Resurrecting American Politics

I was a little ashamed of myself upon realizing last week how elated I was at the long-overdue demise of Jerry Falwell. It was a gut reflex of giddy, unadulterated joy that I immediately felt guilty for, because I’m a good Christian – right? I’m not supposed to find glory in the misfortune of others. But glory I found, and I’m still having marked difficulty refraining from being positively ecstatic at the silencing of one of the most hateful mouths in America.\nRev. Falwell’s death, I would argue, comes as a greater moral triumph to the American people than even the execution of Saddam Hussein, and thus, we should feel minimal guilt in the wake of a joyful reaction to the news of it. You would be hard-pressed to convince me that a single person in the past 50 years has been more poisonous and antithetical to the fiber of America than that evangelical preacher from Virginia.\nFalwell was best known as the man who founded Moral Majority in 1979, and with that, inextricably tied American Republicanism with fundamentalist-to-the-point-of-xenophobia Christianity. \nMoral Majority, an ultra-conservative lobbying entity, was created as a response to what Falwell saw as the descent of America into the abyss of immorality in the forms of the sexual revolution, equal rights for women and the Democratic Party. As a charismatic lobbyist, unafraid of the constant negative response from more populist sectors, Falwell elicited millions of dollars of support throughout the past three decades for politicians who supported the anti-abortion, anti-socialist, anti-GLBT and anti-pacifist platforms now commonly associated with the modern Republican Party, as he and his supporters considered them dangerous to Christianity. He was integral in blocking key equal protection legislation for women and fomenting homophobia in our country. Through the vitriolic and violent rhetoric they became known for, Falwell and his Moral Majority’s divisive platform of hate in the name of God has done more than any other force in the past 30 years to alienate the moderate electorate and castrate the American political system.\nFalwell’s absence leaves an open position of authority at the forefront of the weirdly xenophobic, uptight and hateful sector of American Christianity. It is up to all of us to prevent an equal replacement from rising to Falwell’s pulpit and spewing similar garbage to frame the conservative agenda with hate. \nThis is an opportunity for America to redefine its majority stance on morality as one that includes all styles of faith and goodness, neither alienating the religious liberals nor the non-religious right. If Falwell taught us anything, it’s that being religious is no guarantee against being evil and that the religious do not have a monopoly on what is considered moral. \nLet the faith-fueled hate that has driven right-wing politics for so long die with Jerry Falwell, and let us replace that divisive negativity with a commitment to working together to unify our country under the banner of our shared humanity.