Mr. Moderate

Jerry Falwell is dead. It is enough to make me wish I believed in Hell. It is in the moments following a significant death that we come to contemplate the life of the departed and to wish them everlasting existence in one of two places: eternal pleasure or eternal torture. Falwell set a high bar for those who would wish to outdo his outrageous comments. CNN had this paragraph in the story it posted:

Many now remember him most for outrageous statements he made after leaving the Moral Majority — in 1999, his house organ the National Liberty Journal warned parents that the Tinky Winky TV character was secretly gay and morally dangerous; in 2001, he blamed the September 11 terrorist attack on “pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America.”

How many of you Christians out there believe that your God would deliberately kill 3,000 Americans because the folks mentioned above were trying to secularize America? Is that the way your God works?

Jerry Falwell was from the segment of Christians who believe that lies told for the greater good are themselves good for the soul of the teller. The basis of this teaching is found in, among other places, 1 Corinthians 9:19-22:

9:19 For since I am free from all I can make myself a slave to all, in order to gain even more people.
9:20 To the Jews I became like a Jew to gain the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) to gain those under the law.
9:21 To those free from the law I became like one free from the law (though I am not free from God’s law but under the law of Christ) to gain those free from the law.
9:22 To the weak I became weak in order to gain the weak. I have become all things to all people, so that by all means I may save some.

The last words are the key: “… so that by all means I may save some.” I suppose that if you hold yourself out to be a preacher of God’s inerrant Word, and if that Word tells you to “become all things to all people, so that by all means [you] may save some,” then any lie or deceit becomes justified in your eyes.

But what does that teaching do to the idea of God? Doesn’t it imply that Falwell’s God can’t succeed through the truth, but must rely upon lies and deceits to trick people into converting to save their immortal souls? How does that idea of God square with the rest of Christianity?

And once lies and deceit become tools for salvation, then facts have no place in your rhetorical repertoire. And once you have renounced facts as the foundation for truth, then its just a matter of political polemics: use whatever rhetorical devices are necessary to win converts and damn the consequences!

But what are the consequences? A total renunciation of morality is one consequence. You cannot preach sermons filled with lies and deceit and maintain any moral standards whatsoever. And without moral teachings, what good is religion, anyway? Isn’t the whole purpose of a good religion to propagate morality to the population? But Jerry Falwell was so filled with hypocrisy that his political positions became his moral commandments. When you can’t distinguish between politics and morality, then you are worthless as an evaluator of circumstances or a recommender of actions.

My only thoughts on Falwell’s death are these: I wish he had died sooner. Say, sometime before he lost his mind altogether and started attacking the Teletubbie Tinky Winky as gay and blaming the 9/11 attacks on the ACLU (among others).