Death of a Titan: Where Were You When Jerry Falwell Died?

In a world ruled by a sovereign God, who knows but

that Jerry Falwell was ordained to awaken the sleeping giant of faith through
the demonstration of its alternative?

I don't reckon that a common question will emerge, "Where
were you the day Jerry Falwell Died?" 
Nevertheless, the day Jerry Falwell died, I was reading Jon Meacham's
incredible treatise, American Gospel
(Random House, NY, 2007).  This is a
must-read for every thinking Christian.

Back on message, however, what I was reading the day Jerry
Falwell died was the account of his conversion from preaching to individuals
the Gospel of Jesus Christ to that of saving the soul of America.  "We were mobilizing a potential army
numbering in the tens of millions.  The
fight was on!!" (p. 218).

God was not, apparently, sufficient for Falwell's
purposes.  Jetting around the world in
his Lear donated by the State of Israel, Falwell achieved rock star status,
while America
lumbered on, defending its non-sectarian roots that provide the very freedoms
that gave rise to Jerry Falwell.

Meacham systematically avoids his own litmus test of faith
by leaving us in the dark as to his church affiliation, if any.  That he perfectly understands the Christian
message and its distortion by the charlatans of the Gospel is clear,
however.  He writes with a passion that
unmasks more than a scholarly interest in the debate.

A striking message emerges from his brief thoughts on notorious
atheist, Madelyn Murray O'Hair:

O'Hair
and two of her relatives disappeared in 1995; they were killed, dismembered,
and secretly buried on a Texas
ranch as a result of an extortion-kidnapping scheme.  It took nearly six years for authorities to
locate the family's remains.  When
O'Hair's minister son learned that the bodies had been found, he said, "She was
an evil person who led many to hell. 
That is hard to say about my own mother, but it is true" (p. 236).

 

Voices
like Robertson's, Falwell's and O'Hair's come from the farthest fringes, but
they reach many ears (p. 237).

Meacham's theme is that America is anything but a Christian
nation, and he bases that on the carefully-constructed safeguards against the
domination of public life by any religious belief system.  He offers hope, however, in what he refers to
as the "American Gospel," an underlying belief in the actions in human history
of a sovereign power, while protecting the rights to worship freely to any and
all variations of that power or none at all. 

Thus, the founders carefully and skillfully protected the
minority from the over reaching of any majority, a concept foreign to the
agenda of the Christian Right, who seek to impose theocratic aims through
majority rule.

As a result, America
is the most religious nation in the industrialized world but also, perhaps, the
most pluralistically religious. 

Had Falwell been an educated man, he might have latched onto
the doctrines of the sovereignty of God and the presence of the Kingdom of God. 
It is in those two doctrines that he would have found the very
sufficient source of power necessary to overcome.

Instead, it will be a long time before the damage he
inflicted on civility is repaired.

But then, in a world ruled by a sovereign God, who knows but
that Jerry Falwell was ordained to awaken the sleeping giant of faith through
the demonstration of its alternative?

Stan Moody is the author of "Crisis in Evangelical Scholarship" and
"McChurched: 300 Million Served and Still Hungry