The Island of Doubt

Pity the poor rationalist, who won't have Jerry Falwell to kick around any more. Gone is one of the leading opponents of reasoned debate, a man who seemed to devote every waking hour to turning the clock back on the Enlightenment. I have no idea how good a family man he was, but his public persona was one of open hostility to tolerance, diversity and science. Just how significant he was -- and therefore how significant is his death -- is far from clear, but I suspect that this morning's eulogies greatly exaggerate his lasting influence.

What's consuming the nation's obituarists today is the memory of a prominent Baptist who once blamed the 9/11 attacks on "the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians" and explicitly connected Hurricane Katrina to those who would defend a women's right to an abortion. He also called the entire idea of climate change "a tool of Satan being used to distract churches from their primary focus" and claimed to understand the science as well as leading global warming campaigners.

Spouting such nonsense as was his habit, it's no wonder that the consensus seems to be that Falwell was a marginal figure for at least the last 20 years, attracting media attention (other that Larry King spots) only when he said something silly. Which was a fair bit.

But there's a large disagreement over his political influence back in the late 1970s and early 80s, as founder of the fundamentally anti-science Moral Majority. Today on NPR's Morning Edition, reporter Barbara Bradley Hagerty used the term "juggernaut" to describe his influence on the 1980 election, claiming he brought millions of fundamentalist Christians. She supplied no evidence for that claim, however. And in Newsweek, Jonathan Alter makes a good stab at demolishing that idea, pointing out that polls show Falwell's abortion focus was nowhere near as importeant as economics and foreign policy when it came to voting against Carter. Falwell, writes Alter, "was not even close to being instrumental" in Reagan's victory.

The myth of Falwell's importance persists, however, and there's a perfect example on You Tube, in which MSNBC is caught mistaking a White House parody site (whitehouse.org), which sings the praises of Falwell, for the real White House website, which does no such thing (and also doesn't carry ads encouraging viewers to "Flatter Jesus or he'll torture you in hell").

I'd say Falwell's political legacy is important in the same way Bo Derek's hair in "10" was important. For those without an independent thought in their heads, that is.