvement in top-level
Republican politics. His connection to the
founding of the pastor John Hagee's lobbying
group, Christian Zionist Christians United for
Israel, also showed that Falwell wasn't only about
setting up multi-million dollar endowments and
fashioning impressive real estate deals.
Nearly 30 years after entering the
political fray, Falwell had formidable political
clout up until his death.
Bill
Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the
conservative movement. His column "Conservative
Watch" documents the strategies, players,
institutions, victories and defeats of the US
Right.
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