Televangelist firebrand Jerry Falwell is dead

Yesterday God struck down controversial televangelist Rev Jerry Falwell with a sudden heart attack. He died while sitting comfortable in his office at Liberty University, which he founded in 1971 in his hometown of Lynchburg, Virginia as a Bible training college. It is a manifestation of God’s abiding grace, however, that he allowed Falwell to live more than his allotted “threescore years and ten” – as promulgated by His word in Psalms 90. He was 73.

Of course, Falwell’s death is noteworthy primarily because during his life he did more than anyone else in American history to undermine the Jeffersonian (legal and political) principle of separation of church and state. Indeed, he was as much a preacher as he was a politician as he pioneered a fundamentalist movement all over the United States to turn church services into political rallies for conservative social causes.

Alas, Falwell was not only possessed of a messianic complex, which made him presume that he spoke for a “moral majority” in America (that was neither moral nor a majority); he was also beset by a delusional fixation with homosexuality, which made him suspect that teletubby Tinky Winky, a cartoon character on a children’s television program, is a gay mascot furthering a political conspiracy to turn America from a (predominantly) Judeo-Christian into a queer nation.

But I never minded Falwell using his bully pulpit to condemn homosexuality (indoctrinating his congregation with such misanthropic aphorisms as “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve) or any anything else he thought was abomination unto the Lord. Instead, I abhorred, religiously, his venal self-righteousness, which was never more on display than in an interview with the equally messianic, delusional and self-righteous Rev Pat Robertson just days after 9/11, when Falwell intoned:

…to the pagans, abortionists, feminists gays and lesbians…and all those that tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say you helped make this happen.

(To which Robertson replied, incidentally: “I concur”.)

But since my Mummy told me to never speak ill of the dead, I shall end by noting that, based on the Bible in which he professed such blind, unqualified and unconditional faith, Falwell might be in for a rude awakening when Saint Peter greets him at the Pearly gates….

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