Remembering Rev Jerry Falwell

Thousands of faithful attend the Reverend Jerry Falwell's funeral at the Thomas Road Baptist Church that he established over 50 years ago:

"He said, 'I believe God has called me to confront the culture,' and did he ever confront it," said the Rev. Jerry Vines, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention who gave a sermon that ranged from personal stories about Falwell to Biblical references.

The media Liberals have been going out of their way to 'eulogize' Jerry Falwell in terms of their disagreements with him. Or maybe 'spit on his fresh grave' is a better term, given the "Ding-dong, the witch is dead" sendoff from a Sun-Times columnist and similar 'good riddance' comments from the left ("bigot" "Osama" etc.). Even the more graceful can't recount his influence without sneering at his disagreeable views. Clarence Page gets in: "Speak not ill of the dead. That's easy advice to follow until you are remembering those who spoke a lot of ill while they were alive. ... Reports that his heart had failed were greeted with grim irony by those who thought it had failed years earlier."

To understand Why the Left hated Falwell you need to understand What Falwell wrought: Falwell wrought the kind of political re-alignment that awakened in many Christian believers an understanding of who and what was attacking their world-view and their values. As a result, Falwell's Moral Majority helped awaken a conservative Christian movement that became a linchpin for Reagan's victory over Carter in 1980 and Mondale in 1984, built on an opposition to abortion and other countercultural (soon to be 'dominant liberal cultural') views of the liberal elites. Falwell stopped the cultural steamroller, or at least slowed it down, and helped in the process to reshape how millions voted.

As J.R. Dunn puts it:

Falwell was despised and loathed for a very simple reason: he defied the leftist consensus, and he won. He made them back down. He frightened them terribly, by confronting them with clear evidence that the country was not what they insisted it was, and that their utopian dreams would never come to pass. That was his crime, one for which he could never be forgiven.

Star Parker notes that Rev Falwell is gone, but his influence isn't. The evangelical Christian vote, 22% of the total electorate, remains a key constituency within the Republican party and one of its most reliable voting blocks.