I had been blissfully unaware of Jerry Falwell’s view on race and civil rights until a friend flagged this article by Max Blumenthal. Falwell was more of a piece of work than I had realized.
Decades before the forces that now make up the Christian right declared their culture war, Falwell was a rabid segregationist who railed against the civil rights movement from the pulpit of the abandoned backwater bottling plant he converted into Thomas Road Baptist Church.
. . .
Falwell launched on the warpath against civil rights four years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools with a sermon titled “Segregation or Integration: Which?”
“If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God’s word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made,” Falwell boomed from above his congregation in Lynchburg. “The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line.”
Falwell’s jeremiad continued: “The true Negro does not want integration…. He realizes his potential is far better among his own race.” Falwell went on to announce that integration “will destroy our race eventually. In one northern city,” he warned, “a pastor friend of mine tells me that a couple of opposite race live next door to his church as man and wife.”
His anti-abortion crusade came a little late in the game — in the early days, that was mainly the domain of Catholics. Anti-Vatican II Catholic, Paul Weyrich says that, initially, his attempt to enlist Falwell and other Southern evangelical leaders in a fight against “social ills” such as abortion, school prayer, and feminism fell on deaf ears.
“I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. “What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.”
. . .
In 1979, at Weyrich’s behest, Falwell founded a group that he called the Moral Majority. Along with a vanguard of evangelical icons including D. James Kennedy, Pat Robertson and Tim LaHaye, Falwell’s organization hoisted the banner of the “pro-family” movement, declaring war on abortion and homosexuality. But were it not for the federal government’s attempts to enable little black boys and black girls to go to school with little white boys and white girls, the Christian right’s culture war would likely never have come into being. “The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion,” former Falwell ally Ed Dobson told author Randall Balmer in 1990. “I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something.”
Did Falwell remain a racist? I have no idea. For all I know, it’s altogether possible that some of his best friends were black.
I didn’t know Tim LaHaye had been an early founder of Moral Majority. That makes puts a whole spin on those creepy (and cheesy) Left Behind books.
Oh yeah, Tim LaHaye is a certifiable wingnut, braingirl, no doubt about it. Pushing a disturbingly literal version of Revelation is all part of his far-right, us-against-them agenda…
This is really sick, Doug. Let me be clear, I have spoken against Falwell many times to people I know, and I don’t think I’ve ever had anything to defend him for. (rephrase: I’ve not disagreed with any of his critics that I can recall)
HOWEVER, this “dancing on the grave” rant that is going on all over the Internet is hard to take. This guy had a family and a group of people that cared for him. I would guess that he even had many people that completely disagreed with him but are saddened by the loss.
I’m not defending him, and I don’t dispute WHAT you are saying. Please, though, show some respect by waiting a *little* while before going into what an awful human being the guy was.
Glenn: I think you’re mistaken about LaHaye’s intentions in writing the wildly successful “Left Behind” series, which I never read and don’t intend to. His only intention was to make money.
Doug: When Senator Robert Byrd dies and his body lies in state, are you going to mention his days with the KKK?
I respect what you’re saying, Jason. And more power to you for being that civilized. In 99% of cases, I would agree with you. But, by my standards of morality, Falwell was a really, really bad person who has done a great deal of harm to my country. And, I’m simply not quite that civilized.
I mean, come on:
As if those who died of AIDS did not also have families and groups of people who cared for them.
With that statement, he’s not claiming that AIDS is the wrath of some inscrutable God whose will we do not have to understand, but merely have to accept. No, he’s endorsing affliction with the disease as some sort of justice.
I remember as a young girl of 9 or 10 in the late 60’s my grandma going on and on about Jerry Falwell and what a great Christian he was. She and my grandpa even stopped at Lynchburg one spring on the way back from Florida. In her next breath however she would express worry about those n**rs moving down Gary into Valpo. Somehow those two statements were always linked in my mind…..
It’s standard to assess the impact of someone’s life when that person dies. And some of us think the overall impact was bad, and in some very specific examples the impact was extremely bad. If he wanted to be remembered as a good guy, he could have refrained from scapegoating gays, women, minorities, civil libertarians, etc. What is the appropriate length of time between someone’s death and his critics reciting his own words to summarize his contributions to (or detractions from) society? Shorter version: Don’t want to be remembered as a jerk? Then don’t be one.
Tripletma made a very good point above. I also remember the late 60s and this is when the simple-answer-people started to group to find an refuge against the excesses of the hippies.It was like the end of american civilization to my parents and to me who was already in my 20s it was like waking up somewhere else by 1970. The hippie culture devasted many people. I started teaching in 1964 in a culture that was almost unrecognizeable by 1970.By then,I was trying to maintain the status quo amongst a bunch of teen revolutionaries. This was the Merle Haggard time when he sang about the Okie from Moskogee,and the hippies were smoking grass on the campus greens. By the 80s and Reagan I was the liberal teacher and all my high school students had become little rightwingers.
Fundamentalist religion gave simple rules and made huge promises and they formed a community that even today is still growing.
I would guess that in the coming times there will be a liberal-type backlash,but Im not sure of the scope of it..The individual has been trampled by the moralization of the message and the pressure of desire for community.There is little room for diversity because it undermines the message of community..Yet the moral message has a sinister side now as it is being laid bare by daily exposure of its underside from many fronts.The Falwell legacy will be forever a watershed of intellectual,cultural analysis. It’s a vast victimization of sorts: good-willed people looking for simple truths,many afraid to question or deviate for fear of everlasting perdition.
I hope im around to see the next chapter.
Remember that most of the leaders of the Moral Majority (if not all) were Southerners. We think of them as obnoxious creeps who preyed on the frightened and simpleminded but they were more than that. I think Falwell and Robertson sincerely believed what they believed. That made them more dangerous than a cynical opportunist.
Boy Doug, I just can’t wait for your obituary when Robert Byrd dies. Should be entertaining, that’s for sure.
Robert Byrd is the one prominent blue dog Democrat who didn’t convert to Republicanism because of integration. He’s a relic from the past.All the rest of his ilk are these
‘new’ Southern Republicans who got religion.
Why wait until Byrd dies? I’ll go ahead and mention it now. Robert Byrd was in the Klan. Hell, he was the leader (“Exalted Cyclops”) of his local chapter. Byrd wrote of integrating the military:
In 2005, Byrd said:
Did Falwell ever say, in such uncertain terms, that intolerance has no place in America?
Just while we’re at it, another guy who had been in the Klan but whose opinion I nevertheless respected is Hugo Black.