Excellent post. I think this line sums it up:

"Falwell's influence should have ended there, but just as journalists flock to Al Sharpton for the "black perspective," ignorant journalists consistently propped up Falwell as a token Christian leader."

Journalists are as guilty as Falwell for the influence of the Moral Majority.

You got one thing wrong about PTL - it was fundamentalist only after the takeover. Part of the controversy about the takeover was that an evangelical organization would be run by a fundamentalist.

Some strong words about a man so recently departed. Falwell was a flawed man, for sure. He was strident and his statements often didn't represent mainstream Christianity, but...demagogue? That implies he wasn't sincere about his stated goals and intents. I happen to think he was quite sincere about his fundamentalist agenda, even though I disagree with a large portion of it. And I think you left some context out of the quote about gay activists:

White recalls when Falwell was accosted by gay protesters.

"Jerry grinned and said to me, 'Thank God for these gay demonstrators. If I didn't have them, I'd have to invent them. They give me all the publicity I need.'"

Assuming the quote was accurate, it's quite possible Falwell was looking on the bright side of being protested, rather than letting on that publicity was all that really mattered to him. The fact that he knew how to effectively get people to pay attention to his message certainly doesn't mean the message wasn't sincere.

Eric is right that it is generally untoward to speak ill of the recently departed, but I think it's quite telling that with Falwell, it's so easy -- almost unavoidable.

I'd suggest that the ease one finds in spitting on Falwell's not-yet-dug grave is inversely proportionate to how much one agrees with his views on religion, morality, politics, etc.

His post-9/11 statement was abominable, and he failed in plenty of other ways over the years to be a good representative of Christ on this earth, but he's hardly the boogeyman some make him out to be. He's no Billy Graham, but he's no Fred Phelps, either.

If I were to equate Falwell to someone on the left whom I don't like, I'd place him halfway in between Jimmy Carter and Michael Moore.

In some ways I see Jerry Falwell as a modern day Pharisee, and my reaction to his work is much like the disciples of 30 A.D. Just as the Pharisees no doubt did some good things for God, I'm sure that Falwell brought thousands of people to Christ. But I also think that his effect was a net negative, turning away far more than he brought in, all while presenting a distorted and incomplete picture of Christ. That's a grave crime with significant consequences.

The negative obituary is a lost art. Thanks Josh.

I like this quote: "It is ironic and a bit sad that the man who stayed on the sidelines during the civil rights movement – saying pastors needed to preach Jesus, not politics – became the leading person marketing Jesus for political ends in the '70s, '80s and '90s, and that he will be remembered not as a great spiritual leader but a powerful political one."

– David Kuo, former Bush official in the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives

Another quote, this one from Barry Goldwater: "I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass."

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Josh, you ought to be considered for one of Andrew Sullivan's Yglesias Awards for this post and subsequent comments. When conservative Christians call out unchristian bigots like Falwell, they are truly living up to the tenets of their faith as I understand them.

Equating an extremist bigot like Falwell with Jimmy Carter, or even Michael Moore for that matter, is so unfair that it borders on the absurd. But I suspect Eric is not kidding.

A lot of Iranians would disagree with equating an Ayatollah-empowering Jimmy Carter with a guy like Falwell who doesn't have any body counts associated with his career.

Typical wingnut nonsense. Was it really Carter who was guilty of Ayatollah-empowering? From Investigative reporter, Robert Parry: "The Russian Report"
Carter vs. Reagan

"...To the shock of the {congressional} task force, the six-page Russian report stated, as fact, that Casey, George Bush and other Republicans had met secretly with Iranian officials in Europe during the 1980 presidential campaign. The Russians depicted the hostage negotiations that year as a two-way competition between the Carter White House and the Reagan campaign to outbid one another for Iran's cooperation on the hostages. The Russians asserted that the Reagan team had disrupted Carter's hostage negotiations after all, the exact opposite of the task force conclusion...

...Both the Reagan Republicans and Carter Democrats "started from the proposition that Imam [Ruhollah] Khomeini, having announced a policy of 'neither the West nor the East,' and cursing the 'American devil,' imperialism and Zionism, was forced to acquire American weapons, spares and military supplies by any and all possible means," the Russians wrote. According to the report, the Republicans won the bidding war.

"After the victory of R. Reagan in the election, in early 1981, a secret agreement was reached in London in accord with which Iran released the American hostages, and the U.S. continued to supply arms, spares and military supplies for the Iranian army," the report continued. The deliveries were carried out by Israel, often through private arms dealers, the Russians said. Spares for F-14 fighters and other military equipment went to Iran from Israel in March-April 1981 and the arms pipeline kept flowing into the mid-1980s.

"Through the Israeli conduit, Iran in 1983 bought surface-to-surface missiles of the 'Lance' class plus artillery of a total value of $135 million," the report said. "In July 1983, a group of specialists from the firm, Lockheed, went to Iran on English passports to repair the navigation systems and other electronic components on American-produced planes." Then, in 1985, the weapons tap opened wider, into the Iran-contra shipments...

...the Russians considered their report "a bomb" and "couldn't believe it was ignored," the official said. Not only did the House task force keep the extraordinary Russian report secret, it ended up in a cardboard box among hundreds of documents, some unclassified and others "secret." The document boxes were piled, ingloriously, on the floor of a former Ladies' Room which had been converted into storage space, deep inside a parking garage of the Rayburn House Office Building..."

"After its release on Jan. 13, 1993, the House task force report on the October Surprise controversy quickly hardened into historical concrete. Its conclusion that there was "no credible evidence" to support the allegations of Republican sabotage in the 1980 Iran hostage crisis won acclaim across the political spectrum.

But in the months following the task force's findings, more foreign leaders in positions to know told other Americans that there was more to the October Surprise story than the task force found. Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasir Arafat informed American journalist Richard Fricker that senior Republicans had traveled to Beirut in 1980 seeking avenues to the Iranian leadership.

In a May 1993 videotaped interview in Tel Aviv, former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was asked "was there an October Surprise?" and he responded "of course, it was." In another interview, retired Israeli General Yehoshua Saguy, who was head of Israeli military intelligence in 1980, said Prime Minister Menachem Begin claimed American approval for Israel's secret 1980 weapons shipments to Iran. But the approval had not come from President Carter, who had angrily objected to the shipments when he learned of them.

Alexandre deMarenches, the man who ran French intelligence in 1980, privately mocked the House task force findings and let stand the sworn testimony of his biographer that he (deMarenches) had arranged meetings between Ronald Reagan's campaign chief William J. Casey and Iranians in Paris in October 1980..."

"...senior representatives of Iran's current government held informal talks in Europe with Americans close to President Clinton. Like deMarenches, these Iranians were amused at how wrong the House task force had been. Casey indeed had made secret overtures to Iran during the hostage crisis of 1980, these Iranians said.

The new Iranian claims were relayed to the highest levels of the Clinton administration. But fearing how a reopened October Surprise investigation might look, the White House refused to reconsider the House task force findings. For reasons perhaps explained best by Washington's acute sense for sniffing career danger, the October Surprise story had become one of the capital's most powerful taboos..."

JohnS,

I should have been more specific: a lot of Iranians (and American conservatives) blame Carter's foreign policy for the Ayatollahs rising to power in Iran in the first place. Your post deals with stuff that happened and that allegedly happened afterward.

A scale with Moore on one end and Carter on the other is silly. Aside from being leftists, they don't really have much in common, so there really isn't anything for that "scale" to measure, unless it's public unlikeability.

Can we agree that Carter's presidency was a colossal failure? Aside from easing some tensions between Israel and Egypt, and the appointment of Volcker to the Fed, I can't think of any successes.

Carter is to blame for the Iranian revolution?

I'm no Iran expert, but I would have thought that the seeds of revolution were planted in 1953 when the western powers (with a big assist from the CIA) installed Pahlavi on the throne, and then nurtured by the Shah's conspicuous use of American military advisers, his free spending ways (on himself!), one-party gov't corruption, SAVAK, his neglect and underestimation of his religious opposition, all topped off by oil-boom-created crushing inflation in the mid 70s, followed by Pahlavi imposed austerity measures.

It looks to me like "a lot of Iranians (and American conservatives)" want to conveniently make Carter the fall guy here. Could Carter have prevented the Shah's downfall? There was certainly controversary within his administration, with Brzezinski calling for military intervention on behalf of Pahlavi, while others high up in the State Dept thought that the historical forces behind the revolution were unstoppable. Carter ultimately decided against yet another U.S.-sponsored coup.

I'm not sure that that qualifies his presidency as a colossal failure, at least compared what I have witnessed in these past six years.