Falwell leaves divisive legacy

Coming up with a column about Jerry Falwell was a lot harder than I thought it would be. I… Coming up with a column about Jerry Falwell was a lot harder than I thought it would be. I am not the type of person who thinks it is OK to speak ill of the recently dead, but at the same time, I cannot pretend that I have many positive things to say about this former televangelist. He used his incredible influence to do a lot of things with which I disagreed. And a lot of the things he said were horribly offensive. Still, he died less than a week ago, so I am giving him a little respect – whether it’s due or undue.

Instead, I will speak ill of someone with whom I had a personal encounter not too long ago – someone who embodies everything that Falwell endorsed and does so while sporting a neat, military-esque crew cut. This man is notoriously known as “Loud Guy,” and he came into my life two and a half years ago when I was working at my local video store.

Loud Guy, or L.G. as we at the store called him, was not someone I would normally remember. I rang up a lot of people during my year-long stint at “48 Hours.” But one day, not long after the Southeast Asian Tsunami of 2004, L.G. impressed himself into my mental book of ass-hats by not only standing in the middle of the video store spouting bigotry and hate, but also by doing so in the name of God.

Now, I am a Christian, a practicing Lutheran who still attends church every Sunday, so I take things said in the name of God very seriously. This is why I was so easily bated by L.G.’s offensive blather. We had a screaming match, he on the side of Christianity-based moral superiority and I on the side of liberal-based equality.

Afterwards, I stood embarrassed in a circle of put-off customers who were merely looking for the newest release or $1-section comedy and had been forced to listen to our highly charged diatribe. I wondered what they thought of us. I probably came off as a tree-hugging, godless, leftist radical – which I know I’m not. And L.G. definitely seemed like a crazed, religious fundamentalist who thought the destruction of an entire country was justified because its inhabitants did not fear God in the same way that he did.

I mean, at least that’s what he said.

Like I said before, I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed that I caused a scene and that the scene probably reinforced two stereotypes about groups to which I belong – the idea that Christians blindly follow the likes of Falwell and Pat Robertson in order to be “saved,” despite the despicable moral implications like homophobia and racism, and that liberals are boisterous, high and mighty, and morally apathetic.

People like L.G. and Falwell and those who vehemently oppose them have reinforced these ideas in a way that puts me out of both groups. I know where I stand on socially and morally sensitive issues like abortion and gay marriage, but if I have to defend myself, people have a hard time understanding how I came to those convictions.

I try to explain that they are a combination of my religious beliefs, my upbringing, my intellectual endeavors and my inherent morality, but people are always thrown off. Academics often disregard my well-articulated arguments because I have a “na’ve” or “silly” faith that has no basis in facts. The very faithful think that my beliefs aren’t in line with the religious teachings I claim to follow.

Falwell was media-savvy. He admitted to knowing when to say what, in what order, to provoke whomever he wanted. When he created his “Moral Majority” in 1979, he was creating the image of a majority, rather than actually uniting a group of believers. Certainly a large number of people followed Falwell’s teachings; the numbers are reflected in the Evangelistic mega-churches and donations made to various fundamentalist organizations. But I don’t really think the true moral majority thinks it is moral to blame abortionists and homosexuals for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Let me eulogize Falwell’s positive assets for a moment. He was intelligent and dynamic, he became successful after a broken childhood, he established a university for people who may have felt other colleges were too perverse to be attendance-worthy, and he worked for what he interpreted as “moral.”

But at the same time, his “moral” work was divisive, offensive and highly permeable in mainstream culture. And though I love the American tradition of moral and political discourse, I hope that with Falwell’s death also comes the demise of the televangelist superiority, so that the “majority” can define their own sense of what is morally right and wrong, and so that that old-fashioned discourse can be reborn in a way that allows even those of us who identify with more than one group to feel less defensive and more like we belong.

Do you put the “fun” in “fundamentalist?” E-mail Cassidy at cassidygruber@gmail.com