Jerry Falwell's paradoxical legacy: political victories and cultural failures.

• Author: Young, Cathy
• Position: Columns

THE DEATH OF televangelist Jerry Falwell in May at age 73 drew the curtain on a paradoxical career. Falwell was a founding father of the Christian right, which has succeeded in uniting religion and politics to a degree unthinkable in the late 1970s. Yet its gains in the political arena have been accompanied by equally impressive losses in the culture wars. He crusaded tirelessly against pornography and immorality in the media, yet the legal battle he fought against pornographer Larry Flynt expanded the boundaries of constitutionally protected free speech.

Falwell started out his career as a TV preacher opposed to mixing religion and politics, but this opposition was never uniformly applied. In the mid-'60s he warned that Christians were called to "preach the word," not "reform the externals," and slammed ministers involved with the civil rights movement. At the same time, Falwell's own Old Time Gospel Hour frequently featured segregationist politicians such as Lester Maddox and George Wallace as guests.

Francis Schaeffer, a fundamentalist champion of "dominion theology," reportedly helped allay Falwell's stated fears of tainting religion with politics. Schaeffer believed that Christians are called to rule America under the guidance of biblical law. His followers include the radical "Christian Reconstructionists" who would impose Old Testament law--requiring the stoning of homosexuals, for example--in America. In a 2005 report for the Southern Poverty Law Center, Bob Moser quotes former Falwell ghostwriter Mel White as saying that Schaeffer "convinced Jerry there was no biblical mandate against joining with 'nonbelievers' in a political cause."

This shift in Falwell's thinking allowed ecumenicism to emerge among fundamentalist Christians, a strangely progressive result of Falwell's reactionary thinking. Evangelical Protestants could work together with conservative Catholics and even Jews to defeat their liberal secularist enemies. This ecumenicism was rooted in shared hatred: of abortion, homosexuality, feminism, secularism, and other bogeymen and bogeywomen of modernity.

Falwell's group, the Moral Majority, helped elect Ronald Reagan in 1980, but his presidency was not an enormous success for the religious right. Reagan paid lip service to Falwell's social agenda but did little to enact it. His administration made no serious attempt to curb abortion; early in his first term, in 1981, Reagan put Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court...